2022 Year in Review

Dear Colleagues, Friends, and Partners,

Over the past year, veterans found purpose and fulfillment through new career paths, community leadership, transitional housing supports, and programs focused on post-traumatic growth; new parents and their babies accessed expanded avenues of care in DC through coordinated efforts by providers large and small, citywide; and among our scholarship recipients, we saw a young man thrive at a large state university after transferring there from community college with the support of a scholarship.

Expanding opportunity and access to resources that allow individuals and communities to succeed is at the heart of the Clark Foundation’s mission. Reflecting the values of its founders, A. James and Alice B. Clark, the family foundation fulfills their belief in addressing today’s challenges by using their resources to achieve the greatest possible impact. Together with our grantees, we are focused on educating engineers, improving the lives of veterans and their families, and providing members of the DC community the best opportunity to thrive.

Since our inception 35 years ago, we have been fully committed to making investments, not gifts, because we view our grantees as partners in our shared mission. And with plans to sunset the Foundation in 2025, we’re spending down our assets by sharpening our focus with sizable, carefully chosen investments — and partnering with our grantees to think strategically about their missions, operations and outcomes to support them in building the infrastructure they need to be stronger and more sustainable over the long term.

Like a typical 10-year private equity investment fund, we are fully into the back half of our spend-down investment cycle. We have now committed over $907 million within our strategic portfolio, and of that, 85% is already invested in our grantees.

Our work in 2022 was focused on:

• Making smaller but targeted additional investments as a result of our learnings, strategic pivots, new ideas born of our partners’ work, and gaps brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Fostering relationships between our grantees and the greater philanthropic community to share the learnings of our trust-based model and bring additional investment support to our partners as we reach our sunset.
• Celebrating the success of our partnerships by promoting the hard work of our grantees.
• Capturing quantitative and qualitative results and beginning to shape the story of the Foundation’s 10-year, $1 billion+ spend-down.
• Working closely with our grantee partners and the larger communities within our strategic areas to look for new or unique trends and changes where we might be able to focus our remaining capital in short-term but impactful investments.

As part of our goal of fostering relationships among our grantees and between our grantees and the greater funder community, we held several successful events in 2022. A few of these include:

• Building Together: Partners and Funders in Parent-Child Health, which featured an overview of the initiative from the Foundation, introductions from hospital and community partners, and time for grantees to mingle with funders.
• The first Clark Scholars Mid-Atlantic Regional Gathering, bringing together Scholars, program staff and alumni from Duke University, George Washington University, Pennsylvania State University, University of Maryland, University of Virginia, Vanderbilt University, and Virginia Tech to hear from Foundation and university leadership, and engage in community-building and professional development activities. COVID upset our plans to hold this event for three years and we were so excited to finally make this happen. There will be a Clark Scholars Northeast and a Southeast Regional Gathering held in 2023.
• The College Persistence Luncheon, bringing together grantees in the College Persistence portfolio for community-building and discussion.

Furthermore, several grantees in the Foundation’s Veterans’ Initiatives portfolio received sizable philanthropic gifts from MacKenzie Scott, including the Warrior-Scholar Project ($5M), The Headstrong Project ($10M), Hire Heroes USA ($11M), Operation Homefront ($20M), and The Mission Continues ($10M). We were also pleased to attract support from actor Tom Hanks after Program Director Mike Monroe met him at an event and spoke with him about veterans, their families and the current landscape of support. Hanks has since launched his own coffee brand benefiting Veteran Support Organizations (VSOs), two of which are Clark Foundation grantees, Hire Heroes USA and The Headstrong Project.

The Foundation has helped over 1,000 students with financial need attain a high-quality, well-rounded engineering education, including 591 Clark Scholars, 172 Clark Doctoral Fellows, 101 Clark Opportunity Transfer Scholars, 84 Georgia State Regents’ Pathways students, 65 North Carolina A&T State University engineering students, and 27 Maryland Promise Program Scholar engineering majors. After our sunset, the Foundation’s scholarship investments will continue to support more than 675 engineering students each year, in perpetuity.

In addition to our strategic portfolio investments, since 2016, the Foundation has invested over $210 million in multi-year wind-down funding to 219 grantees.

But before you read about our exciting work, we want to take a moment to thank the Clark Foundation staff for the diligence that they continue to provide and their commitment to developing strong relationships with our grantees. Their passion for this work is inspiring.

Finally, as always, we want to thank our grantee partners for their hard work and dedication to supporting the communities in which they operate.

Best,

• Courtney Clark Pastrick Board Chair
• Joe Del Guercio President & CEO