The Nathan Cummings Foundation (NCF) is a private foundation that funds left-of-center and Jewish organizations and used its endowment investments as a vehicle for promoting environmentalist and left-progressive economic policies. ^[1] It is a leader in left-leaning “shareholder activism” and is annually one of the most active sponsors of shareholder resolutions designed to push corporations into publishing information or taking actions that would benefit left-of-center policy goals and narratives. ^[2][3]

History and Leadership

Nathan Cummings Foundation was started in 1949 by Nathan Cummings, the founder of Consolidated Foods (later Sara Lee Corporation), as a vehicle for his personal philanthropy. Cummings retired in 1968, and used his foundation as a vehicle for supporting mainstream organizations such as hospitals, the arts, Jewish causes (including organizations in Israel), and education. After his death in 1985, his foundation received the bulk of his estate, estimated at $200 million. ^[4]

Under the leadership of his descendants, the Nathan Cummings Foundation began slowly moving away from Cummings’s long-time philanthropy model and into more left-leaning political advocacy causes, especially environmentalism.

In the 2000s, under president Lance Lindblom, a former executive vice president at George Soros’s Open Society Initiative and veteran of the Ford Foundation and J. Roderick MacArthur Foundation, the NCF began to use its existing investment stakes in public companies to promote left-progressive policy priorities. ^[5][6] NCF moved beyond leveraging its existing investments and started actively investing its $443 million endowment to achieve policy goals in 2013 when it allocated $6.5 million to “impact investing.” ^[7][8]

By 2014, it was one of the two most prolific activist investors in social causes, sponsoring 38 shareholder proposals that year. ^[9] That same year, its president Simon Greer announced that it was ending the “four core programs that have long defined the Foundation” — health care, Jewish causes, the arts, and environmentalism — in favor of a new focus on left-wing environmental activism and income redistribution. ^[10] During this time, the NCF produced a video that Greer said was designed to promote the idea that “without government involvement, we would not be able to grow together as a nation.” ^[11]

By 2018, new NCF president Sharon Alpert announced that 100 percent of the foundation’s endowment would be invested in the service of left-of-center policy change. ^[12]

Grantmaking

The Nathan Cummings Foundation made $24,068,160 in grants in 2017. The largest recipients were:

1. Union for Reform Judaism: $1,000,000
2. National Domestic Workers Alliance: $762,500
3. New Israel Fund: $619,000
4. Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors: $585,000
5. Bend the Arc – A Jewish Partnership for Justice: $535,000
6. Jewish Funders Network: $527,950
7. PICO National Network: $500,000
8. New Venture Fund: $450,000
9. org Education Fund: $400,000
10. JOIN for Justice: $385,000
11. Restaurant Opportunities Centers United: $375,000
12. Movement Strategy Center: $360,000
13. NEO Philanthropy: $314,000
14. Tides Center: $280,000
15. Fractured Atlas: $251,000

Shareholder Activism

Much of the Nathan Cummings Foundation’s shareholder activism focuses on pushing energy companies and electric utilities to disclose information about their activities, especially disclosures related to lobbying and industry advocacy efforts that would normally be confidential. ^{[13] [14]} Examples include:

• After a 2014 Duke Energy coal ash spill in North Carolina, the NCF led a group of investors that included state treasurers and union pension funds to pressure Duke into publicly disclosing its related lobbying, advocacy and political spending. ^[15]
• In 2016, an NCF-led coalition forced a shareholder vote at electric utility FirstEnergy on a non-binding resolution asking the company to publicly report all its government and grassroots lobbying and expenses, including the amounts it contributed to organizations such as the American Legislative Exchange Council. ^[16]
• In 2017, a group of investors led by the NCF passed a nonbinding resolution at Occidental Petroleum’s annual meeting asking the company to predict what future risks it could face under a specific global warming outcome scenario. ^[17]

The NCF also engages in other forms of shareholder activism, such as resolutions designed to force companies to meet racial and gender quotas in their slates of proposed board candidates. ^{[18] [19]}