Big Ideas, Big Giving: The Legacy of Hewlett Foundation’s Larry Kramer
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Larry Kramer, president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, speaks at the foundation’s “New Common Sense” conference on political economy in the San Francisco Bay Area in April 2023. Photo provided by Hewlett Foundation. Credit: Steve Fisch
When a foundation president steps down from their job, the first question one might want to ask is “Why are you leaving?” — and all the more so if they’re exiting the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which has a $13 billion endowment, makes $500 million in grants annually, and is known to pay their presidents very well indeed: in Larry Kramer’s case, around $1 million a year.
With a gig that sweet, maybe the better question for a departing CEO is: “Why would you possibly leave?”
Sometimes, foundation leaders exit because of problems with the board or even a scandal. But in Kramer’s case, it’s nothing so juicy. After 11 years at Hewlett, he just felt like it was time to move on — and for two main reasons.
First, he believes leaders “shouldn’t stay too long” in their jobs and that transitions are good for institutions. And second, he was keen to do one more big thing in his career before it was too late. So when an opportunity came along to become president and vice chancellor of the London School of Economics, he decided to grab it. Kramer leaves Hewlett at the end of this month.
What it takes
I wrote a profile of Kramer nearly 10 years ago, when he was still relatively new in his job — and seemed a bit surprised even to be there. "It's peculiar," he told me, “that foundations will hire people with no prior experience in philanthropy."
In fact, it’s not uncommon for foundations to bring in leaders from outside the sector. But Kramer’s comment raises interesting questions: What do foundation presidents actually do? What skills do they need to succeed? And how can we tell if an outgoing CEO has done a good job?
Let’s start with the first question. Kramer told me in a recent conversation that the work of leading Hewlett has had five main components: strategy development, managing relations with the board, forging major collaborations with other institutions, internal management and publicly speaking on Hewlett’s behalf. Weaving through all this is a larger mandate, Kramer says: to preserve the foundation’s “overarching values.”
It takes a formidable leader to truly succeed in a job like that. You must be a big thinker with ideas. You need to know how to keep powerful stakeholders happy. You have to be good at selling your foundation’s ideas to potential partners and a wider audience of influencers. And you need to know how to run an organization: hiring and firing, building staff consensus, setting policies, handling problems, and so on.
That’s a lot to juggle — although the job of foundation president doesn’t sound so hard that these leaders deserve the huge salaries some get. After all, they never have to face the gut-level fear of not making payroll or grovel to donors or routinely scrimp to do more with less. If anyone deserves fat pay, it’s the grant seekers, not the grantmakers.
But back to Larry Kramer and the big question as he departs Hewlett after 11 years: How well did he do in the job?
At some level, this question is unanswerable right now, since we won’t know the full impact of Hewlett’s actions under Kramer for some time to come. And impact, of course, is the ultimate yardstick of success in philanthropy.
Still, it’s not too soon to make an initial assessment of Kramer’s tenure. What follows is based on a decade of tracking Hewlett’s work, reading its program strategy documents and blogs, and also talking with Kramer occasionally, including for this article and my earlier 2014 profile. In addition, I’ve drawn on Inside Philanthropy reporting on Hewlett by our staff writers, who have written quite a bit about the foundation over many years. Let’s dig in.
Pursuing a paradigm shift
Coming up with new initiatives is surely the most fun part of being a foundation president. While some CEOs are hired mainly to implement an existing strategy, it seems like most major foundations give their new CEOs some degree of latitude to develop their own initiatives. Indeed, that’s often precisely why these people are hired: to make new things happen.
Kramer has a very strong record in this regard. As Hewlett’s president, he’s spearheaded four major initiatives, all of which have been largely successful.
The most groundbreaking of these is Hewlett’s Economy and Society program, which began in 2018 as a two-year exploratory effort and now entails over $30 million a year in grantmaking. The program seeks to challenge the “neoliberal” free-market economic consensus and generate “a new intellectual paradigm better suited to address the biggest challenges of the 21st Century.”
Inside Philanthropy has written about this initiative here and here, so I’ll skip the full rundown about its origins, structure and grantmaking. Instead, here are three reasons why this program is so impressive and a testament to Kramer’s leadership, along with the choices made by the leaders he recruited for the project, Jen Harris and Brian Kettenring.
First, this program is tackling one of the biggest problems of our time. The failure of the U.S. economy to work for all Americans has been obvious for decades, with wages stagnating and inequality spiking starting in the 1970s. That trend has been devastating for working people and pure poison for our politics. And yet, clear exit ramps from neoliberalism have been elusive. This is exactly the kind of top-tier challenge that philanthropy should take on.
Second, the Economy and Society program is bold, going where many big foundations wouldn’t. While plenty of funders give heavily to address the downstream wreckage caused by neoliberalism, very few have looked upstream to confront the ideas and assumptions that buttress this ideology. That may be because foundations, as creatures of capitalism, are loath to critique the system that spawned them and generates their endowment returns. Or because most foundation leaders just don’t think much about “intellectual paradigms'' or understand why change at this level is so important. But as a former star academic, Kramer does think at this level and managed to get the board of a $15 billion grantmaker to go along. You don’t see that everyday in the philanthrosphere.
Finally, and most importantly, the Economy and Society program appears to be having an impact. President Joe Biden has more directly challenged the neoliberal consensus than any president in memory. And if you look closely, you’ll find the fingerprints of Hewlett grantees on Biden administration initiatives in areas like industrial policy and antimonopoly. The Roosevelt Institute — one of Hewlett’s largest grantees for its economy work — has been influential in the administration, while the former CEO of another top Hewlett grantee — the Washington Center for Equitable Growth — now serves as a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisors. In addition, Hewlett’s very own Jen Harris served a stint in the Biden administration, helping shape its new thinking on political economy. She is returning to the foundation this month to resume leading the Economy and Society program.
Kramer is cautious when it comes to gauging the impact of Hewlett’s economy work. “I’m really proud of it,” he says. But he notes that history is still unfolding and it’s too early to say how things will turn out. While he’s sure that the neoliberal era is winding down, he’s less clear what will replace it. Even as Hewlett’s grantees put forth an economic vision rooted in the values of equity and democracy, other alternatives are also gaining traction, Kramer says — like a “21st century fascism” rooted in ethnonationalism, or China’s statist authoritarian model. “We could fail, there’s no question about it.”
Taking on threats
Another Kramer initiative that’s worked out well is Hewlett’s cyber program, which began in 2014. The idea here was simple: to ensure a strong voice for civil society in the growing debates over cybersecurity. Even as cyber threats proliferated, spurring both industry and government to pour billions into managing this challenge, Kramer says there were few experts outside these two sectors weighing in on key questions. “There was no field,” he recalls. “There were sporadic people in some think tanks, in academic centers, thinking about it a little. But they didn't use the same language, they didn't talk to each other at all.”
Hewlett set out to address this vacuum. “Let’s build that field” was the idea, says Kramer. The strategy was to fund a new ecosystem of institutions and experts focused on cybersecurity. It gave grants of $15 million each to a core set of universities — Stanford, UC Berkeley and MIT — but also smaller grants to think tanks like New America. Over time, the program has expanded to fund a wide range of institutions dealing with cyber challenges, making $20 million in grants in 2022 to 25 recipients. Big chunks of money have continued to flow to research universities with the capacity to train top-tier technical experts, but also to more public-facing groups, or “translators,” like the blog Lawfare, that engage the policy questions around cyber issues in accessible ways.
Hewlett’s cyber program hasn’t received much attention. But it’s a great case study of philanthropy doing one of the things it does best: equipping America’s independent sector to have a bigger say on a critical issue. The cyber initiative also underscores Kramer’s knack for identifying important areas that other funders are neglecting. Even today, amid a never-ending drumbeat of scary news about hacking attacks, few foundations work on cybersecurity. This disinterest is hard to explain, given people’s reliance on digital systems with well-known vulnerabilities. Weirdly, Hewlett is not just the leading funder in this critical space; it remains among the only funders of any consequence.
Another of Kramer’s big gambits, the Madison Initiative, shares some similarities with both the economy and cyber programs. Here again, he sussed out a hugely important challenge that few funders were addressing: rising political polarization.
Hewlett’s grantmaking in this space — now under its U.S. Democracy program — initially set out to improve the legislative process in Congress, support reforms to the electoral system, and promote greater civic engagement. But the program evolved substantially over time, amid the tumult of the Trump years, the emergence of large-scale disinformation, and then the 2020 election. Today, Hewlett’s biggest democracy grantees include the Election Trust Initiative, a collaborative fund managed by Pew, and Issue One, a bipartisan group working to fix democracy.
The Madison Initiative — which was quarterbacked at Hewlett by political scientist Daniel Stid — turned out to be remarkably prescient, given how Trump’s rise turbo-charged polarization. But I felt from the start that its framing missed a larger danger in U.S. politics. In a 2014 piece titled “Why Won't Foundations Like Hewlett Just Stand Up and Fight for Their Values?” I argued that Hewlett was misdiagnosing the threats to U.S. democracy. The problem wasn’t some general breakdown of governance institutions, with both parties sharing equal blame. Instead, I wrote, “The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.”
I wondered why Hewlett didn’t just call out the threat to U.S. democracy for what it was and use its enormous resources to bolster those groups fighting the extreme right. If Hewlett had taken my advice, maybe they would have funded voter registration and mobilization work in — say — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, which Trump won in 2016 by some 80,000 votes amid anemic turnout in communities of color.
Stid replied to my critique with a post in Inside Philanthropy, which you can read here. He wrote that the causes of America's broken politics go far beyond the GOP and “the philanthropic sector has paid too little attention to shoring up the system of representative democracy.” Hewlett, he said, would seek out grantees that had ideas for fixing this system and boost their efforts.
Stid was right that philanthropy has an important role to play in improving how our democracy functions. And Hewlett has been a standout funder in this regard, including supporting areas totally ignored by other funders, like fixing the congressional budgeting process and trying to attract more talented people to government. But it’s also true that the MAGA movement poses an existential threat to U.S. democracy. And at this point, it’s fair to say that a good portion of Hewlett’s democracy funding now is going to try to repair the damage inflicted by Trump. Kramer says, “While we're still working on the long term polarization… we've got to focus in the short run on doing what we can to help shore up trust in election outcomes.”
Getting buy-in
The three major initiatives that Kramer and his staff spearheaded in the first five years of his tenure were unusual enough that one wonders how he brought Hewlett’s board along.
A key here seems to lie in Kramer’s tendency to think out loud as he develops ideas. He didn’t just plop his ambitious new goals in front of the board and see if he could get a majority “yes” vote. Instead, he says, “I’m transparent about my thinking all along.” With both board and staff, Kramer says he floats out ideas and sees how people respond, and then reshapes the ideas to incorporate feedback. “I think of the board as an active, engaged partner in everything, but not standing outside and telling the staff what to do or not do.… I’m in relatively constant contact with them.”
A fourth program developed under Kramer, on racial justice, is still pretty new and quite small, giving out only $6 million grants in 2022. But a lot more money is in the pipeline. In developing this work, Kramer advocated that the foundation make a 10-year commitment. The thinking here was to get “past that natural hump of, let's go back to business as usual. And stay committed to this work. It's built into the structure.” Typically, Hewlett’s board has to reauthorize all programs every five years. In this case, though, they went along with a time frame that’s twice as long.
Kramer hasn’t just had to win over internal stakeholders in his job. He’s also devoted much time to building external partnerships, mainly around climate change work, where Hewlett has long been among the largest grantmakers in the world. That funding totaled $175 million in 2022, a good chunk of the foundation’s entire giving. But for all its resources, Kramer and his team saw early on that they needed to find a way to get more philanthropic resources into climate work — which meant, in effect, going out to raise money from other foundations and wealthy donors.
“People forget just how dire it was,” Kramer says of the period when he was starting his job at Hewlett and began grappling with climate change. “In 2012, we were on track for something like six to eight degrees warming by the end of this century.” Meanwhile, Hewlett’s signature effort in this space — ClimateWorks Foundation, which it incubated in 2008 — was “kind of falling apart.” A big problem, says Kramer, is that it was a pooled fund and some grantmakers resisted that approach. So Kramer was part of a push to revamp ClimateWorks — creating what he called “ClimateWorks 2.0,” which was structured mainly as a funders table. But a larger problem remained: how to galvanize bigger sums of money for climate work.
“We needed a different kind of fundraising,” Kramer recalls, one that emulated the major gift operations of universities and hospitals with the goal of finding “a bunch of funders who care about this but they don't even know where to start.”
The effort to revamp ClimateWorks and its development strategy has paid off. Last year, this funding intermediary — the largest in the climate space by far — raised $327 million from nearly 30 funders, including the family philanthropies of major donors who aren’t well known for their climate giving.
More recently, Kramer and Hewlett helped create two other major philanthropic collaboratives to rally new funds for climate change work — Invest in Our Future and BuildUs. Both aim to leverage charitable dollars to aid and accelerate the implementation of historic climate and economic legislation passed under Biden.
Kramer has played a hands-on role in fundraising for all these efforts. He says that trying to get another funder to step up in a major way is most likely to succeed when it’s coming from a CEO, since that’s who other leaders will respond to best. “You needed a CEO to do it.” To support new funders coming into the climate space, Kramer and Hewlett also helped create the Climate Leadership Initiative, a philanthropic advisory group that has helped billionaires like the Sobrato family and Steve and Connie Ballmer get started as climate funders.
Hewlett’s large climate grantmaking budget — unmatched by any other legacy foundation — has always ensured a natural leadership role for the foundation in this funding space. But Kramer greatly amplified that leadership through his strong evangelism for more climate funding and creating pathways for new donors to enter this space at scale.
A growing list of megadonors have embraced the cause in the past few years, including Jeff Bezos, Laurene Powell Jobs and C. Frederick Taylor. As Michael Kavate wrote last year in IP, “it seems like every month, a new billionaire or major foundation pledges millions, or even billions, to fight climate change.”
Kramer says that his success in catalyzing new giving for climate change is among the things he’s most proud of from his time at Hewlett.
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The Hewlett Foundation is a giant in the world of philanthropy, reporting assets of $13 billion. While that kind of wealth can seem staggering to nonprofit types, it’s not so impressive by other measures. Just up the road from Hewlett, Palo Alto’s city government has a budget twice the size of the foundation’s annual grantmaking to meet the needs of its 66,000 people.
The modest resources of philanthropy — at least relative to the problems funders are tackling — put a premium on creative thinking. We need foundation leaders that are engaged in a probing, relentless search for the right leverage points to catalyze major change. Unfortunately, many big grantmakers aren’t known for their dynamism. Most just keep supporting the same things they’ve been funding for years using the same strategies, with only occasional tweaks.
By this measure, the Hewlett Foundation under Larry Kramer has stood out, living up to the ideals that philanthropy so invokes about itself — of being innovative, ambitious and willing to take risks.
Yes, Kramer has done a great job, but in a sector where the bar is pretty low. In theory, philanthropy is “society’s passing gear,” as Paul Ylvisaker famously said. In practice, a lot of leaders in the sector don’t know how to drive the vehicles of wealth that they command. In some cases, the blame for stasis may lie with the board; in others, with the CEO or senior staff. Either way, it’s always inspiring to see a foundation that is living up to Ylvisaker’s maxim — which has been the case with Hewlett over the past decade.
