The David and Lucile Packard Foundation is a foundation created by David Packard, cofounder of Hewlett-Packard, in 1964. It supports environmental causes, population control programs, and three programs created by David Packard: the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and the Packard Fellowships in Science and Engineering.
Founder
David Packard (1912-1996) was the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard,1 one of the first large corporations to emerge from Silicon Valley. Packard was born in Pueblo, Colorado, and was admitted to Stanford University in 1930. At Stanford, he met William Hewlett, and they decided to go into business together. After both men worked for General Electric for five years, they decided to launch their company in 1939. The garage that was Hewlett-Packard’s first office—at 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto, California—is now a National Historic Landmark.3 In August 1975, Packard went half time at Hewlett-Packard to serve as finance chairman of President Ford’s 1976 re-election campaign. He resigned this position in November 1975.4
Early Years
The David and Lucile Packard Foundation was created in 1964, but it did not begin significant funding until the early 1980s and was not fully funded until Packard donated $2 billion to the foundation in 1988. Packard biographer George Anders writes that Packard expressed his intentions as a donor in a document written in the late 1980s which has never been made public. According to Anders, Packard wrote that the foundation’s first concern should be population control. Packard stated that an annual population increase of two percent would mean “utter chaos for humanity…The highest priority of our foundation must be to do what can be done to get the worldwide population growth” back to lower levels. “We must support abortion and any other policy that will help,” Packard wrote.5
In 1988, after the Packard Foundation was fully funded, it increased its annual grants to population control programs from $1 million to $10 million. New York Times reporter Kathleen Teltsch stated that the additional funds would “emphasize Third World assistance and cover adolescent pregnancy and assured access to abortion.”6
Environmental and Population Control Giving
Despite his opposition to unions and support for Republicans, Packard supported population control and considered himself an environmentalist. In a 1986 interview with the Christian Science Monitor, Packard said that “the most important question we have to deal with is a combination of population control and he control of our environment—how to utilize the world in as effective a way as we can for the future of mankind. Anytime you look at the long-range situation, you come to the conclusion that, unless we can limit the population, the pother problems are eventually going to become unmanageable. Packard said the solution to global population growth was to be “more rational about birth control and abortion” and that “the United States should be a leader in helping with this problem of population control.”7
In the same interview, Packard said that environmental degradation was a problem because “the environment is going to determine, in the final analysis, what population can be supported.” Packard said “a lot can be done” in the area of environmental policy, including “trying to preserve some attractive examples of ecology—so you can keep some of the original character of our country.” He also said that “we’re changing the character of our atmosphere” which could result in “some very drastic change to our climate.”8 Packard said the solution to America’s energy needs was nuclear power, and “we’re going to have to come to some form of nuclear power sooner or later—and I think we’re going to have to do that during the 21st century.”8
David Packard supported conservation charities during his lifetime. In 1981 the New York Times reported that Packard chaired the Nature Conservancy’s Critical Areas Program Committee, which was raising $15 million by the end of 1982 to buy 22,000 acres of habitat.9 In 1985, Packard was one of the initial board members of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, created by Reagan administration Interior Secretary William P. Clark to buy and preserve habitat.11
In a 1995 oral history David Packard recalled, “So we did a feasibility study and were told, yes, it is a viable program, and we could build an aquarium there which would cost about ten million dollars, and it would be successful and would pay its own way. So with that information we hired architects and engineers and proceeded to design the aquarium. Well, I didn’t know a damned thing about aquariums, but my wife and I visited every aquarium in the country, and my children visited some of the aquariums overseas.” 14 Planning for the hospital began around 1983, and Lucile Packard saw some of the plans for the hospital before her death in 1987.
As she was dying, David Packard decided to name the hospital for his wife. It was the first building on the Stanford campus to bear the Packard name. “This is her project,” Packard said. “I’m not going to agree to less than that.”14 The Lucile Salter Packard Children’s Hospital opened in 1991.
Packard Fellowships
The Packard Fellowships in Science and Engineering have been awarded since 1988. They are currently five-year, $875,000 grants. The foundation says it has awarded $378 million in fellowships since 1988 and recipients have gone on to win the MacArthur Fellowship, the Nobel Prize in Physics, and the Fields Medal, the highest honor in mathematics.16
After Packard’s death, the Packard Foundation largely cut off grants to conservatives. It gave one grant to the center-right American Enterprise Institute and a three-year, $600,000 grant to the Stanford University-based center-right research group Hoover Institution. It has since occasionally given grants to Hoover for special projects18
A $10 million loan from the Packard Foundation enabled Danco to begin production of RU-486 (mifepristone), a chemical abortion pill. Packard population program head Sarah Clark told Time that Danco Laboratories was “not able to raise the money through regular channels. It didn’t surprise me. It made me sad.”19
In the 21st century, the Packard Foundation launched a program of intensive land acquisition in California. University of Southern California historian Kevin Starr wrote in a 2004 Los Angeles Times op-ed that between 1998 and 2003 the Packard Foundation had spent $175 million buying and preserving 342,000 acres in California. The foundation’s giving, according to Starr, resulted in an additional $700 million in private and state grants to preserve land.
“Never before in California history has a nongovernmental agency acted with such sweeping and bold effect on public value, policy, and action,” Starr wrote.20
A 2001 grant of $11 million allowed the University of California to acquire property used for the construction of the University of California (Merced), the tenth branch of the University of California system. Other donors included the Virginia Smith Trust and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which contributed $2 million. When the campus opened in 2005, Chronicle of Higher Education reporter Sara Hebel interviewed UC-Merced associate vice chancellor for university advancement, Michael I. Campbell, who “credits the Packard Foundation with saving the Merced campus.”21
Current Activities
New Leadership
Its tax return for 2015 reported the Packard Foundation held an endowment of $6.8 billion. Susan Packard Orr is the foundation’s chairman, while Julie Packard and Susan Packard Bennett remain trustees. Three grandchildren of David and Lucile Packard—Jason K, Burnett, Katherine Orr, and David Orr—are also on the board.
Susan Packard Orr donated at least $2,500 to President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign25
The Packard Foundation donated $56 million to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America between 2000-15.27 The foundation funds nonprofits around the world, which lobby for restricting coal use, implementing national carbon taxes, tightening international treaties limiting carbon dioxide production, and discouraging the use of cars.
The Packard Foundation also supports the Resources Legacy Fund, which received five grants totaling $7.2 million in 2015.28 The fund networks with land trusts in particular areas and acts as a pass-through organization for nonprofits interested in buying and preserving land.
The Packard Foundation and Canada
Vivian Krause, a blogger and contributor to the National Post, has calculated that the Packard Foundation has contributed at least $28.7 million to environmental groups opposed to increased oil production in the western Canadian province of Alberta. 0){
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