Arthur Blank Family Foundation

ATLANTA, March 30, 2004 — The trustees of The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation have adopted a strategic direction that sharpens the Foundation's focus on providing opportunities to children and youth and enhancing the quality of life over the next five years.

The Foundation launched a strategic planning review in early 2003 — after reaching a $100-million milestone in giving — to assess what it had learned from its grant making and to determine how to have a greater impact going forward. The strategic direction is a result of that process, which involved Foundation trustees, staff, grant recipients, civic leaders and community partners.

"Our family is committed to being a partner in promoting positive change — in individual lives and in entire communities," said Arthur M. Blank, chairman of the Foundation. “We’ve listened to our partners and we’ve learned a great deal about grant making over the past eight years. This plan is a natural evolution of our work, and our desire to go deeper in areas where we think we can help make a lasting difference.”

The Foundation will work to promote positive change in people’s lives and to build and enhance the communities in which they live, with a strong interest in improving the circumstances of low-income youth and their families. For the next five years, the Foundation will focus its grants on two primary initiatives — Fostering Opportunity and Enhancing Quality of Life — with plans to pledge more than $100 million to grants and related activities to achieve specific goals and outcomes.

The Foundation will continue to work in three communities where the Blank family has deep community roots: Atlanta; Maricopa County, Arizona; and Beaufort County, South Carolina. Its work will be led by an experienced management team. Penelope (Penny) McPhee joins the Foundation as president in early April from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation in Miami. Elise Eplan, vice president for special initiatives, and Deva Hirsch, vice president for program, will continue in their management roles at the Foundation.

The strategic direction builds on experience the Foundation has gained in broad-based support of youth development and quality of life issues since 1995. The Foundation has identified specific focus areas as part of each initiative:

Fostering Opportunity supports efforts to provide a fair chance for everyone by helping low-income youth and their families overcome barriers imposed by the inequities of poverty and origin. It targets two critical stages in youth development:

Better Beginnings — To ensure equal access to opportunity for all young children between birth and age 5, the Foundation will support and promote high quality early care and education services for low-income children and their families, preparation for parenthood, and abuse prevention, beginning in the City of Atlanta.
Pathways to Success — To improve the life chances of young people, the Foundation will support work to expand educational opportunities for low-income youth beyond high school. This work will begin in the City of Atlanta; Maricopa County, Arizona; and Beaufort County, South Carolina. Strategies will support initiatives that guide and encourage youth, and provide information on how to prepare and qualify for postsecondary programs and financial aid.

Enhancing Quality of Life extends the Blank family’s interest in green space preservation and the arts. Its goal is to help ensure that growing communities remain desirable places to live by protecting the environment, increasing recreational opportunities, and fostering diverse arts and cultural activities.

The Foundation will support activities in two quality-of-life focus areas:

Inspiring Spaces — To help develop a system of great parks in the City of Atlanta, through planning, land acquisition, maintenance and public support.
The Art of Change — To develop the new world-class home for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and to explore ways that the new facility can be a resource to strengthen the broader arts community.

The Foundation will use a proactive grant making process going forward. It will identify and invite potential partners to receive grants around its initiatives, supporting efforts that focus on specific goals. The Foundation will no longer accept unsolicited grant requests.

While the Foundation will utilize grant making as a primary strategy, it will support additional tools to support change. The Foundation will seek partners in business, civic, governmental, foundation and nonprofit sectors who share interest in the goals of its initiatives. Foundation staff will engage partners in efforts that include: developing and expanding promising practices and model programs; convening people and organizations around issues; developing knowledge to inform policy decisions through research; communicating findings to the community and decision-makers through publications and educational forums; and spurring civic action and community involvement for positive change.

Additional details about the Foundation’s strategic direction and focus areas are available on the web site at www.blankfoundation.org.

Arthur M. Blank founded The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation in 1995 to share his civic values and the joy of giving with his family. Since that time, the Foundation has awarded more than $128 million in grants to support youth development, the arts, education and the preservation of green space and parks. The Blank Family Foundation also supports two affiliated funds — the Atlanta Falcons Youth Foundation, which awards grants throughout Georgia, and the Mountain Sky Guest Ranch Fund, which focuses on Park and Gallatin Counties in Montana. Mr. Blank co-founded The Home Depot, the world’s largest home improvement retailer, in 1978 and retired from the company as co-chairman in 2001. He is owner and CEO of the Atlanta Falcons.