Atlantic Philanthropies Archives, 1921-2018.
Collection Number: 8540

Atlantic Philanthropies website [Delivery]

Only grant files for all areas except those for the United States are open to researchers. Access to all other records is restricted until completion of processing.

Access to board books (1982-2016) restricted until 2025.

Entrepreneur Charles F. ("Chuck") Feeney established The Atlantic Philanthropies, a limited-life foundation, in 1982. Feeney, who made his fortune through Duty Free Shoppers, pioneered Giving While Living and has inspired many, including philanthropists Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, to use their wealth to better the world during their lifetimes. Over 35 years, Atlantic disbursed more than $8 billion to support promising programs and people to advance opportunity and promote equity. It made its final grant commitments in 2016 and will close in 2020. Atlantic is the largest foundation ever to fully commit its endowment in a limited time frame. Its early giving was directed largely toward higher education, and in later years focused on aging, children and youth, population health, and reconciliation and human rights—working in Australia, Bermuda, Cuba, Northern Ireland and Ireland, South Africa, the United States and Vietnam. Feeney was a member of the Cornell University Class of 1956. Grant awards to Cornell University total nearly $1 billion. For more information, researchers are encouraged to refer to The Atlantic Philanthropies website: https://www.atlanticphilanthropies.org/.

Atlantic Philanthropies Archives, #8540. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

Grant files have been arranged into subseries by geographic area of impact, and further arranged alphabetically by grantee. In cases when titles did not appear on the original folders, processing staff used the grant titles as they appeared on FLUXX, The Atlantic Philanthropies' grants management database. Similarly, given that grantee names sometimes changed over the years, they have been uniformly identified by how they appeared on FLUXX. Titles for grant files include the taxonomies assigned to each grant by The Atlantic Philanthropies on their website. These taxonomies include historic program affiliation, key issues, and Foundation Center themes. Historic program affiliations are the broad classification each grant was given, and indicate which Atlantic staff members were involved in the grant-making process. The major program affiliations at Atlantic include Higher Education, Aging, Pre-Collegiate Education and Teacher Development, Population Health, Disadvantaged Children and Youth, Reconciliation and Human Rights, Equality, Rights, and Justice, Peace and Reconciliation, and Nonprofit Sector/Voluntarism/Philanthropy. Key issues and Foundation Center themes provide a more granular description for each grant. Also included with titles are notes from the archivist regarding processing information, contents, and access restrictions. Items such as check copies, bank statements, invoices, wire transfer forms, and consultant agreements have been removed and destroyed.

This collection includes the corporate and grant making records of The Atlantic Philanthropies as well as the operational records of many of its executives and program officers. Grant files constitute a majority of the collection, and contain records that document the entire life cycle of grants—from proposals to final reports. Regardless of the office where they were kept, grant files are arranged by geographic area of impact in order to ease searchability. These files are supplemented with program files kept by Atlantic staff, which shed further insight on Atlantic's grant making, and the grantee organizations, geographic locations, and program areas represented. These files are arranged by the geographic location of the office where they were kept. Also noteworthy are records that document Atlantic's operations, particularly the decision to go public, becoming a limited life foundation, and embracing Chuck Feeney's "Giving While Living" philosophy. The collection includes both paper and electronic files.

Access restrictions apply.