Reply #74: A Philanthropic Innovator [View All]

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After the tragic death of her husband, Senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania, in a plane crash in 1991, Teresa Heinz took direction of the family's extensive philanthropic activities. She immediately launched a major reorganization designed to sharpen the foundations' strategic focus. Only two years later The Chronicle of Philanthropy noted that under her leadership the Heinz Endowments were already “poised to become a much more influential force in the philanthropic world”.

Today, the foundations she oversees are widely known for developing innovative strategies to protect the environment, improve education, enhance the lives of young children, broaden economic opportunity and promote the arts. Pittsburgh civic leaders have repeatedly praised Teresa Heinz Kerry for her many contributions to the city and to western Pennsylvania.

The Heinz Endowments, based in Pittsburgh, is among the largest independent philanthropic organizations in America. Last year, the foundation approved more than $70 million in grants to non-profit organizations, mostly concentrated within southwestern Pennsylvania, in the program areas of Arts & Culture; Children, Youth and Families; Economic Opportunity; Education; and the Environment.

The Heinz Family Philanthropies, which are based in Pittsburgh with offices in Washington, D.C., administer the annual Heinz Awards, and support active research and programs in the areas of women’s health and economic security. The Heinz Plan to Overcome Prescription Drug Expenses (HOPE), developed by the Heinz Family Philanthropies, presented a blueprint for making prescription drugs affordable for older Americans. The Wall Street Journal described the Heinz Plan as “the brainchild of one woman,” and the Boston Globe hailed it as "a great service for Massachusetts...presenting the state government with a credible plan to provide its elderly citizens with prescription drugs.”

Teresa Heinz Kerry has spoken all across the country, and testified before state legislatures, on prescription drug issues. In addition to Massachusetts, similar Heinz Plan "blueprints" have been prepared for five other states including Pennsylvania, Maine and Mississippi.

University of Massachusetts (Boston) Chancellor Jo Ann Gora has said that Teresa Heinz Kerry is, “one of this country's most creative and thoughtful philanthropists. She has used philanthropy as the vehicle for bringing intellectual leadership to a remarkably wide range of public concerns, with an eye to economic justice and improving the conditions of life for all members of society."
http://www.johnkerry.com/about_teresa/innovator.html


An Environmental Visionary
In 1995, when the UTNE Reader named 100 Visionaries, Teresa Heinz Kerry was included as someone who had left "the outdated dichotomy of environmental protection versus economic development in her wake." Later that year, the trustees of the Vira Heinz Endowment announced a $20 million grant (one of the largest environmental grants ever made), to create the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment. The Heinz Center, based in Washington, is dedicated to improving the scientific and economic foundation for environmental policy through collaboration among industry, government, academic, and environmental organizations. This four-sector approach is unique to the Heinz Center.

In September 2002, the Heinz Center published the results of a long-awaited pioneering project assessing, on the basis of the objective data available, the state of America's ecosystems. (The State of the Nation's Ecosystems, Cambridge University Press, 2002) The study is the product of five years' work by nearly 150 individuals from environmental organizations, businesses, universities, and federal, state, and local governments. The distinguished journal Biodiversity noted that "the highly anticipated report…is a succinct and comprehensive ---yet unbiased and scientifically sound--- examination of the current state of the nation's lands, waters, and living resources." The volume has been hailed as invaluable not only for decision makers in government and environmental organizations, businesses, and trade associations; and for academics with a research or teaching interest in environmental issues; but also for a general public interested in the continued well-being of American ecosystems. The AEI Environmental Policy Outlook said the Heinz report "provides a road map for future research necessary for policymakers to set sensible priorities."

The Heinz Center's State of the Nation's Ecosystems project is ongoing, and the published report will be regularly updated; the next edition will appear in 2007.

Teresa Heinz Kerry is vice chairman of the Heinz Center's board and a longtime board member of Environmental Defense, one of the nation's leading environmental organizations. In 1992, she was one of ten representatives from non-governmental organizations attached to the U.S. Delegation to the U.N. Conference on Environment and Development (Earth Summit) in Brazil. (It was at this conference in Rio de Janiero that she first got to know another delegate --- Senator John Kerry. Three years later, on May 26, 1995, they were married on Nantucket.)

She has endowed a professorship in environmental management at the Harvard Business School and a chair in environmental policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. In addition, she has established the Teresa Heinz Scholars for Environmental Research --- annual awards to provide support for individuals writing doctoral dissertations or a master's thesis, or for project enhancement, for research and solutions on emerging environmental issues. All research must have public policy relevance that increases society's understanding of environmental problems and their solutions. In 1996 she created the John Heinz Environmental Fellows Program for the United Negro College Fund. These fellowships are open to students enrolled full-time in UNCF institutions majoring in science with an environmental emphasis.

As a member of the Advisory Board for the Earth Communications Office, she helped to pioneer an internationally acclaimed public service campaign promoting citizen environmental action in countries around the globe. Similarly, she sponsored The Environminute and The World ECO Minute, a daily radio campaign reaching citizens in more than 100 countries, and HealthWeek, a weekly PBS-produced program with a strong focus on women's health and the environment. She helped to conceptualize and launch Second Nature, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to support the development of an environmentally literate citizenry. She is a co-founder of the Alliance to End Childhood Lead Poisoning and serves on the Advisory Council for the Center for Children's Health and the Environment at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
http://www.johnkerry.com/about_teresa/visionary.html


A Women's Advocate
Teresa Heinz Kerry has been an advocate for women and at the forefront of women's issues for more than 30 years. She attended the first meeting of the Pennsylvania Women's Political Caucus in 1972. In 1974, she was a co-founder of the Women's Campaign Fund, a bipartisan effort to generate financial support for women who run for public office.

Teresa Heinz Kerry has helped to educate women on the vital importance of pensions and savings to their retirement security. To further this work, in 1996, she established the Women's Institute for a Secure Retirement (WISER), a Washington-based think tank. She underwrote both the publication of a nationally acclaimed book, Pensions in Crisis and the creation and production of a magazine supplement ----What Every Woman Needs to Know About Money and Retirement---- that was published in Good Housekeeping and in US Airway's Attaché magazine, and has been translated into Chinese, Portuguese, and Spanish. In March 1999, she testified before a House Ways and Means Committee in Washington on the circumstances and needs of poor elderly women in America.

Since 1995, she has sponsored and hosted annual conferences open to the public on Women's Health and the Environment in Boston, bringing women together with health, environmental, and policy experts. She believes that the conventional concept of the environment -- involving only the traditional "green" issues such as air and water quality -- is no longer adequate to the lives that people (and especially women) live today. The design of office equipment and work systems, the architecture of the built environment, and the extent of chemical and pesticide exposure all have significant implications for women's health and well being. The Women's Health and the Environment conferences (the eighth will be held in October in Boston) examine key health issues confronting women in the workplace and the home, including sick building syndrome, ergonomics, and the significance of the workplace as a public health issue. Attended by more than a thousand women annually, these conferences have increased public understanding of the special health risks facing women from the physical and cultural environment, of the diverse sources of disease, and of the need for public policies that protect women's health.
http://www.johnkerry.com/about_teresa/advocate.html


Founder of the Heinz Awards
In 1993, Teresa Heinz established the Heinz Awards (in memory of the late Senator John Heinz), an annual program recognizing outstanding individual vision and achievement. Each year awards of $250,000 are made in five areas in which Senator Heinz provided leadership and inspiration: arts and humanities; public policy; technology, the economy, and employment; the environment; and the human condition. A nationwide network of several hundred anonymous nominators propose outstanding men and women for consideration; then five juries of ten members each narrow the numbers down until a recipient is chosen. The Heinz Awards are conferred at a ceremony each spring in Washington, D.C.
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A Committed Citizen
Teresa Heinz Kerry has long been an advocate for human rights and for economic, scientific and creative freedom. Some of her earliest childhood memories reflect her family’s experience, as Portuguese citizens living in the African colony of Mozambique, of being disenfranchised second-class citizens (a designation that was even noted on their passports). As a college student in South Africa during the late 1950’s, she saw at first hand--and joined in protests against--the unfairness and brutality of the apartheid regime. “That remembrance,” she told a meeting of the American Jewish Committee’s Philadelphia chapter, “propels me to stand tall for those who cannot stand.”

In 1977 she was part of the core group that, the next year, became Senate Wives for Soviet Jewry. Russian Jews who wanted to immigrate to Israel were being held in the Soviet Union, trapped in a nightmare of legalistic constraints and bureaucratic muddle (with a strong and ugly undercurrent of anti-Semitism running not far below the surface). A number of leading scientists and intellectuals known as the “refuseniks” (including Anatoly Scharansky and Iosif Begun) were also being held in the gulag as Prisoners of Conscience. In order to bring the pressure of public opinion to bear on the Soviet government to observe internationally accepted standards of human rights, the Congressional Wives group organized high-profile events including letter-writing campaigns and silent vigils in front of the Soviet Embassy. As an original member and later co-chair, Teresa Heinz helped to arrange conferences and traveled widely to speak on behalf of the organization. In 1984, she helped to sponsor and conduct a conference in Washington with wives of MPs from Canada, the United Kingdom, Israel and the Netherlands; the groups met with White House and congressional officials and were addressed by Elie Wiesel. In 1987, she helped to organize and lead a small delegation to the Soviet Union. In a series of unprecedented meetings in Moscow, the Congressional Wives met with “refuseniks” (Jews the Soviet government refused permission to emigrate to Israel) from two women’s groups and were the first non-official group allowed to take their case directly to Soviet emigration officials.

“This is an age of heroes,” Teresa Heinz told audiences when she reported on the trip, “but our heroes frequently have foreign-sounding names: Brailovsky, Slepak, Nudel, Orlov, Rudenko, Murzhenko, Federov, Klevanov, Scharansky and Prestin. And each of these symbolizes countless other brave, nameless men and women who dare to speak out against a repressive Soviet state that ruthlessly, brutally and cynically seeks to deny them the most elementary human freedoms.”

In 1977, with three young children at home, Teresa Heinz became involved in organizing what became, in 1978, the National Council for Children and Television (which later became the National Council for Families and Television).
http://www.johnkerry.com/about_teresa/citizen.html


A Recognized Leader
In 2003, Teresa Heinz Kerry received the Women's Leadership Award from the Save the Children organization for her efforts to improve the lives of children throughout the world. In April 2003, she received the World Ecology Award from the International Center for Tropical Ecology at the University of Missouri. In June, she was among the women honored by the Boston YWCA in the Women Achievers' Class of 2003 and the Massachusetts Women's Political Caucus presented her with a lifetime achievement award. And in September 2003, she was presented with the Albert Schweitzer Gold medal for Humanitarianism at Johns Hopkins University for her work in protecting the environment, promoting health care and education, and uplifting women and children throughout the world.

Teresa Heinz Kerry has been named Carlow College's National Woman of Spirit. She received the Community Service Human Rights Award from the American Jewish Committee. Along with Senator Kerry, she shared the Boston Bar Foundation's prestigious John and Abigail Adams Award. She has been awarded the Art Rooney Award from the Catholic Youth Association of Pittsburgh; and she received the first ever Gold Medal conferred by the American Institute of Architects in Pittsburgh.

Teresa Heinz Kerry is a trustee of the Brookings Institution. She also sits on the Visiting Committee for the Kennedy School and the school-wide environmental committee for Harvard University, serves on the board of the American Institute for Public Service (which confers the Jefferson Awards), and is an emerita trustee of Carnegie Mellon University. In addition, she was recently elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Teresa Heinz Kerry has been awarded honorary doctorate degrees from Beloit College (Wisconsin), the University of Massachusetts (Boston), Bank Street College of Education (New York), Pine Manor College and Clark University (Massachusetts), Carnegie Mellon University, the Medical College of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, Washington and Jefferson College and Carlow College.

Teresa Simoes-Ferreira was born and raised in Mozambique in East Africa. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in romance languages and literature (French, Italian, and Portuguese) from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. She speaks five languages. After graduating from the Interpreters School of the University of Geneva, she worked for the United Nations in New York. She has three sons, John, Andre, and Christopher Heinz, and two stepdaughters, Alexandra and Vanessa Kerry. She is the almost inordinately (but understandably) proud grandmother of one grand child.
http://www.johnkerry.com/about_teresa/leader.html