The George Gund Foundation is a charitable foundation established in 1952 to provide grants in the areas of the arts, civic engagement, community development, economic development, environmental policy, and human services, public education, racial inequality.
[3] President Woodrow Wilson signed the Food and Fuel Control Act into law on August 10, 1917, which banned the manufacture of retail liquor and beer for the duration of the emergency created by World War I.
[4] Unable to make beer, in May 1919 Gund purchased all 15,000 shares of the American subsidiary of the German company Kaffee HAG, which had developed a process for manufacturing instant decaffeinated coffee.
[7] Gund became a major stockholder in Kellogg's, and invested in banking, insurance, and real estate.
[8] He was one of Cleveland's richest men at the time of his death in 1966,[9] worth about $200 million ($1.83 billion in 2023 dollars).
[18] Disbursement of funds to various causes left The George Gund Foundation with just $16.4 million ($161,100,000 in 2023 dollars) in assets by 1964.
[23] This was James S. Lipscomb, and he served as executive director of The George Gund Foundation from 1969 until his death in June 1987.
[20] For the first time, The George Gund Foundation began supporting community organizations and began making grants to nonprofits working in the areas of affordable housing, child abuse prevention, drug abuse prevention, gun control, and juvenile justice.
[25] Hawley E. Stark retired from the board of trustees in 1973, and Frederick K. Cox became the foundation's president.
The foundation had also begun to expand its grantmaking to include boosting nonprofit organizations doing good work but which needed funds to reorganize, reorient, or merely overcome bad luck in order to survive.
[32] Bergholz retired at the end of 2002, and was succeeded by David Abbott, president of University Circle Inc.[34][g] Abbott, a former Cuyahoga County administrator, worked closely with The Gund Foundation as executive director of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and as executive director of the Cleveland Bicentennial Commission.
[34] In 2014, The George Gund Foundation joined Cuyahoga County in launching the nation's first county-level Pay for success (PFS) project aimed at reducing the amount of time children whose families are homeless stay in foster care.