Welcome to The Atlantic Philanthropies web site. Here we seek to tell you something about who we are and what we are trying to achieve.

We are guided by a mission to bring about lasting changes in the lives of disadvantaged and vulnerable people. Since every moment counts, we aim to use our considerable, but also finite, resources to this end, by spending our entire endowment before the next decade is over.

We were inspired to do this by our founder, Charles Feeney, who believes that “giving while living” is the best approach to achieve an impact on the urgent social inequities and injustices of our time.

Our work is aimed at four of the most important issues facing the world – ageing, disadvantaged children and youth, population health, and reconciliation and human rights. We work on one or more of those issues in the seven countries in which we maintain a presence: Australia, Bermuda, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, South Africa, the United States and Viet Nam.

To achieve our mission, we partner with grantees, other funders and governments. We believe in the power of advocacy by those who will benefit by it, especially the disadvantaged. To that end, we support targeted initiatives, ranging from the Treatment Action Campaign, which influenced the government of South Africa to provide effective medications to people with HIV/AIDS, to the legal team which persuaded the Supreme Court to abolish the juvenile death penalty in the United States, to the effort to increase the number of religiously integrated schools in Northern Ireland.

In addition to these tangible campaigns, Atlantic seeks always to strengthen the capacity of leaders and institutions in the fields we have chosen, since this is the best insurance of a vibrant movement for social equality and justice that will endure long after we have made our last grant.

We understand that we cannot achieve the kind of change we seek on our own. Our grantees do the hard work, and our funding partners make it possible for us to join together in making big, bold, often risky bets.

We do our best to learn what works and what doesn’t and to share this knowledge with colleagues and partners. As we have learned from the able advocates we support, we hold our values constant while remaining nimble in pursuing strategies that will best advance them.

Our openness to learning and adjustment extends to you, the reader. I invite you to let us know what we could be doing better to bring us closer to a world in which health, human rights and economic equity make it possible for every person to achieve full potential.

Gara LaMarche

President and CEO

The Atlantic Philanthropies

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