The Hewlett Family and Foundation History

William and Flora Hewlett shared a deep, persistent, and personal belief in a life of charity and philanthropy.

When they established the foundation in their Palo Alto home, they captured their many charitable impulses with a loose charter mandating only a “perpetual existence … as a charitable, religious, scientific, literary or educational foundation for the purpose of promoting the wellbeing of mankind.”

The Hewletts were modest people; they often gave anonymously because they believed attention should be focused on the people doing the work, not the people funding it. For the same reason, they seldom made announcements about their giving, and the best way to understand their philanthropic vision is to look at what they did. And they did a great deal. Flora was a board member and involved with the foundation for its first decade, until her untimely death in 1977. Bill was actively engaged with the foundation until shortly before his death nearly 25 years later. The couple’s gifts, donations, and grants left a well-blazed trail.

Alongside the issues and institutions they supported, Bill and Flora also cared about the culture of their foundation and about the field of philanthropy itself. They wanted the foundation to reflect values they believed in and practiced — frugality, humility, collaboration, and humanism. They wanted a workplace that was intimate rather than bureaucratic, and they deemed it essential to always work with partners. They not only wanted the foundation to work on pressing problems in the broader world, but to also pay attention to where they could make a difference in the Bay Area.

In 1966, after a decade of exploring alternative vehicles for philanthropy, Bill Hewlett, at the age of 53, formed the foundation. The founding board members were Bill, Flora, and their eldest son Walter, a 22-year-old Harvard graduate who planned to pursue further studies at Stanford University. Walter remembers 1966 to 1972 as the “living room years,” when family members met at home and together decided how the Hewlett Foundation could do the most good.

Flora Hewlett was a quiet force behind the family’s and the foundation’s giving throughout her life. She was a trustee of the San Francisco Theological Seminary of the Presbyterian Church located in San Anselmo, and she served on the board of the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley. She also generously supported the Graduate Theological Union (GTU), a consortium of eight graduate schools of religion affiliated with the University of California at Berkeley.

Her passing in 1977 was an emotional blow to Bill and their children — a reminder of the natural limit on the time anyone has to try to make the world better, and a call to focus on the things that matter most. She was an active participant in the foundation’s board meetings until a few weeks before her death. In recognition of her contribution, the foundation was renamed from “William R. Hewlett Foundation” to “The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.”

A few months after Flora’s death, the foundation brought in former University of California Chancellor Roger W. Heyns as its first president. Bill Hewlett became board chair, a new position. Flora had been particularly keen on having Roger run the foundation, and his recruitment had begun while she was still alive. Roger would later say it had been his “happy assignment to understand [Flora’s] interests and express them intelligently through the foundation,” noting at the same time that she “would be the first to express that the foundation was not a vehicle for her personal wishes.” Societal needs changed, Flora’s priorities had changed with them, and she wanted the foundation to have the same flexibility to change and evolve with the world’s challenges.

Consistent with that wish, by the time Roger Heyns retired 15 years later in 1993, the Hewlett Foundation had been transformed.

But not in its core values, and Roger took care to maintain the Hewletts’ core beliefs about philanthropy.

• First and foremost, he made Bill’s practice of providing grants to institutions for general operations into a general rule, recognizing the importance of using philanthropy to build and strengthen institutions.
• At the same time, he reshaped the foundation — which had been making donations to organizations personally known to its president or board members — by focusing its work in particular areas, which became the first programs, led by dedicated professionals.
• Roger and Bill also enlarged the foundation’s board of directors. The Hewletts’ daughters, Eleanor Hewlett Gimon and Mary Hewlett Jaffe, joined the board, reflecting a desire by Bill for his children to participate in the foundation’s work. Eldest son Walter became chair of the board, a position he held until 2014.
• While Bill was eager for his family to be involved, he did not want to create a family foundation, and non-family members have constituted a majority of the foundation’s board since 1981. The expanded board helped the foundation pursue collaboration, open up dialogue around big social problems, and bolster its national impact.

The foundation’s endowment grew during these years. When Flora Hewlett passed away, the bulk of her estate was transferred to the foundation, and by 1981, the endowment had grown to more than $300 million. By the early 1990s, the foundation’s assets had increased thirtyfold — to more than $800 million, and the Hewlett Foundation was recognized for its work in the fields of conflict resolution, education, environment, performing arts, and population, and was a key source of funding to organizations in the Bay Area.

In 1993, former University of California president David P. Gardner succeeded Roger Heyns as president of the foundation. During his six years at the helm, the programs expanded in breadth and sharpened their focus — change enabled by another growth spurt in the endowment, which increased to more than $2 billion. Annual grantmaking rose from $35 million in 1993 to $84 million in 1998.

While the foundation had previously limited most of its environmental efforts to California, David recommended expanding grantmaking to encompass the entire Western United States and Canada. The foundation also broadened its education funding from higher education to emphasize K-12 reform and developed a program on U.S.-Latin American relations.

Under David, term limits for program officers were formalized to ensure that the foundation’s programs would remain fresh in outlook, that program officers would not confuse the foundation’s resources with their own or become over-connected to their grantees, and that program officers would understand their role as a stepping stone to other work. The foundation board adopted a policy to limit program officers’ terms to six years and, with board approval, a three-year extension. This limit was extended to eight years in 2005, but without any option for extension.

In January 2000, Paul Brest, former dean of the Stanford Law School, became the new president of the foundation. One year later, on January 12, 2001, Bill Hewlett succumbed to heart failure. He was 87 years old.

In 2000, the year before Bill’s death, the foundation’s assets were $3.93 billion. By 2006, after Bill’s estate had been transferred, the foundation’s assets were $8.52 billion, making it the fifth-largest private foundation in America.

Bill left no specific guidance on how the foundation should be run or any specific directions on how its funds should be spent. Instead, he left an independent foundation imbued with his curiosity, approaches to problem-solving, and generous and forgiving spirit. He also instilled a culture that embodied the core principle of the “HP Way” he and his friend David Packard used to build their company: find good people and give them space to achieve mutually shared goals.

Paul Brest, the last foundation president to know Bill Hewlett, served from 2000 to 2012. He carried on the Hewlett Foundation’s long tradition of providing core operating support to nonprofit organizations but also became a leading voice for making philanthropy more strategic and effective — arguing for clearly articulated goals, developing theories of change to achieve those goals, and ways to measure and evaluate progress.

During his tenure, the foundation professionalized key administrative functions, including new systems for investments, IT, grants management, communications, and legal affairs. The foundation ended its program on conflict resolution, having determined that the goal of establishing a robust field had been met. It launched a new program in global development, which was subsequently merged with the program on population. Most important, the foundation collaborated with the Packard and McKnight Foundations to create the ClimateWorks Foundation, which increased tenfold the philanthropic resources dedicated to climate change and effectively launched today’s field of climate philanthropy. The foundation also built and moved into its current Menlo Park offices, the first Gold-level LEED-certified building in the state.

In 2012, Larry Kramer became president of the foundation. Like Paul Brest, Larry was also a former dean of Stanford Law School. Under his leadership, the foundation continued the process of evolving and adapting. It deepened its support for long-term areas of work such as environmental protection, performing arts, and women’s reproductive rights while taking on emerging problems such as cybersecurity and making significant new commitments to address U.S. democracy, racial justice, and economic prosperity. The foundation also adapted its approach to outcome-focused philanthropy, building in more flexibility while retaining rigor.

Maintaining continuity with the ethos of Bill and Flora Hewlett was a central focus of Larry’s presidency. As he said in 2015: “The best way to understand and think about the Hewlett Foundation’s values and practice is in light of its history. Our endowment comes from the personal fortune of William and Flora Hewlett. The foundation began as an expression of their philanthropic values, and while they left their successors broad discretion about problems to work on, we believe the work we do today needs to be continuous with and reflective of their values. That applies both to how we work and to what we work on.

“When I interviewed for the job of president, I explained to the board that I would think about these issues in much the same way as I think about constitutional law. I am not an originalist, and we should not mindlessly continue to do exactly what Bill and Flora did, for the world is continually changing, and standing still means falling behind. But neither should we feel free to do whatever seems most interesting or important to me or to the current board or staff.

“We are, rather, engaged in an ongoing conversation with our past — looking at the problems Bill and Flora cared about and the reasons they cared about them, and reshaping our work to remain continuous with those values and concerns in changing circumstances.”

The process of maintaining continuity while adapting is ongoing. Larry left his role at the end of 2023 to become president and vice chancellor of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Longtime general counsel and corporate secretary, Elizabeth Peters, served as interim president while the board searched for a successor.

In September 2024, Amber D. Miller, an astrophysicist and pathbreaking university leader, became president.

Note: This history is adapted from “The founding of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation,” by Leslie Berlin and Glenn Bugos.