Overbrook Foundation: A Small Family Funder Trying to Cure What Ails Environmentalism
Sometimes it’s the smaller foundations that take on the most audacious goals. Like the Bullitt Foundation, with its deep-green commercial office building and accompanying green building program. Or Heron’s unparalleled commitment to impact investing. Or Wallace Global Fund’s incubation of the fossil fuel divestment movement.
Many of these early adopters are, in fact, working on a meta level, trying to change how the philanthropic or NGO sectors themselves operate, hoping to make an impact that reverberates further than they could reach alone. Another example of such a funder is the Overbrook Foundation, which has worked during the past few years to improve an underperforming U.S. environmental movement.
Overbrook is a progressive family foundation started in 1948 by Helen Altschul and Frank Altschul, who was a New York investment banker, and now led by a board of of third- and fourth-generation descendants and a small staff. . .