2016 Annual Report

A note from our leadership

2016 was marked by an unprecedented election season. Divisive rhetoric became the norm, while civil, productive, public discourse became a casualty. Many were left questioning the future of the nation. But what does it all mean for Philadelphia – a city that’s been reestablishing itself as a world-class destination for visitors, residents, commerce, and development?

We can begin by asking more questions about the kind of city we want for ourselves and for our children. How do we enhance local quality of life and expand economic opportunity for all Philadelphians? How do we give voice to our common interests and shared values to forge new paths forward to collectively shape a better future for the region?

At the William Penn Foundation, we have supported three grantmaking areas for many years that are key components for discussion about what will accelerate the recent successes here. By improving access to high-quality education, especially for Philadelphia’s youngest learners; protecting our environment and the watershed that provides drinking water for 15 million people; developing high-quality public spaces that bring together and engage people of diverse backgrounds across all neighborhoods; and supporting a vibrant cultural community that stretches us to think differently about how we view the world, we can contribute to common solutions.

We consider these areas of focus – education; watershed protection; and arts, culture and public spaces – to be essential ingredients for a successful and just city. By strengthening them, we continue the work started by Phoebe and Otto Haas when they created the William Penn Foundation in 1945. We support the city and its people, from children in early childcare centers and entering pre-K, to community members engaged in re-envisioning their parks and recreation centers, to the remarkable diversity of walkers, runners, and bikers from every age group, background, and neighborhood enjoying the Schuylkill River Trail along the waters of a clean river.

We at the William Penn Foundation hope that you will join us in the ongoing dialogue about what unites us as a city as we continue to build a strong foundation for a prosperous, vital, and equitable Philadelphia.

Sincerely,

THOMAS HAAS
Chair of the Corporation

JANET HAAS, M.D.
Chair of the Board

Race Street Pier is a vibrant public space that is bringing people of diverse backgrounds together and connecting them with the Delaware River waterfront.

Creative Communities

The intent of our Creative Communities work is that through equitable, accessible, dynamic public spaces and vibrant artistic and creative expression, people will come together, engage with each other, and build community, empathy, and shared understanding. At this time in our nation’s history, when so much of the conversation is divisive, these outcomes are especially relevant.

...people will come together, engage with each other and build community, empathy, and shared understanding.

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Providing Flexible Capital to the Region's Arts and Culture Sector

Philadelphia has a unique arts and culture sector that is essential to the vibrancy of the city and the backbone of creative expression in the region. A rich, diverse cultural sector reinforces the city’s position as a great place to visit and live. To build on this identity, promote artistic excellence, and protect the long-term viability of Philadelphia's artistic assets, we must ensure that its arts organizations have the resources they need to thrive.

To support the region’s arts and cultural sector, we provide flexible working capital through unrestricted, core organizational support, so that arts groups have the confidence and resources to pursue their missions and produce innovative, high-quality work. In 2016, core support grants were awarded to 32 organizations.

Rebuilding Public Spaces to Connect Communities

In 2016, the Foundation made a $100 million commitment toward Mayor Jim Kenney’s proposed $500 million Rebuilding Community Infrastructure initiative (“Rebuild”). Inspired by the Foundation’s own investments in public space and its partnership with the Knight Foundation to create what is now a national model called Reimagining the Civic Commons, Rebuild is an unprecedented effort to enhance quality of life in neighborhoods that have experienced disinvestment by renovating and reanimating essential public spaces such as parks, playgrounds, libraries, and recreation centers.

Central to Rebuild’s approach is using data-driven decision-making for project selection, promoting community building and empowerment through community engagement, ensuring overall design excellence, and promoting economic opportunity and inclusion. Rebuild also represents a potentially new national model for strategic public investment in community infrastructure.

Informing Our View of the World and Ourselves through Arts & Culture

Through exposure to the arts, young people, especially, expand their view of the world they live in and their role in it. In 2016, we funded a formative evaluation of our arts education strategy, entitled The Socioemotional Benefits of the Arts: A New Mandate for Arts Education. This robust, two-year study examined how arts education impacts socioemotional outcomes for students, particularly in the context of a large, urban school district. Key findings suggested that even brief exposure to arts education programs can spark interest in the arts; can lead to attributes like increased tolerance, perseverance and motivation to achieve, particularly among younger students; and at all levels can disrupt academic disengagement.

Engaging the Entire City in Creating a Contemporary Monument to Philadelphia

Monument Lab is a nine-week public art and history project produced by Mural Arts Philadelphia. It is designed to engage a diverse public in the guiding question: "What is an appropriate monument for the current city of Philadelphia?" with a goal of developing an exhibition that presents a collaborative and more equitable portrait of an evolving city.

This question was posed to more than 20 contemporary artists working around the world, who are creating temporary monuments that will be displayed in ten public spaces across the city from September-November 2017. Each site will also include interactive pop-up “laboratories” for soliciting local knowledge and cultivating civic dialogue and engagement. The project will additionally include a central hub exhibition space at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts where data collected from the public at pop-up “laboratories” is shared.

Monument Lab promotes the use of civic spaces across the city, both in Center City and the surrounding neighborhoods, as sites for the exhibition of thought-provoking art and audience engagement that enable public spaces to serve as platforms for community and cultural expression.

Teacher and student working together on developing literacy skills at Kinder Academy, Inc.

Great Learning

The William Penn Foundation is committed to the success of Philadelphia’s children. We support efforts to improve school readiness, help young children read on grade level by the end of third grade, and improve programs and pathways for high school completion. In partnership with many others, we are working toward the day when all children, regardless of family income, can experience educational success.

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Creating More High-Quality Opportunities for Our Youngest Learners

There are approximately 100,000 children under the age of 6 in Philadelphia, and currently only space for 22,000 children in high-quality early childhood education programs. This means 78,000 children are not in high-quality educational settings.

We must do better for these children. Every child in Philadelphia deserves access to high-quality education, and we, along with many others, are steadfastly focused on increasing the number of high-quality early childhood education seats available. This focus is starting to make a difference. Research by Reinvestment Fund showed the supply of high-quality early childhood education seats in Philadelphia increased by 8.6% between 2014 and 2016, creating space for more than 7,300 additional children to receive a high-quality education compared to two years ago.

A key contributor to this progress is the Fund for Quality, a program that supports high-quality early education providers to expand their services to reach more low-income families. The William Penn Foundation was the original supporter of the Fund for Quality, and in 2016 we awarded an additional $15 million to expand this program. We are pleased that in 2016 other private funders engaged in this work with Vanguard committing an additional $3 million through its Capital for Kids program.

Business and philanthropic participation is critical to the success of this effort.

Mayor Kenney on private financial support of Universal pre-K

Strengthening our Workforce

Research has shown that well-trained, high-quality teachers are the most important school-based factor impacting student achievement. Yet professional learning opportunities for teachers, particularly ones that help them to meet the changing needs of their students, are often in short supply.

In 2016, we funded Temple University to work with the School District of Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards to establish a model program to help K-12 teachers hone their skills and improve their impact on student achievement through a nationally recognized advanced certification program.

Equally important is ensuring there is a strong base of teachers for our youngest learners. As more high-quality seats are created with Philadelphia’s goal of enrolling 6,500 more children in high-quality programs over the next five years, more high-quality teachers will be needed to serve those students.

To support the professional development of these teachers, we funded an effort by the Philadelphia Health and Hospital District 1199c to build a model program that includes college coursework, on-the-job training, mentoring, and financial supports. It will help current child care workers attain their Associate degree, the required certification to be a lead classroom teacher in highly rated programs, and help build a stronger workforce.

Catalyzing Policy Change

The Foundation has been a significant funder of the Pre-K for PA campaign, whose efforts helped secure an increase of $30 million for early childhood education in the 2016-2017 state budget. This increase will result in an additional 700-800 publicly funded high-quality pre-K seats for low-income children in Philadelphia. Another important education policy milestone was reached when the state adopted the funding formula recommended last year by Pennsylvania’s Basic Education Funding Commission and informed by advocacy, education, and research supported in part by the William Penn Foundation. In addition, more than $350 million has been committed to K-12 education funding over the past two years, representing historic increases. These advances help move us toward a more equitable and adequate system, but there is much more to do. The William Penn Foundation will continue to support advocates for children and invites others to join us in supporting those who push for the resources our children need and deserve.

Philadelphians row along the Schuylkill River. Although the river cuts through the middle of the city, its clean water invites recreation among neighboring communities.

Watershed Protection

While many things changed in 2016, one thing did not: clean water in the Delaware River watershed continues to be essential for ecological and human health and water-dependent businesses in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and Delaware. Dramatic evidence of this is the fact that the watershed provides drinking water for more than 15 million people in those states, including half of the residents of New York City and all of the residents of Philadelphia, Camden, and Wilmington. Despite past successes in reducing pollution, there are persistent and growing threats to water quality – including loss of forests in headwaters, runoff from agricultural fields, polluted stormwater, and continued development of natural land.

The Foundation’s Watershed Protection Program is designed to catalyze action to protect and restore clean water in the face of these threats.

Working on the ground to protect and restore

With Foundation support, more than 50 conservation organizations across the watershed are advancing one of the nation’s largest privately funded watershed protection efforts: the Delaware River Watershed Initiative. In 2016, our grantmaking continued this critical work to protect forests and restore streams in eight carefully selected, ecologically significant places. Through the Initiative, new tools were developed to measure progress and strategically map out future projects. A Foundation-funded evaluation of the Initiative was carried out in 2016 to improve practice, and we awarded more than $15 million in grants to continue this conservation and restoration work in 2017 while simultaneously engaging in a strategic planning process, using innovative tools developed in the early years of the Initiative to inform the next phase of the work.

Fostering deeper engagement

Millions of people recreate on the Delaware River and its tributaries each year, whether they’re fishing, paddling or enjoying a scenic view of the water from a nearby trail. These outdoor enthusiasts are a largely untapped source of watershed stewards and advocates, and many of our grantees are engaging these people in learning about and caring for the water, using trails as platforms to provide access to our region’s rivers and streams; environmental education centers as hubs to increase awareness and understanding of water issues; and experiential programs as a means to inspire stewardship of the watershed. In 2016, we increased access to waterways through seven grants totaling $2.6 million toward the continued planning, development, and use of the Circuit Trails, which will ultimately include a 750-mile trail network, with many miles running alongside the region’s waterways. We also supported the launch of River Days, a series of community events hosted at 23 environmental centers located on the Circuit Trails and major extension trails to draw attention to our unique yet connected waterways.

To protect water quality within this 13,500-square-mile watershed, it’s imperative ... to have a comprehensive understanding of system-wide threats to clean water.

Looking at the watershed as a whole

To protect water quality within this 13,500-square-mile watershed, it’s imperative for public agencies, conservation organizations and other stakeholders to have a comprehensive understanding of system-wide threats to clean water. With this in mind, we supported research that will inform policy makers and advocates as they make decisions that will affect the watershed’s health. We also funded outreach and communications to build affinity for the watershed, as well as effective networks which mobilize people to advocate for better practices to protect our clean water. To do this, we awarded nearly $3.5 million in grants to address loss of forested headwaters, agricultural runoff and polluted stormwater, including grants to the Pennsylvania Growing Greener Coalition, New Jersey Keep it Green Coalition, and Delaware’s Clean Water Alliance for education campaigns on the importance of state funding for conservation and watershed protection.

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A Look Back at 2016

March | Creative Communities

The Foundation partnered with the Knight Foundation to welcome more than 319 funders from across the country to Philadelphia for The Funders Network annual conference. Attendance was record-setting and showcased the important work happening around public space development and sustainability across the city.

April | Creative Communities

The Foundation awarded its first round of multi-year, unrestricted, core support grants to arts and cultural organizations. This new approach to funding provides much-needed flexibility to the sector.

April | Watershed Protection

The Circuit Trails branding campaign was launched locally and nationally, with a new “Proud to Trail” tagline. The branding helped to solidify the Circuit’s identity as the trail network continued to grow and develop. The Circuit is actively used as a national model by Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, the largest and most influential trail advocacy organization in the country.

May | Watershed Protection

The Foundation joined the Academy of Natural Sciences and the Open Space Institute to welcome actor Mark Ruffalo to Philadelphia to learn about the Delaware River Watershed Initiative. Mark met with scientists from the Academy to learn more about the Initiative's robust water quality monitoring and focus on data, and also participated in a roundtable discussion with DRWI organizations to learn about their involvement in the effort to protect regional water resources.

June | Great Learning

An important milestone was reached when Pennsylvania codified the funding formula recommended by the legislature’s Basic Education Funding Commission. The new formula was informed, in part, based on data, research, and information compiled by groups that received funding from the William Penn Foundation. Though experts estimate that over $3 billion in additional funding is needed to have an adequate and equitable system of public schools, this milestone means that new funds for public schools will be distributed across the Commonwealth in a fair fashion that reflects student needs.

July | Great Learning

A second cohort of 600 teachers attended an intensive week of training to advance their skills in early literacy instruction. With support from the William Penn Foundation, the Lenfest Foundation, and the School District of Philadelphia, this summer training brought the number of people trained to more than 1200 kindergarten through third grade teachers. Each of these teachers is supported with an early literacy specialist working in their schools to help them implement the research-based practices that will yield success for our students. Each teacher also received a classroom library specially selected for their students to engage them in reading every day.

July | Watershed Protection

The William Penn Foundation awarded an additional $15 million toward the Delaware River Watershed Initiative, extending existing grants for an additional year and supporting a robust planning period to evaluate and implement key learnings from the first phase of the Initiative.

October | Great Learning

Enrollment opens for 2,000 children to enroll in pre-kindergarten funded by the City of Philadelphia. This new opportunity will allow more 3- and 4-year-olds to experience the benefits of early childhood education. With support from the William Penn Foundation, efforts such as Success by Six, the Fund for Quality, and Action for Early Learning help to ensure that there are high-quality programs available for these additional students in locations across Philadelphia.

November | Creative Communities

A long and compelling history of investing in public space inspires a $500+ million city effort to transform neighborhood parks, recreation centers, and libraries across the city. Known as Rebuilding Community Infrastructure, the Foundation commits $100 million to support this once-in-a-generation set of investments that could become a national model for community reinvestment.

Board & Staff

2016 Grant Awards

2016 Financial Highlights

Statement of Activities

For the year ended December 31, 2016 (Unaudited)

Revenues

Dividends	$14,739,615.00
Interest	$7,727,143.00
Net Realized & Unrealized Gains on Investments	$106,174,406.00
Total Revenue	$128,641,164.00

Grants Made & Operating Expenses

Grants Made, Accrual Basis	$115,950,847.00
Program, Administration & General Expenses	$9,031,685.00
Investment Fee Expenses	$10,035,589.00
Excise Tax and UBIT	$785,264.00
Total Expenses	$135,803,385.00

Change in Net Assets	-$7,162,221.00
Net Assets, Beginning of Year	$2,223,169,237.00
Net Assets, End of Year	$2,216,007,016.00

Grant Payments & Future Commitments

For the year ended December 31, 2016

Creative Communities	$34,996,562.00
Great Learning	$28,071,216.00
Watershed Protection	$35,134,272.00
WPF Fund	$14,893,923.00
Director Discretionary & Matching Gifts	$2,382,428.00
Total 2016 Grant Payments	$115,478,401.00
Total Future Commitments	$181,483,552.00