Welcome!

Earlier this year, The Overbrook Foundation began posting the blogs of its Human Rights and Environment grantees on our website here. It was pointed out by a conscious observer that the Foundation itself didn’t have its own blog! Well it took us a few months to get rolling, but here we are.

Before we begin to post about the work of the Foundation’s grantees, we thought we should tell you a bit about us. The Overbrook Foundation, located in New York City, is a family foundation established in 1948 by Frank and Helen Altschul. The Foundation took its name from Overbrook Farm, the Altschul family home in Stamford, Connecticut. Currently the Foundation has an endowment of approximately $185 million and awarded $7.7 million in grants during 2007. Today, twelve of the Board directors are family members and one independent Director sits on the Board. The Board remains committed to the family tradition of philanthropy.

The Foundation's has two primary program areas: The Environment and Human Rights. The Environment Program supports organizations working to develop better consumption and production habits in the United States and in Latin America (currently Brazil, Mexico and Ecuador only). In Latin America the primary objective is to conserve the planet's dwindling biodiversity. The Human Rights Program joins together the Foundation's commitment to international and domestic human rights to support human rights work inside and outside of the United States. The program investigates and looks to support human rights activism of smaller human rights organizations where activists are at particular risk both domestically and globally. The Foundation works to link together its focus on reproductive rights, LGBT rights, reproductive health, HIV, trafficking of people and other issues of sexuality. In doing so, it seeks to advance support for gender rights and to eliminate discrimination and marginalization based on gender.

To learn more about the Foundation and the work that we support, please visit us on our website. Be sure to check out the recent edition of our Newsletter.

We look forward to posting topics related to the Foundation's work in the upcoming weeks.

Enjoy!