The Wallace Foundation traces its origins back more than a half century to the philanthropic impulses of DeWitt and Lila Acheson Wallace, founders of The Reader's Digest Association. Giving freely of their time and the wealth amassed from the "little magazine" they launched in 1922, the Wallaces contributed generously to a wide assortment of artistic, cultural and educational causes during their lifetimes. They also ensured that after their deaths their fortune would go to philanthropy. The Wallaces' giving has touched
many institutions and their legacy continues today through the work of The Wallace Foundation. You may read more about the Wallaces and their philanthropy in a
booklet published by
The New York Community Trust, where they established a number of
charitable funds.
With assets of about $2 billion in 2020, The Wallace Foundation stays true to Lila and DeWitt Wallace's passions for education, youth development and the arts. Wallace today aims to foster equity and improvements in learning and enrichment for young people, and in the arts for everyone. In particular, we focus on
school leadership,
afterschool programming,
summer learning,
expanded learning,
building audiences for the arts and
arts education for young people.
Getting Organized (1986 – 1990)
DeWitt Wallace died in 1981; Lila Wallace in 1984. Their estate plan gave much of their fortune to four private foundations they had established. With the founders gone, the foundations—whose assets comprised Reader's Digest's stock—needed to have an organizational structure, which began with rented office space in New York City and the hiring of staff members. M. Christine DeVita, who had been deputy general counsel at Reader's Digest, joined as executive director in 1988; then, with the board of directors, she helped create a plan to take Reader's Digest public to provide a public market in which the foundations could sell the founders' stock over time. The four Wallace foundations were merged into two and renamed the DeWitt Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund. Their missions were revised to concentrate on education and youth for DeWitt, and arts and culture for Lila. Grants evolved from supporting relatively small local programs to foundation-created initiatives with a more national focus.
The First Decade as a National Foundation (1990 to 1999)
DeVita was named president of the Wallace funds in 1989. In the following years, she played a key role in increasing the number of national multi-year philanthropic initiatives taken on by the funds. She also helped incorporate evaluation and communications expertise into the staff, a pioneering move for philanthropy of the time. The DeWitt Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund continued to focus on education (particularly teachers and school libraries) and national youth-serving organizations. The Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund created audience development efforts for a variety of different art forms and added initiatives in public libraries and urban parks.
The work of both funds began to draw national attention. A teacher-recruitment program,
Pathways to Teaching Careers, was recognized as a model in the 1998 reauthorization of the federal Higher Education Act. A program for school libraries,
Library Power, became the basis for new national standards by the American Library Association. The Lila Wallace fund was among the first national foundations to invest in American folk art traditions. The fund also received the National Medal for the Arts from the first President Bush for its work helping cultural organizations develop new audiences.
Second Decade as a National Foundation (2000 to 2009)
Early in the 2000s, the funds sold the last of their Reader's Digest stock and merged into a single national philanthropy with a name reflecting its roots: The Wallace Foundation.
Equally significant was the adoption of a new approach to philanthropy. After
studying the results of their efforts in the 1990s, Wallace's board and staff members concluded that although the funds had accomplished much, they had not fundamentally changed the areas in which they worked. The Wallace Foundation moved, therefore, from "doing good" to "making change," and developed the approach to philanthropy that is the hallmark of its work today: developing and sharing effective ideas and practices that can be used to effect beneficial changes in the areas of Wallace interest.
Over the decade, the foundation published more than 150 reports and other publications highlighting findings from its on-the-ground work and commissioned research. Wallace's efforts in school leadership helped put an important but marginalized issue—the need to better train and support principals—high on the national education reform agenda. The foundation's work in Dallas supported the building of a national model for improving arts education for city children. Wallace's approach to improving afterschool programming for urban youngsters is being adopted in a number of American cities. Our efforts in the arts helped shed light on ways arts organizations could reach new audiences. The foundation's assessment of its work during this decade was the subject of its
'09 Report: Appraising a Decade.
Into the Future: 2010 and Beyond
Wallace marked the first year of its third decade as a national foundation in part by moving into a new area of interest: summer and expanded learning. In 2011, Wallace reached another milestone with the
retirement of DeVita, the organization's founding president. It stepped into a new era with the arrival of
Will Miller at the helm July 1, 2011.
Miller has built on the foundation’s legacy and refined its approach to focus on identifying and filling knowledge gaps that, if closed, could help fields make significant progress. Under Miller’s leadership, the foundation has launched three major efforts: the Principal Supervisor Initiative,
Building Arts Audiences for Sustainability and an initiative to develop
stronger afterschool arts programming for young people who may otherwise lack access to such programming. Since 2011, the foundation has also added significantly to its library of information and ideas; its online Knowledge Center in 2016 had more than 400 reports, articles, videos, infographics and other materials.