This countdown clock, which featured an electronic readout when plugged into an electrical outlet, marked the time remaining to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals agreed to by United Nations member states in 2015. Building on earlier multilateral efforts to tackle development and environmental priorities, the member states committed to a plan to work in partnership to towards goals including ending poverty, ending hunger, promoting education, and combatting climate change by 2030.
In 1997, CNN founder Ted Turner gave $1 billion to create the United Nations Foundation to support international efforts to address global challenges. His gift helped launch a new era of large-scale, ambitious, and sometimes controversial philanthropy, particularly by titans of media, tech, and finance companies.
This wooden toy with wheels is made in the shape of a "2." There is a string at the front with a wooden ball at the end. The Boston-area public broadcasting company WGBH was a pioneer in public media fundraising and offered the wooden toy to donors in the 1970s.
This embosser was used by staff of the child sponsorship organization Foster Parents Plan (now known as Plan International USA) to stamp children’s case files. Foster Parents Plan was established by two British men in 1937 to aid children suffering because of the Spanish Civil War. Americans soon began to support the organization, with a New York woman named Edna Blue (d. 1951) leading efforts to raise funds and awareness for the charity. Foster Parents Plan established headquarters in New York in 1939, and, with the outbreak of World War II, the group expanded its work to aid children from many European countries. In the decades after the war, Plan broadened its reach to many developing countries around the globe.
While donors to the charity could give to a general fund, Plan primarily solicited funds by providing supporters with the opportunity to sponsor individual children. Supporters received case files with details about their sponsored child, and sponsors and children were encouraged to develop relationships with one another.
Over the years, the organization’s name changed from Foster Parents’ Plan for Spanish Children to Foster Parents’ Plan for War Children to Plan International USA.
This book is a copy of the first printed edition of “The Foundation Directory,” published by the Foundation Center Library in 1960. The Foundation Center Library (later known as the Foundation Center and starting in 2019, after a merger with Guidestar, as Candid) was established in 1956 by foundation leaders to bring greater transparency to foundations’ work in the wake of Congressional scrutiny of foundation philanthropy in the early 1950s. The book provides detailed information about grant-making foundations, and the volumes, published annually, became vital to the work of professional fundraisers.
Maggie Webster, Associate Director for External Affairs at NMAH, recalled: “When I worked at a college in P[ennsylvania] we purchased the Foundation Directory every time a new version was published. Back then, it was a $300 purchase and a sizeable catalogue. When we received the updated copy, I always offered the previous year’s book to the Development Office of a local, private secondary school who did not have the budget to purchase it and the school was always so grateful to have it. Back then, before every organization had a website, the Foundation Directory was “the bible” for anyone doing professional fundraising.“
This collection box for the Jewish National Fund is typical of collection boxes, known in Yiddish as pushke, that were common in American Jewish homes in the mid-1900s. Members of Jewish families dropped coins into the box to support the Jewish National Fund, founded in 1901, which has worked to buy land and plant trees to build a Jewish state. The boxes were sent periodically to organizations, such as synagogues, that forwarded the funds onto the Jewish National Fund. In addition to helping fundraise for the JNF, the boxes helped inculcate philanthropic values. They reminded Jews that giving tzedakah was an everyday obligation and encouraged a sense of belonging to the Jewish community. (Tzedakah is Hebrew for “righteous behavior.” By the early 2000s, many understood the word to refer to charitable giving).
This particular box belonged to Helena “Nelly” Birnbaum (ne Eisenberg), who was born in Kharkov, Ukraine in 1917. Her family were bourgeois Jews from Bialystock who’d moved east to escape WWI, then fled back west to escape the Russian Revolution and Russian Civil War / White Army pogroms. They settled outside of Danzig. With the rise of Nazism, Nelly escaped to Baltimore in 1936 and got her parents out before the war. Most of her extended family died during the Holocaust, some at Treblinka, other’s at unknown places. In Baltimore Nelly joined German-Jewish social clubs and played a key role in organizing the Jewish refugee/survivor community. She was a committed Zionist and became active in Hadassah, HIAS, the JNF, and later in the movement to support Soviet Jewry. She hosted talks, donated money, organized development campaigns, traveled frequently to Israel and even the Soviet Union, and hosted Soviet Jews (distant relatives) who were allowed to leave in the 1970s. She died in 2000.
This nest box was used in bluebird conservation efforts by Cathy Hindman, a volunteer with the Virginia Bluebird Society and the group’s president at the time the box was collected in 2017. The North American Eastern bluebird population had declined markedly in the 1900s as a result of urbanization and other developments that disrupted the birds’ habitats. Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring (1962) raised widespread concerns about the loss of bird populations and helped inspire Americans to begin forming bluebird conservation societies in the 1970s. Volunteers with the organizations put up and maintain the nest boxes on their property, in parks, and elsewhere. Eastern bluebirds are cavity-dwelling birds. The boxes provide hospitable habitats for them and volunteers’ efforts contributed to a revival in the population.
A blog post about this nest box can be found at this link: s.si.edu/Bluebirds
Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, kept this carved wooden turtle on his desk as a symbol of the Foundation’s approach to its work. The leader of an African NGO (who Walker chose not to identify) gave Walker the turtle when he became president of the Ford Foundation in 2013. Turtles can live for many years and the gift conveyed a hope for his longevity. Walker explained that “because the Ford Foundation makes long-term investments in institutions, ideas and people, [he] believe[s] the turtle is a metaphor for our approach.”
This identification card belonged to Caleb Canby Balderston, known as C. Canby Balderston (1897-1979), during his service with humanitarian relief agencies in France and Belgium during World War I.
A member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), Balderston served with the Ambulance Unit of the Friends’ Relief Service in France and then he worked with the Commission for Relief of Belgium. He sailed for Europe on August 28, 1917. Over the next years, he worked as a mechanic and drive for the Friends’ Ambulance Unit and oversaw the distribution of relief supplies for refugees in Belgium.
Later in life, Balderston was a prominent businessman and professor finance at the University of Pennsylvania. He served as a governor and vice chairman of the board of governors of the Federal Reserve.
One (1) woman's American Red Cross hat. This uniform was worn by Frances Marie Wilkinson who volunteered with the American Red Cross from 1957 - 1960 while in Japan.
Light blue and white striped cap with Red Cross pin. Tag inside cap reads " A.R.C. / STOCK NO. 321443 / 22"
This uniform was worn by Frances Marie (Wilkinson) Bohe as a volunteer with the American Red Cross in Yokohama, Japan, where she lived from 1957 to 1960 while her husband Stanley Alma Bohe was stationed there with the U.S. Army.
Frances had been born in Arkansas in 1925 and received a teaching degree from the University of Arkansas. She taught first through fourth graders for a year before marrying Stanley in 1944. Over the years, the Bohes were stationed in Florida, Germany, and Japan. In Yokohama, the family, including a son and daughter, lived in a house off the Army base and employed a Japanese woman named Kiyoko as a maid.
T-shirt for the Charles B. Wang Community Health Center’s 2018 Good Health Day. Held annually, Good Health Day is a community health fair geared to underserved Asian Americans in New York City. The event commemorates the 1971 Chinatown (NY) health fair organized by young Chinese American activists that led to the establishment of the center. The shirt has characters in Chinese and Korean, reflecting the growth of the Korean American population in New York and the demographic expansion in the population the center serves.
Charitable giving went viral in the summer of 2014 with the Ice Bucket Challenge, a social media effort to promote ALS awareness. More than 17 million videos of participants dumping ice-cold water on their heads have been uploaded to social media websites. Jeanette Senerchia, whose husband had the degenerative nerve disease, used this bucket in launching the challenge