Wallis Annenberg, the L.A.-based media heir and visionary philanthropist who helped transform the City of Angels, died on Monday, July 28, at 86. She made a profound mark on Los Angeles during her long and active life, including, for the past 16 years, by serving as the chair, president and CEO of the Annenberg Foundation, which she joined in 2002. Begun in 1989 by her father, the publishing magnate Walter Annenberg, the family’s foundation has since become a global funder of issues including arts and environment, education, journalism, animals, and the needs of older adults, while simultaneously devoting most of its activities to giving in Southern California. Under Wallis’ leadership, the Annenberg Foundation gave some $1.5 billion to thousands of organizations and nonprofits in Los Angeles County. President Joe Biden acknowledged her largesse by awarding her a 2022 National Humanities Medal for “for transforming philanthropy in our nation.”
Annenberg leaves behind a legacy of giving that is both substantial and particularly visible in Los Angeles. As Los Angeles Times feature reporter Deborah Vankin wrote last week, Wallis Annenberg’s name “is ubiquitous in public spaces around Los Angeles.” Among those locales are the Wallis Annenberg Building at the California Science Center, the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, and the Annenberg Community Beach House in Santa Monica, a free public space with a playground, gallery and volleyball courts. This is a regular stop for locals like me, and one of the few spots in Los Angeles where you can actually eat dinner on the beach.
One of her more recent inspirations, the Wallis Annenberg GenSpace — a space-age-looking senior center on the top floor of a traffic-stopping, trapezoid building adjacent to the Wilshire Boulevard Synagogue in Koreatown — went live in 2022. Then there is the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, a low-profile landbridge spanning the 101 freeway in Agoura Hills, designed to provide a footpath for mountain lions, bobcats and deer over the 10-lane roadway, scheduled for completion in 2026. The Annenberg Foundation also acted as a recovery funder earlier this year in the aftermath of the Palisades and Eaton wildfires.
Wallis leaves behind four children, five grandchildren and one great-grandchild. Three of her children currently serve as co-directors of the foundation: Lauren Bon, Gregory Annenberg Weingarten and Charles Annenberg Weingarten. As the L.A. Times reported, control of the foundation now passes onto the next generation, as outlined in the trust. Her passing also leaves a big question for philanthropy: What will the future of giving look like at the more than $1 billion Annenberg Foundation now?
If past is precedent, here are some areas the next-gen Annenbergs may take after a deliberative process about the foundation’s future. If the foundation continues the range of funding it has so far established, it will likely follow all four paths simultaneously.
Path 1: The Annenberg Foundation could steer more philanthropy toward protecting animals, vulnerable people and prosocial documentary films
Wallis Annenberg was deeply committed to animals, as evidenced by her 2016 commitment of $1 million to the wildlife crossing, made as part of a challenge grant, and an additional $25 million gift in 2021. Annenberg also founded the Wallis Annenberg PetSpace, which opened in 2017 with a mission to “promote and strengthen the human-animal bond” including by running a pet adoption program, offering education and events, and running a day camp for “animal-loving kiddos!” as its website puts it.
She apparently passed down her love of animals to her children.
Charles Annenberg Weingarten is a philanthropist and filmmaker who created Explore.org, a philanthropic multimedia organization that holds a library of some 250 films and 300,000 photographs that document “leaders around the world who have devoted their lives to extraordinary causes.” The site also features dozens of live cams showing bears chillaxing in a stream in Alaska, nesting Osprey owls stretching their wings in the wind in Montana and yellow jellyfish undulating like lava lamps at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach.
Charles Annenberg Weingarten supports animal-focused projects including Dog Bless You, which funds service-dog training and helps pair dogs with U.S. Veterans struggling with PTSD. He is also known for traveling around the U.S. with his golden retriever, Lucky, and creating a series of documentaries “bringing to life stories of the country’s unsung heroes.”
Through Explore.org, the Annenberg Foundation has made some 300 grants totaling more than $69 million to nonprofits around the world on a “wide range of topics — from animal rights, health and human services, and poverty to the environment, education, and spirituality.” Animal orgs and solutions-focused filmmakers take note: Under Charles Annenberg Weingarten, funding for animal causes and prosocial films seems likely to expand. Or, as he says in a video on the site, this is “the world’s largest live nature network. We want you to fall in love with the world again.”
Gregory Annenberg Weingarten, meanwhile, an artist and former journalist with British newspaper The Times, is the founder of GRoW@Annenberg. This philanthropic initiative focuses on social justice and global humanitarian efforts and has taken on projects such as funding a hospital in Bangladesh and helping low-income students in Los Angeles go to college. Health and education seem other likely areas to garner continuing support.
Path 2: Annenberg may join other funders in increased giving to the environment — and to environmental art
While Charles Annenberg Weingarten is clearly focused on the planet, so is his sister, Lauren Bon, an artist and the founding director of L.A.-based Metabolic Studio, a nonprofit with a mission to “to explore and address critical social and environmental issues through art interventions and innovative projects aimed at reparation.” In practice, this has meant large, site-specific, land-based artworks that address issues of water, land use, energy, and the relationships between humans, nonhumans and other living systems. Metabolic Studio planted a cornfield in an abandoned railyard in downtown LA, for example, and tended it through one complete harvest season; the foundation funded this urban agricultural art project to the tune of $3 million in 2005.
Bon has also been working for more than a decade on a massive, multi-permit-requiring land-use project called Bending the River, which will divert a section of the L.A. River to a native wetland treatment area, then out to local parks, including the 52-acre adjacent Los Angeles State Historic Park. Like Wallis Annenberg’s Wildlife Crossing land bridge, this project reshapes the physical terrain of L.A. Located on native Tongva land, it incorporates input from native communities, which seems to be a key part of Bon’s view of environmental repair in Los Angeles.
Under Wallis Annenberg’s leadership, the foundation gave quickly and substantially to fire victims after the L.A. wildfires. The Annenberg Foundation and Wasserman Foundation gave $1 million to the Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation and helped raise $100 million through the FireAid benefit concerts. Bon also threw herself into a collaborative project to harness traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) to the work of fire prevention and recovery. The group filed a petition with the city to this effect.
Giving this support, Bon’s focus, and the ongoing environmental interests of Annenberg Weingarten, the foundation is likely to lean into projects and nonprofits focused on the environment and fighting climate change and its associated catastrophes, perhaps with an increased focus on traditional approaches to environmental stewardship.
Path 3: Arts philanthropy will likely continue as a focus, and possibly diversify
It’s hard to think about the art scene in Los Angeles without thinking about the Annenberg Foundation and Wallis Annenberg. The foundation has long supported arts organizations in Los Angeles, including the 24th Street Theatre Company, the California Art Club in Pasadena, the Center Theatre Group of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Opera Company, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. As Vankin reported: “Under her leadership, the foundation made $38.5 million in low-interest loans for the construction of the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts.” The Zoltan Pali-designed center opened in 2013 in a former Beverly Hills Post Office “and has since become a major cultural hub in the heart of Beverly Hills.”
It also made grants to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Washington, D.C., Performing Arts Society.
This focus on supporting the arts began with Walter Annenberg, who created the family fortune from a media company his father founded and went on to donate a $1 billion art collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. All three of the next-gen Annenbergs at the foundation are artists and have given to the arts. While Gregory Annenberg Weingarten’s charitable giving has been more focused on public education and health, he also sits on arts-focused boards and committees including the Getty Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the American Friends of the Paris Opera and Ballet. He supported an art exhibit at Santa Monica’s Annenberg Beach House in 2022 through GRoW@Annenberg and has given works, such as this one by Spanish artist Ignacio Zuloaga to the San Diego Museum of Art. It’s a good bet that the foundation will continue this key focus.
Path 4: The Annenberg Foundation will invest in collaborative giving and networking, largely in L.A.
One striking characteristic of the giving of both Charles Annenberg Weingarten and Bon is the focus on building coalitions, connecting with the people and organizations doing the work on the ground, and elevating and championing activists and others. Both Explore.org and Metabolic Studios focus on and prominently feature the creations and causes of others. There seems to be a real love of collaboration and connection, making it likely that this approach of co-creating change will continue.
Much of this is focused on L.A., a geographic priority that seems likely to continue. As the website puts it, “We give priority to nonprofit organizations serving the Los Angeles, Ventura, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino Counties that are well integrated into the fabric of the communities they serve.”
Or as Charles Annenberg Weingarten said in a welcome video on Explore.org, “The belief is, as a philanthropist, you take care of what you love.”
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