- Assets: $277,805,820 (2013)
- Grants Received: $144,382,361 (2013)
- Grants Awarded: $8,865,052 (2013)
Originally based in Little Rock, Arkansas and known as the
William J. Clinton Foundation, the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton
Foundation was established by former U.S. President Bill Clinton in 2001 “to alleviate poverty, improve global health, strengthen economies, and protect the environment.”
 persuade
wealthy businesspeople to pledge money to Clinton Foundation programs.
Former World Wildlife Fund
president David Sandalow, who served as a senior environmental official
in the Clinton administration, chairs the CGI Working Group. Claiming to be politically nonpartisan, the Foundation administers several major programs, of which the best-known is the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI).
The Clinton Global Initiative
Incorporated in 2005 as an independent nonprofit, CGI aims to
 Protection Agency administrator Carl Browner; Pew Center on Global Climate Change president Eileen Claussen; Environmental Defense president Fred Krupp; and Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla, an ethanol advocate
who supported California’s failed Proposition 87, which would have
imposed new taxes on that state’s oil producers. Other key CGI working
groups are headed by senior fellows at the Center for American Progress
who previously worked for the Clinton administration: Clinton economic
advisor Gene Sperling chairs the CGI Education Working Group; Clinton
National Security Council staffer Gayle Smith chairs the CGI
Poverty-Alleviation Working Group; and Thomas Kalil, deputy director of
Clinton's National Economic Council, chairs the CGI Global Health
Working Group.
CGI hosts annual Clinton Global Summits where
affluent business moguls, who pay $15,000 apiece to attend, pledge money
to CGI programs. Among those who attended in 2007 were high-ranking officials of Wal-Mart, PepsiCo, Duke Energy, Starbucks, the Carnegie Corporation, and the NoVo Foundation. Also on hand were former Vice President Al Gore, The
Working Group’s advisory board is composed of such luminaries as Natural Resources Defense Council president Frances Beinecke; President Clinton's former Environmental
Archbishop Desmond Tutu,
Evangelical Environmental Network president Jim Ball, actors Brad Pitt
and Angelina Jolie, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Afghan president
Hamid Karzai, and media giants Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner. At this 2007 Summit, Bill Clinton advocated a form of Cap-and-Trade
that would raise energy prices while purportedly reducing
greenhouse-gas emissions. Some CGI activities, such as this
greenhouse-gas initiative, are of a highly political nature.
Others,
however, are not politicized – particularly those that focus their
philanthropy on impoverished peoples in Africa.
At the 2009 Clinton Global Summit, attendees included Barack Obama, Jordan's Queen Rania Al Abdullah, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Al Gore, Wangari Maathai, and actors Brad Pitt and Matt Damon.
Additional Programs of the Clinton Foundation
Additional major initiatives of the Clinton Foundation include the following:
A) The Clinton Health Access Initiative
(CHAI): Established in 2002 as the Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative, this
program is dedicated to “expanding access to care and treatment for
HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis ... in developing countries.” In its
earliest months, BHCCF brokered
price cuts by generic drug producers of AIDS drugs, organizing a
cooperative that enabled more than 70 poor nations to purchase those
medicines at discounted rates. The driving force
behind this initiative is Ira C. Magaziner, a longtime Bill Clinton
ally who engineered Hillary Clinton’s failed attempt at a healthcare
overhaul in the early 1990s.
B) Clinton Climate Initiative
(CCI): Created in 2006 “to create and advance solutions to the core
issues driving climate change,” CCI is founded on the premise that human
industrial activity, by emitting greenhouse gases (GHG), causes global
warming. To address this problem, CCI has created such projects as
energy retrofits for homes and businesses, low-GHG-emitting outdoor
lighting, and improved waste management for American cities. CCI also
promotes clean-energy alternatives to fossil fuels, which it says
“account for about 60 percent of greenhouse gas emissions globally.”
Moreover, CCI seeks to curtail “deforestation in tropical countries,”
which it calls “a major contributor to climate change.”
C) Alliance for a Healthier Generation:
Asserting that “in the past 20 years, childhood obesity rates have
doubled and are now at epidemic rates,” this initiative supports a Healthy Schools Program
that encourages schools to stock their vending machines with
non-fattening foods; urges students to “bring in healthy snacks for school parties”; and exhorts parents to “work with your child’s school to organize 'healthy' fundraisers like walk-a-thons.”
D) Clinton Economic Opportunity Initiative
(CEOI): This Initiative was established in 2002 “to reduce economic
inequity and accelerate economic progress in the United States by
helping individuals become more financially stable and businesses in
underserved communities to grow.” CEOI's Entrepreneurship Program
“promotes business-to-business public service, helping entrepreneurs
reach higher levels of success”; the Financial Mainstream Program “helps
people access lower-cost, safer financial services, and the support
they need to develop and sustain good financial habits.”
E) Clinton Development Initiative
(CDI): At the inaugural meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative in
2005, Scottish philanthropist Tom Hunter, the wealthiest man in
Scotland, committed “to invest $100 million over ten years to encourage
sustainable economic growth in the developing world” – principally
Africa. Today, CDI “works to increase farmers’ access to fertilizer,
seeds, irrigation, and other farming inputs, and to identify and develop
new markets for agricultural outputs.”
An Apparent Quid Pro Quo Donation to the Clinton Foundation
In 2004, New York developer Robert Congel donated $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation. Soon thereafter, Senator Hillary Clinton reportedly helped Congel access millions of dollars in federal assistance for his mall project.
Collecting Donations to Fund the Clinton Presidential Library
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