The Wallace Foundation, an independent national philanthropy, seeks to foster equity and improvements in learning and enrichment for young people, and in the arts for everyone. Wallace’s approach is to develop insights into important questions that, if answered, could help strengthen practices and policies within the foundation’s fields of interest.
Wallace has six major initiatives underway:
School leadership. Strengthening education leadership to improve student achievement.
Building audiences for the arts. Making the arts a part of many more people’s lives by working with arts organizations to broaden, deepen and diversify audiences.
Social and emotional learning. Exploring whether and how children benefit if schools and afterschool programs work together to align and improve experiences and climate to build social and emotional skills.
Arts education. Expanding arts learning opportunities for children and teens.
Summer learning. Better understanding the impact of high-quality summer learning programs on children who typically lack access to such programs.
Afterschool. Helping selected cities make good afterschool programs available to many more children.
With assets of about $2 billion, the foundation is among the 50 largest independent foundations in the United States, according to 2014 figures from the Foundation Center. Wallace traces its origins back more than half a century to DeWitt and Lila Acheson Wallace, founders of The Reader’s Digest Association.
The foundation has an unusual approach: In each of our focus areas—Arts, Education Leadership, and Learning and Enrichment—we seek to identify, and help answer, one or more significant questions whose answers are not known but which, if known, could help propel progress more broadly. Accordingly, we work with a small number of grant recipients both to help them test new ideas and generate improvements for those they serve, and to generate evidence and insights that, when shared broadly, can improve policy and practice in an entire field.
This Wallace Approach is reflected in the way the foundation develops its strategies and designs its initiatives. We begin by attempting to
understand the context of the fields in which we work in order to identify the right unanswered questions to address. We then simultaneously fund programmatic work in the field by organizations—including technical assistance and peer learning communities—and research that studies the process and results of their efforts in order to
generate improvements and insights that can benefit both the people served by the grant recipients and the field. The public reports emanating from this work support our strategy of
catalyzing broad impact, acting as a source of credible, useful lessons to be disseminated to key audiences.
The Wallace Approach is carried out in an interdisciplinary team-based structure. Our three disciplines are program, communications, and research. In each discipline, we seek employees who are both highly skilled in their professions and able to work collaboratively across disciplines to capture the synergy of diverse experience and ways of thinking. Wallace employees need to be able to work collaboratively, think analytically and communicate clearly. We value the flexibility to adapt to change, a desire to learn, and the ability to work productively both on one’s own and with colleagues inside and outside the foundation.
We post job openings here in the employment section. If you are interested in applying, please send an email with your resume to
HR@wallacefoundation.org. Please use the position title as the subject line of the email.
Salary is commensurate with experience. Our benefits include health, dental, vision, life and disability insurance, a 403(b) retirement plan and paid time off.
The Wallace Foundation is an Equal Opportunity Employer, committed to maintaining a diverse workplace where differing perspectives are a source of strength.