The First Nine Years
Report by James F. Gill, Esq.
DDCF Founding Chair
May 17, 2005
As I approached the end of my third, three-year term as Chairman of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, I thought it appropriate and desirable to provide a brief summary of our history and accomplishments since inception.
When the Trustees first met in 1996, we assumed responsibility for a great financial, real estate, artistic, and historical legacy. Doris Duke’s will made us stewards of a large endowment, then valued at $1 billion; five properties; and Doris Duke’s many collections, from spectacular jewelry to Southeast Asian and Islamic art.
At the same time, we faced daunting challenges. We had no offices, no staff, no investment plan, and no clear mission or strategy for our grants and properties. We had Doris Duke’s will as a guide, but, we quickly learned, her guidance was very general and in certain respects confusing. Many of us did not know each other and none of us had worked together. We had to organize ourselves as a governing board; create an organization and recruit leadership and staff; develop an investment strategy for our financial assets; identify grant programs and strategies; manage, restore and create programs for our properties; and dispose of two of Doris Duke’s residences and her personal effects.
The trustees were undaunted by these challenges and ambitious for DDCF. We wanted to create a different kind of foundation that made large grants with a small staff and focused on key needs and opportunities. We wanted to use the properties we inherited for important public and social purposes. Our hope was to do more than fulfill the wishes set forth in Doris Duke’s will; we wanted to improve the quality of people’s lives, make a difference, and create a foundation with a new way of doing business. In the doing we resolved to convey the goodness of Doris Duke, particularly her enormous generosity. We were right to pursue these ambitious goals and the DDCF is on the road to a long and successful future.
Grant Programs
Our grant programs are flourishing. In the beginning, we used Doris Duke’s will and her life to identify three grant programs, and we later added a fourth. We have a lean grantmaking staff that has created innovative, focused strategies with the potential for meaningful impact.
Today, we are among the most significant supporters of the performing arts. We started with support for jazz and modern dance, areas of enormous personal interest to Doris Duke, and then expanded to fund presenting institutions, theaters, artist training, and individual artists throughout the country. We made a substantial grant to endow the Brooklyn Academy of Music, we renovated the Joyce Soho, we built a state-of-the-art black box theatre named “The Duke on 42nd Street” and we provided highly sophisticated technology for “Jazz at Lincoln Center.” With the foundation’s support, new artistic work is being created and winning Pulitzers and Tony awards, young artists are being trained and becoming leaders in their fields, and performing arts institutions have endowments and greater financial stability.
In our medical program, we focused on clinical research as a significant gap and a fit with Doris Duke’s will. Beginning with a program for young researchers, we expanded to support distinguished scientists, medical students, and multidisciplinary research teams. We launched a program for research on AIDS in Africa and established the Doris Duke Medical Research Center in South Africa. Our grantees have developed cures and made breakthroughs, including a landmark discovery on C-reactive protein and heart disease; seminal findings showing that HIV persists in infected patients despite treatment with anti-retroviral therapy; and a recently discovered therapy for non-small cell lung cancer.
Our environmental program has focused on land preservation for wildlife habitat, reflecting Doris Duke’s interest in the preservation of both flora and fauna. We have preserved over a million acres of some of the most significant remaining natural habitat in the United States and have earned a reputation as a leading national land conservation funder. Among our earliest grants was one of $5,000,000 to secure the preservation of the Sterling Forest. DDCF investments of $60 million have protected land worth $400 million, significant leverage in a time of scarce public resources for land conservation. Our funding for improving land use planning and promoting the greater use of incentives to facilitate private land conservation will yield great dividends over time. Our support has also helped educate over 230 Doris Duke Conservation Fellows, who are on the road to becoming a new generation of leaders in the environmental field.
Our program on child abuse prevention is more recent and modest. We have carved out a special role in prevention, seeking to reach vulnerable families with young children before maltreatment occurs. We have supported home visiting services for new parents and prevention strategies involving child care teachers and pediatricians in recognizing and responding to early warning signs of family stress. By cultivating new partners, implementing new ideas and disseminating new knowledge, our support is helping to build and advance the field of child abuse prevention.
Properties
Tackling the legacy of Doris Duke’s properties was a bigger challenge than many of us anticipated. We were able to sell Falcon Lair in Los Angeles and Doris’s New York apartment quickly, but it took several years to plan and complete the sale of Doris Duke’s personal property at auction. It was worth the wait: the auction at Christie’s in 2004 was a financial success and an important opportunity to communicate the work of DDCF and the legacy of Doris Duke.
When we took possession of Shangri La in Hawaii and Duke Farms in New Jersey and the Newport Restoration Foundation took over Rough Point in 1999, we learned that these estates were costly to manage, in need of significant repair, and that Doris Duke had left only limited guidance regarding their use. The will instructed us to create three foundations at Duke Farms without defining where and how. The will also made no provision for the support of the NRF’s eighty eighteenth-century homes, which were running a significant deficit.
Over time, we have devised solutions to address these gaps in the will. We reached an agreement with NRF trustees for support of Rough Point and NRF, and NRF is thriving under the leadership of its independent board and new management. We merged the three foundations at Duke Farms into one entity and put in place strong management at Duke Farms and Shangri La. We have made great strides in restoring and preserving Doris’s legacy at Shangri La, her father’s legacy at Duke Farms and have developed programs for public use and education at both sites.
Today, Shangri La and its collections are being repaired in accordance with museum standards. The property is open to the public and scholars for the study and understanding of Islamic art and culture. The Islamic gallery at the Honolulu Academy of Arts makes our collection available to a larger audience and serves as the launching point for our tours. Shangri La hosts poetry readings, musical performances, and scholarly seminars. The Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art is responding to the post-September 11 world by supporting the creation and presentation of Islamic art beyond the walls of Shangri La.
At Duke Farms, we have expanded and enriched public visitation programs, which now include garden and park tours that focus on environmental themes, horticultural classes, birding expeditions, environmental education and activities for school children. Duke Farms is also hosting a variety of environmental seminars, training sessions and meetings, and DDCF is increasingly using Duke Farms for meetings and retreats. We want Duke Farms to become a model of environmental sustainability and, to that end, have begun by managing the deer and geese populations, transforming our automotive fleet to electric and hybrid vehicles, preserving our lakes, and applying “green” guidelines for the adaptive reuse of our facilities. Duke Farms now serves as a laboratory for academic research on native species, animal management, Dutch Elm disease and Lyme disease.
Investments & Governance
Our investment strategy has provided the resources to support our grants and properties. The cash and short-term securities that the foundation inherited from Doris Duke have been transformed into a well-diversified and balanced portfolio of index funds, active managers, hedge funds and private equity. Our investment performance has been strong. Despite the bear market of 2000-2002, our corpus has grown from $1 billion in 1996 to $1.6 billion today, while we have spent well over $400 million on our grant programs and properties.
We have also developed governance policies and practices that are forward-looking, ranging from our audit and financial reviews to our strategic evaluations of our programs and properties. We have challenged staff and ourselves to do the very best work and to help set a high standard for non-profit governance and performance.
Looking Ahead
As a result of our efforts, DDCF is carving out an important niche in the philanthropic and nonprofit communities, not because of our size but because of the quality of our work. In the process of making grants and opening our properties, we have set the record straight about Doris Duke and communicated the story of the philanthropist, artist and environmentalist. I believe Doris would be proud of our ambitions, achievements, and hopes for the future.
I have derived great personal satisfaction from what we have accomplished and I am deeply grateful to all of the Trustees, to Joan Spero and all of the members of our staff, for all they have done over the past nine years.
I am delighted that Nan Keohane will be succeeding me as Chair. I can think of no one better suited to the task and I know that she will take us to even higher levels. I look forward to continuing our work together.