January 2003

1 The Pittsburgh Foundation president and CEO Bill Trueheart
2 Buhl Foundation program director Cheryl Kubelick and president Doreen Boyce
3 Lisa Schroeder of the Riverlife Task Force and Maxwell King of the Heinz Endowments
4 The Xplorion's Eric Bitar and the Roy A. Hunt Foundation's Torrence Hunt Jr.
5 Manchester Craftsmen's Guild greenhouse general manager John Shea Jr. and Alcoa Foundation president Kathleen Buechel
6 The Birmingham Foundation's Mary Phan-Gruber
7 Pittsburgh Social Venture partners Marion Lewis and John Kuntz (right) and Kids Voice's Scott Hollander
8 Joni Schwager of the Staunton Farm Foundation
9 Jewish Healthcare Foundation president Karen Wolk Feinstein

Rocking the Foundations
The region's philanthropic institutions spent 2002 rocking boats, causing reactions, taking care of business -- and earning the title of "Pittsburghers of the Year."

By Rich Lord | Photos by Blaine Stiger

Three Wilkinsburg High School students dip wires into solutions of strontium nitrate, lithium chloride and other compounds, then move them into a Bunsen burner's blaze, and -- voila! -- flames of green, blue and yellow alternately leap forth. Bill Trueheart, standing nearby, asks the significance of the colors. They show the energy levels of the photons created as electrons dance, one student answers.

For Trueheart, this is a refresher course; he founded a chemistry club while a student at Stamford High School in Connecticut in the late '50s. Now president and CEO of The Pittsburgh Foundation, Trueheart certainly earned the tutorial. His foundation, after all, spent $125,000 refreshing this very chemistry lab -- now equipped with slick black lab tables and a dozen computers -- and an adjacent physics classroom. Unlike most charitable transactions, which start with a hat-in-hand supplicant asking for funds, this one was initiated when the foundation heard about the school's then-decrepit labs and offered to help spiff them up.

"We want to be catalytic," Trueheart explains. "It's a role we're fashioning." The same can be said of many of Southwestern Pennsylvania's hundreds of foundations and charitable trusts (see Roster of Giving). For decades, the region's philanthropies have been the quiet movers behind university programs, health-care efforts, museum exhibitions, services for the disadvantaged, arts groups and improvements like the Cultural District. In 2002, some of them went from movers to shakers. In July, three foundations suspended funding to the Pittsburgh Public Schools, exposing the political meltdown at the district and spawning a reform effort. In August, four foundations publicly tussled with Pittsburgh Mayor Tom Murphy over plans for a Hazelwood development site. And in September, six foundations sounded alarms over proposed public financing for a new arena.

The foundations "were long viewed as a cow to milk rather than a steer to affect public policy," says James Edwards, chairman of the McCune Foundation. No more. "Rather than just wait for a grant proposal, why not make things happen?"

Even foundations that haven't crashed the public sector's china shop are engaged in a revolution. Many have sought to import business principles like entrepreneurialism and venture capitalism into the genteel world of philanthropy. Add them together -- increased assertiveness and a growing spirit of enterprise -- and you've got a formula likely to produce lots of colorful reactions for years to come.

That's why the many members of the foundation community are our 2002 Pittsburghers of the Year.

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