Carnegie Corporation of New York has awarded Carnegie Endowment for International Peace a five-year challenge grant of $10 million to further expand the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s international centers, in accordance with its Global Vision initiative of transforming the organization from a think tank on international issues to the first truly global international think tank. The Carnegie Endowment will seek support from other foundations, corporations and individuals around the world to match the challenge grant. The major fundraising effort will strengthen research and programming at Carnegie centers (Beirut, Beijing, Brussels, Moscow and Washington, DC) and the expansion of the organization’s presence to new centers, beginning in New Delhi, India.
A second, complementary Carnegie Corporation grant of $950,000 will help the think tank expand its development office to meet ambitious fundraising goals in support of its overall mission.
The Carnegie Endowment is America’s oldest international affairs think tank. In 2007, it launched its Global Vision, with the goal of becoming the world’s first truly global think tank. Its work is nonpartisan and dedicated to achieving practical results across a wide spectrum of policy issues.
Commenting on the special challenge grant made during the Corporation’s own centennial year, Vartan Gregorian said, “Andrew Carnegie created the Endowment ‘to hasten the abolition of war, the foulest blot upon our civilization.’ To achieve that goal, Mr. Carnegie charged the institution’s Trustees with aligning the work of the Endowment with changing times because he understood that serving the cause of international peace requires the ability to respond to new challenges with new solutions.”
“Over the past one hundred years,” Gregorian continued, “the Endowment has more than met those challenges, and has often been a leading force for change. Its legacy is intertwined with the history of our nation and the major international developments of the 20th century. Throughout its history, the Endowment has truly remained faithful to its mission of promoting peaceful engagement not only between the United States and other nations, but among all world powers, including those emerging on the international stage.”
“By recognizing the success of the Global Vision in this way, CCNY adds its voice to those that have pointed to the unique value a global network of nationally and regionally based research centers can bring. This generous gift of the Carnegie Corporation of New York is a hugely important kickoff to our ambitious development plan,” said Jessica Mathews, president of the Endowment.
A year after the Endowment’s creation, on the advice of his long-time friend Elihu Root, a Nobel Prize-winner, advisor to several U.S. presidents and the first president of the Endowment, Mr. Carnegie established the foundation he named Carnegie Corporation of New York, which he endowed with most of his remaining fortune along with a mandate to continue his philanthropic work even after his death.
Almost from its start, the Corporation, the largest institution established by the Scottish immigrant industrialist that is dedicated to furthering the goals that Mr. Carnegie cared most deeply about—improving education and promoting global peace—collaborated with the Endowment on efforts to address issues that impact the prospects for peace among the world’s nations. In the past 25 years alone, the Corporation has awarded $30 million to the Endowment. Recent grants include a $3 million award in 2008 to support the Endowment’s China Policy Research Program established to provide policymakers in both countries with a better understanding of the dynamics between the United States and China as well as within China itself. A series of grants have also helped to create the Carnegie Moscow Center and various initiatives to promote international strategies to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.
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