About Carnegie

Who We Are

The Andrew Carnegie Foundation, originally established as Carnegie Corporation of New York, is a philanthropic organization founded in 1911 by Andrew Carnegie for the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding. Today, we seek to reduce political polarization through support for the issues that Carnegie considered most important: education, democracy, and peace.

President

Dame Louise Richardson

President

Dame Louise Richardson joined Carnegie as its 13th president in January 2023 at the end of a seven-year term as head of the University of Oxford.

Staff

Staff

Staff

Meet our staff, who are continually seeking to fulfill Andrew Carnegie’s goal of “doing real and permanent good in this world.”
Trustees

Trustees

Trustees

Our board of trustees is chaired by Janet L. Robinson, retired president and chief executive officer of The New York Times Company.

Andrew Carnegie

Andrew Carnegie

Founder

“To try to make the world in some way better than you found it, is to have a noble motive in life.” – Andrew Carnegie, 1902

A History of Impact

Since 1911, our funding has provided individuals with the knowledge and tools needed to improve their lives, participate fully in society, and advance peace.

View our history

1911

Scottish-born American industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie establishes Carnegie Corporation of New York with a $135 million endowment. The mission is “to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding.”

1923

The Nobel Prize in Medicine is awarded to Dr. Frederick Banting and Dr. J. J. R. Macleod for the discovery of insulin through experiments conducted at a University of Toronto laboratory funded by Carnegie.

1938

Carnegie commissions Gunnar Myrdal to conduct a massive study of conditions endured by Black Americans, resulting in An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. The findings helped end the segregation of schools based on race.

1964

The Carnegie Commission on Educational Television studies the role of noncommercial TV in society, producing a 1967 report that lays the groundwork for the Public Broadcasting Act and government funding of educational television, including PBS.

1969

Groundbreaking children’s program Sesame Street debuts on PBS based on a Carnegie study conducted by Joan Ganz Cooney to determine whether television could be used to educate young children.

1990

The foundation funds the Committee on Reducing the Nuclear Danger, leading to the 1991 Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program and the deactivation and removal of nuclear warheads across the former Soviet Union.

2003

With the University of Maryland’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, Carnegie publishes The Civic Mission of Schools to support civic learning in K–12 education nationwide.

2015

The Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program is established to support scholarly research in the humanities and social sciences through $200,000 stipends. In 2024, the focus pivots to the topic of reducing political polarization.

We support the transformative power of education, the democratic ideals that strengthen communities, and the enduring benefits of peace.

Andrew Carnegie dedicated our philanthropic foundation to the goal of doing “real and permanent good in this world” and deemed that its efforts should create “ladders on which the aspiring can rise.” Today, our overarching goal is to reduce political polarization through grants that support ladders of opportunity and a more peaceful world.

Andrew Carnegie served as the first president of our foundation. His intention, clearly spelled out in his Deed of Gift, was for the foundation to carry out its philanthropic work in perpetuity, so that “even after I pass away the wealth that came to me to administer as a sacred trust for the good of my fellow men is to continue to benefit humanity for generations untold.”

At the time of its creation, Andrew Carnegie’s vision for the work of our foundation was unique in that he understood that as the decades passed, the issues of his day would be incorporated into or supplanted by concerns that more immediately affected future generations. Planning for that certainty, he wrote, “Conditions upon the earth inevitably change; hence, no wise man will bind Trustees forever to certain paths, causes, or institutions.” Therefore, he gave his trustees “full authority to change policies or causes hitherto aided, from time to time, when this, in their opinion, has become necessary or desirable. They shall best conform to my wishes by using their own judgment.”

Through more than a century of grantmaking, our foundation has applied what Andrew Carnegie called the principles of “scientific philanthropy” to changing times while always working in harmony with the historical mission and legacy of the foundation. Our unremitting efforts remain focused on the issues that Andrew Carnegie considered most important: democracy, education, and peace.

Our Grantmaking Philosophy

The Andrew Carnegie Foundation is a proactive grantmaker. Our approach is to identify organizations and invest in innovative projects that can meet our programmatic goals, have measurable impact, and can create meaningful, lasting, transformative change.

See our grants

Annual Report

Learn more about the 309 grants that were awarded for a total of $180 million in fiscal year 2024–2025.

Read FY2024–2025 annual report See all reports