Most members of my generation (Gen X) know Paul Newman as the popular, even legendary, movie star who made hit films for more than 30 years, from “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” in 1958 to his Oscar-winning role in “The Color of Money” in 1987. For most members of Gen Z, though, he’s that handsome guy with the blue eyes whose face appears on bottles of Southwest Ranch salad dressing and bags of organic microwave popcorn sold by Newman’s Own, the food company he founded in 1982.
During his life, the actor, director and entrepreneur found himself at the forefront of many important trends in philanthropic giving. After starting his food and snack company, he immediately funneled all profits from food sales into charitable causes, a novel foray into service capitalism that has been credited with influencing a slew of other companies, including Patagonia, to do more good. Many people in the B Corp world point to Newman’s Own as motivating the movement. And while celebrity philanthropy is now common enough to be seen as an important part of an actor or musician’s “brand,” Newman’s actions propelled the trend: Many top celeb givers point to him as a role model and inspiration, including Kevin Bacon, Edward Norton and Ryan Devlin.
Since 1982, Newman and the Newman’s Own Foundation — which he created in 2005, a few years before his death — have together given away more than $600 million.
From the “why” to the “how” of philanthropy
With no endowment, Newman’s Own Foundation still operates entirely on profits from popcorn — as well as spaghetti sauce, pizza, pet food, salad dressing, cookies, something called Fig Newman’s, and other food and snack items. The foundation started with a broad-ish focus that included kids, nutrition and veterans. It fine-tuned its giving under its last CEO, Dr. Miriam Nelson, into three key grantmaking areas: nutrition education and school food, indigenous food justice, and what it calls “joyful experiences for children with serious illnesses.”
After Nelson retired last year, the foundation hired its current president and CEO, the French-British-American nonprofit exec Alex Amouyel. Amouyel is continuing the foundation’s legacy of being on-trend by operationalizing some of the hot issues and approaches in the sector today. As she put it, her role focuses not so much on “the why” and “the what” of giving, but on the “how” of philanthropy. “The driving question for me is, ‘How can we make the most impact using the resources we have in service of our mission?’” she said.
One new “how”-of-philanthropy move the foundation is making: testing new tech platforms developed for the sector.
Early adopting tech platforms for giving
I first spoke to Amouyel last month when I was covering Grapevine, a new tech platform that supports giving circles. For Amouyel, using Grapevine is one way to do more decentralized, collaborative and open giving. Giving circles let small-dollar donors participate, and Grapevine allows anyone who joins the online community to help choose grantees. In 2023, the foundation launched Newman’s Own Community Fund on Grapevine, putting in $100,000. The online community — people who located the site and chose to join, no donation necessary — decided on which of the foundation’s grantees would get additional funding.
After last year’s trial run on Grapevine, this year, the foundation launched its “Community Choice Awards,” focused on food justice for kids. The community, which has now grown to more than 1,000 people, can vote for two winners from a pool of finalists, each of whom will win $10,000. This is part of a larger, planned give by the foundation of $500,000 a year, over two years, parceled out to 10 organizations: half to groups working in indigenous food justice and half to those focused on nutrition education and school food. The foundation held a September 10 pitch session, in which 20 finalists competed for those grants.
The $1 million awarded to organizations focused on food justice for kids was designed in the form of a contest, and the foundation tried another tech tool to support it: JustFund. JustFund is the “nation’s first and only common grant application platform connecting funders to organizations that are advancing social and racial justice,” according to its website. It’s like the common application that high school students use when applying to college. With JustFund, a nonprofit can load its information once, and any foundation using the platform can access it.
For Newman’s Own Foundation, JustFund is an attempt to address two “how” questions that stymie nonprofits: “How do you get your organization known by funders?” and “How can you spend less staff time writing lengthy, repetitive grant applications?”
Amouyel says, “One of the big issues in philanthropy is that you have a set of foundations that do not accept unsolicited applications — and how someone gets funding is unclear. You have to meet the program officer or CEO at a conference or be someone they’ve always funded. The equivalent would be if an elite university like Harvard said, ‘Sorry, you can’t apply to our university. We’re just going to pick people based on our own research or who we know.’ To me, that’s not an ideal way of doing things.”
What else isn’t ideal? Repeating your work for each grant application. “Our solution was to use this common application portal,” said Amouyel. “I’m not sure we have the perfect answer. We got 500 applications, and we’ll give out 10 grants. It’s still competitive, but we sought to reduce the burden on applicants by using JustFund because you can then apply to all manner of other grants.”
Newman’s Own took a third foray into tech-supported giving for food justice this year through a $100,000 match campaign with DonorsChoose, a nonprofit that allows teachers to post classroom projects they’d like to get funded. “It’s teachers who wanted to run nutrition programs in their classrooms across the country. Anyone could look at the platform and search different locales and projects and donate. It was heartwarming in many ways. We doubled the money, and it goes directly into the hands of these teachers and the community,” said Amouyel.
New staff and a new focus on data
A second way that Amouyel is working to amplify and assess impact is by bringing on new staff, including Christina Chauvenet, the foundation’s first monitoring, evaluation and learning officer. Chauvenet is also part of a third “how-focused” effort: building out the foundation’s monitoring and evaluation capacity and improving learning opportunities for the foundation and grantees.
“One goal of her work is supporting our grantee partners so they know what’s having the most impact, and we better know as a foundation what has the most promise across our portfolio,” said Amouyel. “What types of interventions are most helpful — deep community work, statewide work, city work, or something else? And then, have we been helpful, catalytic or transformational? If we’re writing a $50,000 check or a $250,000 check, that can be helpful. But was it truly catalytic or transformational?”
Chauvenet, who started in November 2023, came to Newman’s Own from the National WIC Association. She earned her Ph.D. on maternal and child health and has worked for other food access programs. She is designing and building ways to measure and communicate impact, looking at the cumulative effect of all grantees within each of the foundation’s three focus areas. “In the past, the foundation has done very well in elevating the work of individual grantees, all of these really wonderful grantees,” said Chauvenet. “But we haven’t talked about Newman’s Own Foundation funding as being catalytic to these organizations and moving the needle on these issues — the financial impact and things we’ve done beyond the check. We can identify trends within our portfolios.”
Chauvenet also helps grantees with their own monitoring and evaluation and has redesigned the application process to make it more transparent, equitable, and less onerous. This includes eliminating needless questions, using JustFund, and hosting webinars for grant applicants that explain the criteria and process, something she wanted herself in her previous roles. “As a grant applicant, often, I wouldn’t know how the rubric was being used. This doesn’t get as much attention, but it’s really important,” she said.
More robust giving in Indigenous communities
Another new employee, Jackie Blackbird, is the foundation’s first Indigenous communities officer. Indigenous food justice became one of the foundation’s three key areas in 2022; hiring Blackbird is part of deepening and expanding that work. “All these topics like regenerative agriculture and healthy meals — there is millennia of knowledge in Indigenous communities about how to do these things,” said Amouyel. “To bring that knowledge back and ‘rematriate’ it, and acknowledge it as Indigenous — that’s a real opportunity. We see real need and real opportunity in that space. We want to deepen our impact and shine a spotlight on this for other philanthropy.”
Blackbird, who spent a couple decades at Nike, has also worked for the Minnesota Twins Baseball Club and for her community, the Fort Belknap Reservation in Montana, where she grew up. She brings a first-hand knowledge of food scarcity in Native American communities. “Growing up, the grocery store was 40 miles away,” she said. “We had a convenience store. It was hard to get healthy foods in the homes. It’s improved some. The convenience store is now a small grocery store, so they have more fresh food, fresh bread, frozen food. But our area is still a food desert.”
Newman’s Own Foundation currently supports more than 30 nonprofits in Indigenous communities — a $2 million-plus investment. Among her other tasks, Blackbird is working with Chauvenet to create learning opportunities for grantees and also bringing funders together to support Indigenous youth in a collaborative way. “We had our first roundtable of funders to learn about what they’re doing, and if they would be interested in exploring with us this opportunity to support Indigenous-led communities and solutions,” she said.
Giving to Indigenous communities comprises less than 1% of total philanthropic dollars, said Blackbird. “That’s not a lot of dollars. When I found out about this role, I thought, ‘Yes, I could be an advocate around food justice and food sovereignty.’ I’m really passionate about the health and wellness of our people. I feel most excited that a private foundation has dedicated resources to serve the Indigenous community, and it’s one reason I took the job.”
Inspiring a future of kinder capitalism?
I often look at the endless drive of corporations to post ever-higher quarterly earnings and think of the cautionary Dr. Seuss tale “The Lorax,” in which the crazed creator becomes obsessed with “biggering.” Amouyel said she hopes that in the future, more companies will follow Paul Newman’s lead and give away their profits — rather than endlessly “biggering” for shareholders. “I want to see more businesses saying, ‘We’re going to make a profit and be a great business and donate all our profits. The reason why we exist is not to sell more stuff, but to do good.’”
