Summary Information
Abstract
This collection consists of the records of the Boehm Foundation, a
philanthropic organization that provided grants primarily to fund groups devoted to
promoting democratic government and civil rights. The bulk of the collection
consists of correspondence, grant proposals, and printed materials related to these
individual grants and the grantee organizations. There is also a small amount of
administrative material, including financial reports, internal memos, and board
meeting minutes.
At a Glance
| Call No.: | MS#1425 |
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| Bib ID: | 5486657 View CLIO record |
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| Creator(s): | Boehm Foundation (New York, N.Y.) |
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| Title: | Boehm Foundation (New York, N.Y.) Records,
1963-2004
[Bulk dates: 1993-2002].
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| Physical description: | 18 linear ft. (36 document boxes).
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| Language(s): | In English
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| Access: |
Thuis collection has no restrictions.
This collection is located off-site. You will need to request this material at least
two business days in advance to use the collection in the Rare Book and
Manuscript Library reading room.
More information » |
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Arrangement
Arrangement
This collection is arranged in three series:
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Description
Scope and Content
The Boehm Foundation Records consist overwhelmingly of files pertaining to the grants
that the Foundation administered. While the subject matter of these files varies
somewhat, almost all of the files contain correspondence between the Foundation and
the grantee organization. Many of them include supplemental information from the
grantee organization such as annual reports, brochures, flyers, publications, etc.,
which in most cases indicate the ways in which the Foundation's grant was spent.
In addition to material related to specific grant projects, there is also a small but
significant amount of the Boehm Foundation's administrative files. These include
financial reports, internal memos, board meeting agendas, letter templates, grant
application forms, and brochures, among other material.
Series I: Administrative Records, 1963-2003 (1979-2003)
This series is composed largely of financial records of the Boehm Foundation, including its annual reports and dockets from the quarterly board meetings at which grant decisions were finalized. It also includes a number of documents which detail the various trust arrangements related to the Foundation and the membership of its board of trustees. Lastly, this series contains a variety of material related to the business of running the Foundation, including its promotional materials (with grant guidelines), letter templates, internal memos, and staff lists, among other items. Material in this series is organized by subject, with one exception: a binder included in the collection has been deconstructed for preservation purposes, but its varied contents remain together.
Series II: Special Projects, 1982-2003
While the vast majority of the grants given out by the Boehm Foundation from 1982-2003 were small grants that were up for renewal on an annual basis, there were a few groups that the Foundation funded at a far higher monetary level and in multi-year terms. The special consideration given by the Boehm Foundation to the organizations in this series can in most cases be explained by the personal relationship Robert Boehm shared with these organizations. For example, he was the long-time chairperson of the board for the Center for Constitutional Rights and served for a time as the treasurer of the Lawyers' Committee on Nuclear Policy. Two of the long-term projects appearing in this series were scholarship funds established in the name of Boehm's daughter, Nancy Boehm-Coster, after her death in 1991.
Material in this series is organized alphabetically according to the names of the programs or organizations funded by the Boehm Foundation.
Series III: Annual Grants, 1988-2004
This series comprises both the bulk of material contained in this collection and the primary business conducted by the Boehm Foundation: records concerning the Foundation's disbursement of small grants to a variety of non-profit organizations pursuing social and political change. The records consist largely of correspondence between grantee organizations and the Boehm Foundation. Since many groups included supplementary material in their correspondence such as annual reports or news clippings, this material is also found throughout the series.
Subseries 3.1: Summary Material, 1994-1999
This subseries provides an insight into both the administrative side of the Boehm Foundation and its grant-giving process, by including checklists for each grantee organization of relevant data about their application such as the date it was submitted and the amount of money given by the Boehm Foundation. Internal Revenue Service rulings certifying that the grantee organizations had non-profit status for the purposes of the Boehm Foundation's gifts are also present in many cases.
The material in this subseries is organized in chronological order.
Subseries 3.2: Annual Grants, 1988-2002
The Boehm Foundation gave out hundreds of small (usually valued at $5,000 or less) one-year grants from 1988-2003. This subseries contains information pertaining to those grants, including a substantial amount of correspondence between the Boehm Foundation and their various grantee organizations. The records in this subseries include letters of inquiry, grant proposals, progress reports, and letters of gratitude. Many of the grantee organizations also included with their correspondence supplementary materials such as publications, flyers, or news clippings relating to the group. In most cases, these materials have been arranged alongside the letters with which they were enclosed.
The material in this subseries is arranged according to the individual grants made by the Boehm Foundation in any given year. Therefore, although correspondence about a given grant might extend to both the year before it was given (often the case with letters of inquiry) and the year after (often the case with status reports), all of the information about any particular grant is arranged according to the grantee organization's name in the year in which the Boehm Foundation made its gift. Please note that any grantee organization named after a person takes the last name of the person for purposes of alphabetization. For example, the "Paul Robeson Fund for Independent Media" is alphabetized under "R," for "Robeson."
Subseries 3.3: New Leaders Grants, 2001-2004
In January 2001, the Boehm Foundation changed its grant guidelines to focus its spending on two categories of multi-year grants: New Leaders Grants and Capacity Building Grants. As the brochure describing New Leaders Grants put it, they were designed to be "two-year general support grants ranging in size from $7,500 to $10,000 per year." New Leaders grants were intended to "support grassroots organizations that nurture progressive new activists and young leaders through work on specific public/private policy campaigns that address the Foundation's areas of concern." The material included in this subseries includes correspondence about the grant process, ranging from letters of inquiry to proposals to progress reports to published materials relating to the grantee organization's activities.
The material in this subseries is arranged in alphabetical order according to the name of the grantee organization. Please note that any grantee organization named after a person takes the last name of the person for purposes of alphabetization. For example, "Maurice and Jane Sugar Law Center for Economic and Social Justice" is alphabetized under "S," for "Sugar."
Subseries 3.4: Capacity Building Grants, 1999-2004
Though officially launched in 2001 as the companion to the New Leaders program, Capacity Building Grants were given out by the Boehm Foundation on occasion before this period. As indicated in the Foundation's published guidelines from 2001, Capacity Building Grants were "two- or three-year grants ranging in size from $25,000 to $50,000 per year" and were "intended to help progressive organizations that are at a critical juncture in their development." Similar grants that were issued by the Boehm Foundation prior to 2001 may be found in Series II: Special Projects. As is the case in subseries 2 and 3, this subseries includes correspondence between the Boehm Foundation and the grantee organizations. However, due to the more substantial nature of the grants and the more rigorous application process, this subseries often contains more detailed applications and more extensive background information about the grantee organizations than the other subseries.
The material in this subseries is arranged in alphabetical order according to the name of the grantee organization.
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Using the Collection
Offsite
Access Restrictions
Thuis collection has no restrictions.
This collection is located off-site. You will need to request this material at least
two business days in advance to use the collection in the Rare Book and
Manuscript Library reading room.
Restrictions on Use
Single photocopies may be made for research purposes. Permission to publish material
from the collection must be requested from the Curator of Manuscripts, Rare Book and
Manuscript Library (RBML). The RBML approves permission to publish that which it
physically owns; the responsibility to secure copyright permission rests with the
patron.
Preferred Citation
Identification of specific item; Date (if known); Boehm Foundation Records; Box and
Folder; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library.
Finding aid in repository; folder level control.
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About the Finding Aid / Processing Information
Columbia University Libraries. Rare Book and
Manuscript Library; machine readable finding aid created by Columbia University
Libraries Digital Library Program Division
Processing Information
This collection was processed by Nicholas Patrick Osborne (GSAS 2012). Finding aid
written by Nicholas Patrick Osborne in February 2008.
Finding aid written by Nicholas Patrick Osborne in February 2008.
Machine readable finding aid generated from MARC-AMC source via XSLT
conversion November 7, 2008
Finding aid written in English.
2009/01/15
xml document instange created by Patrick Lawlor
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Subject Headings
The subject headings listed below are found in this collection. Links below allow searches at Columbia University through the Archival Collections Portal and through CLIO, the catalog for Columbia University Libraries, as well as ArchiveGRID, a catalog that allows users to search the holdings of multiple research libraries and archives.
All links open new windows.
Subjects
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History / Biographical Note
History
The Boehm Foundation was born in 1962 when Louis Boehm, a
successful lawyer and real estate investor from New York City, died and set aside
one million dollars of his estate to aid future "deserving scholars." Boehm's son,
Robert, and several family friends used the bequest to start the Louis Boehm
Foundation in 1963, the same year that Robert and his wife Frances organized the
Lillian Boehm Foundation. Named after and funded in part by Robert's mother, the
Lillian Boehm Foundation was established, according to an early mission statement,
in order "to assist in efforts to bring about important and meaningful social change
. . . in the interest of a more democratic society." The Louis and Lillian Boehm
Foundations merged in 1978 to become simply the "Boehm Foundation," and the goals of
aiding young scholars and activists as well as promoting social change and democracy
continued to guide the Foundation's business through 2004 when it distributed its
last grants.
The progressive nature of the Boehm Foundation was somewhat
ironic considering that Louis Boehm was relatively conservative in comparison to his
son. At one point in the 1930s, for example, he even helped Robert travel to the
Soviet Union in the hopes of "disillusioning" him about the potential of radical
politics. Yet despite Louis' best efforts, Robert became ever more committed to the
political left. After graduating first from Dartmouth and then Columbia University
Law School, Robert went to work in his father's law firm. While there he met his
future wife, Frances, who was as a secretary in the firm. Their first date was at a
1938 rally held in Madison Square Garden where the featured speaker was Earl
Browder, the head of the American Communist Party. Known by acquaintances as Bob and
Fran throughout their lives, they married in 1939.
Not only did 1938 see Bob and Fran Boehm meet, it also saw
Bob join the National Lawyers' Guild (NLG), an interracial coalition of progressive
lawyers that was founded in 1937 in order to defend civil liberties. Boehm remained
a member of the NLG throughout his life, but his role as a legal activist was most
prominent in his close association with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR),
an advocacy group that was founded to aid the United States Civil Rights Movement.
(It later defended rioters at Attica prison in 1971, protested United States
intervention in Central America, and supported prisoners held by the US at
Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, among other causes.) Active with CCR from its founding in
1966, Boehm was its chairperson of the board for most of the 1990s and until his
death in 2006. Though not a lawyer herself, Fran Boehm became a fixture at many of
the trials, conferences, and protests in which these and other groups were involved,
and her legacy of activism developed along with Bob Boehm's through the US civil
rights, women's rights, and peace movements of the second half of the twentieth
century.
Bob and Fran started the Boehm Foundation within this
context of political, legal, and social activism. Because the Foundation remained a
small organization to the end, the Boehm's backgrounds and contemporaneous
activities proved highly influential in determining the course of its development.
Throughout the Boehm Foundation's life, it often gave far more substantial grants to
groups like the NLG and CCR than to its other projects. As one brochure from the
1990s put it, the Boehm Foundation "provided substantial and on-going support to
several organizations with which it has special historical relationships," while its
regular grants were evaluated on an annual basis and were generally for considerably
lower dollar amounts. Such "special historical relationships" were ensured by the
fact that in the early years of the Louis Boehm Foundation, Bob Boehm looked to
friends like Bernie Fischman--his one-time law partner--to serve as trustees and
help identify worthy projects for the Foundation's attention. Frances had been a
trustee of the Lillian Boehm Foundation from its beginning, and she remained a
trustee of the newly-formed Boehm Foundation in 1978. In part to ensure the familial
nature of the Foundation, the Boehms' three daughters, Diane Boehm, Nancy Boehm
(later Boehm-Coster), and Wendy Olesker were all named replacement trustees in 1978
on the contingency that one of the current trustees died.
The late 1970s were an important turning point for the
Boehm Foundation, and not simply because of the 1978 merger. It was in these years
that Nancy Boehm-Coster started to take an interest in the operations of the
Foundation, eventually becoming a trustee in 1980. Bob Boehm later said that it was
Nancy's insistence around this time that the organization should become "more
formal" that really spurred the development of the Foundation from an ad hoc family
institution to a professional philanthropic group.
As Bob Boehm described it, Nancy felt that "the people who
. . . [ran the Foundation] should be changed every few years, and there shouldn't be
a monopoly of just those particular people, and we should have regular elections,
and that women should be included on the board, not just men." In addition to these
changes, Nancy Boehm-Coster became the first Executive Director of the Boehm
Foundation in 1984. In this role, she was responsible for processing grant
applications, organizing and running board meetings, and corresponding with
grantees, among other tasks. She held the role until her death from cancer in 1991.
Upon her death, Judy Austermiller--a Boehm Foundation trustee since 1984--took over
as the only other Executive Director the Foundation ever had, serving (except for a
one-year sabbatical during which June Makela was the acting Executive Director)
until its dissolution in 2004.
As part of the Boehm Foundation's formalization during this
period, it began to more actively seek new applicants and organizations to aid. An
important aspect of this project was the Foundation's efforts to better define its
mission. As one call for grants from the early 1990s explained, the Boehm
Foundation's two main principles are that "the educational, spiritual and creative
aspects of humankind can only be developed when the full range of human rights are
protected and respected" and that "the best interests of a society are advanced in
an atmosphere which encourages the free flow of ideas and information and which
discourages secrecy and censorship." Fueled by a belief that "it is organized and
collective efforts" as opposed to individual action "that will most effectively and
meaningfully fulfill these aims," the Boehm Foundation prioritized projects which
were "advancing democracy and human rights in the U.S." and "advancing peace and
international human rights." Insistent throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s--as
it had been from its origin--that the Foundation should focus on helping multiple
emerging and often small groups that could find funding from few other sources, the
brochure further explained that the Foundation's grants ranged from "$500 to
$15,000" and that "the average grant is $3,500."
By the 1990s, the Boehm Foundation was giving out
sixty-five to eighty grants per year (not including its "special projects"). But by
mid-1999, Austermiller sensed that a reevaluation of the Boehm Foundation's
priorities might be in order. As she noted in an internal memo from August of that
year, two changes had begun to shape the Foundation: as more groups applied for
funding each year, the backlog of unevaluated applications was growing larger and
larger; at the same time, the Boehms were increasingly giving out larger grants,
both through the Boehm Foundation and in their private gifts. With these
observations, a series of board meetings and retreats were held to discuss the
future of the Boehm Foundation.
Out of this evaluative process came the last incarnation of
the Boehm Foundation. In early 2001, the Foundation sent out a letter to grant
applicants explaining that the Foundation was now channeling its gifts to two types
of groups: "grassroots organizations that are developing new leadership through work
on specific public/private policy campaigns" and "statewide, regional or national
organizations that provide support to progressive grassroots public policy
campaigns." The first of these two grant categories were known as "New Leaders
Grants" and were intended to be "two-year general support grants ranging in size
from $7,500 to $10,000 per year." Grants falling into the second category were
called "Capacity Building Grants" and were designed as "two- or three-year grants
ranging in size from $25,000 to $50,000 per year." The Foundation committed to
making approximately twelve New Leaders grants and two Capacity Building grants
annually.
In a sense, the creation of the New Leaders and Capacity
Building programs represented a formalization of past practices rather than a
distinct change in the mission of the Boehm Foundation. After all, it had often
given large multi-year grants to a few organizations in the past while focusing the
bulk of its resources on an assortment of smaller groups. In retrospect, however,
the creation of these two programs--and the much larger amounts of their
grants--suggests that the trustees of the Boehm Foundation recognized at least the
possibility that the Foundation might be nearing the end of its life. Indeed, it was
at about the same time that the Foundation was formally instituting these guidelines
that the Boehms and Judy Austermiller also began to discuss the long-term future of
the organization.
Bob Boehm turned 86 in 2000, and in that year the
Foundation commissioned an independent study to suggest ways for the final
disposition of its holdings. Though several plans that would have enabled the
continuation of the Boehm Foundation in the event of its founders' deaths (including
the establishment of a permanent endowment) were proposed, the Boehms had settled by
2003 on dismantling the Boehm Foundation. The final installments of its multi-year
grants were disbursed in 2004, more than forty years after the Louis Boehm and
Lillian Boehm Foundations were established.
Even without the Boehm Foundation, Bob and Fran continued
to give large gifts to favored organizations and stayed active in many of their
other pursuits, especially the Center for Constitutional Rights. Indeed, Bob
remained the chairperson of the board of CCR until just a few months before his
death. After a lifetime devoted to progressive causes, Frances Boehm died in
February 2006; Robert Boehm followed in December of that year.
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