Unlike most other foundations, it was charged to spend all of its assets within a generation of Olin's death, for fear of mission drift over time and to preserve donor intent.
[1] According to the official website, "the general purpose of the John M. Olin Foundation is to provide support for projects that reflect or are intended to strengthen the economic, political and cultural institutions upon which the American heritage of constitutional government and private enterprise is based.
The Foundation also seeks to promote a general understanding of these institutions by encouraging the thoughtful study of the connections between economic and political freedoms, and the cultural heritage that sustains them.
[4] The Foundation is most notable for its early support and funding of the law and economics movement,[5] a discipline that applies incentive-based thinking and cost-benefit analysis to the field of legal theory.
[9] According to the Philanthropy Roundtable, the Olin Foundation "dispensed hundreds of millions of dollars to scholars, think tanks, publications, and other organizations" and "shaped the direction and aided the growth of the modern conservative movement that first sprang into visibility in the 1980s.