The mission statement we have had since 2003 reflects our belief that knowledge, more than money, is the true coinage of lasting, beneficial change: “The Wallace Foundation supports and shares effective ideas and practices that enable institutions to expand learning and enrichment opportunities for all people.”

And our signature phrase —“Supporting ideas. Sharing solutions. Expanding opportunities.”— encapsulates our belief that as a national foundation with sizeable assets and a seasoned professional staff, we have an opportunity, and a responsibility, to go beyond money and use our resources in ways that build, capture and share information and know-how that leaders in a particular field can use to bring about beneficial changes.

From the start, we have understood our limitations. No one elected us to do or change anything. And we can’t simply buy the changes we want to see happen because the money we have is miniscule compared to the public sectors we are trying to influence.

Still, our pluralist society creates an enormous opportunity for foundations like ours to have an impact beyond just giving away money. There is an insatiable market for new and useful ideas. And as a national foundation, we occupy a privileged position — free of many of the constraints on government or profit-making enterprises — to help generate and test innovative ideas, and then capture and share credible information that helps institutions in the fields we are engaged with work better and bring about benefits to people.

With those constraints and opportunities in mind, The Wallace Foundation has evolved in the last several years from its beginnings some 40 years ago as a group of four family foundations that made grants in many areas, to a single foundation focused on using knowledge and ideas to create enduring change in just three areas of activity:

Strengthening education leadership to improve student achievement
Enhancing after school learning opportunities, and
Building appreciation and demand for the arts.

In simplest terms, our approach is to develop and test useful ideas “on the ground,” gather credible, objective evidence on what is most effective and why, and then share that knowledge with the individuals and institutions having the courage and authority to bring those effective ideas to life in ways that bring benefits to people. There are two components to this approach:

Develop innovation sites: We work closely with sites (such as states, school districts, and cities as well as non-profit organizations) to help them plan and test new approaches for bringing about the change goals to which we have mutually agreed. These sites can provide us and the broader field with insights into what ideas are or are not effective and what conditions support or impede progress.
Develop and share knowledge: In concert with the innovation site work, we support independent research that fills knowledge gaps in the field. We also assess the results of the innovations we support through a range of evaluation methods. We then share our knowledge with others and encourage the use of the ideas and practices that seem most promising. In this way, we hope to improve practice and policy in organizations that will never get Wallace grants.