About

The Jaquelin Hume Foundation is a San Francisco-based foundation with more than $25.5 million in assets at the end of 2011. That year, the most recent for which financial information is available, it dispersed $5,097,728 in grants. The foundation awards most of its money to conservative groups and causes, as well as several San Francisco Bay Area art and theatre companies.

Notable recipients of the foundation’s money include the Foundation for Teaching Economics ($6,441,069 since 1999),  The Heritage Foundation ($1,725,000 since 2002), the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research ($950,000 since 1999), the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy ($823,750 since 1999), and the Institute for Justice ($1,325,000 since 1999). In 2009, the foundation gave $400,000 to DonorsTrust, a donor-advised fund used by conservative philanthropists to anonymously fund right-wing groups.

The foundation is also involved in the "school reform" movement, giving millions to several groups that advocate for school vouchers and the expansion of charter schools. Recipients include the Alliance for School Choice (which has received more than $1 million in the past decade), the Black Alliance for Educational Options, the California Charter School Association, the Center for Education Reform ($1,935,000 since 1999), and the National Council on Teacher Quality. The Association of American Educators Foundation, a group that bills itself as “the largest national, non-union, professional educators' organization,” has received $2,170,000 from the Hume Foundation since 2000.

In 2013, the foundation gave $5 million to The Learning Accelerator, a nonprofit that advocates for "blended learning," which aims to mix traditional classroom-based learning with interactive web-based instruction. The grant is the largest the Hume Foundation has ever given. (Gisele Huff, the foundation’s executive director, sits on the board of The Learning Accelerator.)

The foundation was established in 1962 by Jaquelin Holliday Hume, a businessman described in an obituary in the New York Times as "a pioneer in the dehydrated food business, a philanthropist and a major political donor to Ronald Reagan." In 1975, Hume founded the Foundation for Teaching Economics to advocate the teaching of free-market economics in high schools. In the early 1980s, he joined other California businessmen to create Citizens for America to support Ronald Reagan’s agenda. (Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist and Jack Abramoff both worked at Citizens for America.)

Jaquelin Hume’s son, William Jerry Hume, now leads the foundation. He is also chairman of Basic American, Inc., the dehydrated food company started by his late father. Jerry Hume is actively involved in the conservative movement and sits on the board of several groups funded by the Hume Foundation, including the Heritage Foundation, the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, the Center for Education Reform, and DonorsTrust. Until recently, he also sat on the board of the Foundation for Teaching Economics, founded by his father, and was for a time on the Hoover Institution Board of Overseers. In the 1990s, he was appointed by California governor Pete Wilson to serve on the California State Board of Education.