PROSPECTUS - The Pew Charitable Trusts

Pew Prospectus 2009
1
Message from
the President
REBECCA W. RIMEL
President and Chief Executive Officer
In the aftermath of a historic presidential election and inauguration,
one cannot help but reflect on the genius of the
founding fathers. There is something truly extraordinary in the
fact that, nearly 250 years ago, this small collection of individuals
somehow managed to birth a nation that would eventually
swear in as its leader a person who could not even have
voted through most of its history. They left us with much more
as well: a constitutional framework that would enable later
generations to rise to fundamental challenges to our national
dreams and aspirations, improving what is good and innovatively
fixing what is broken.
Perhaps the greatest gift to future generations the founders
left was their humble embrace of imperfection in pursuit of
the greatest possible good that circumstances would allow.
They say as much in the first 15 words of the preamble to the
U.S. Constitution, a document J. Howard Pew, one of the
founders of The Pew Charitable Trusts, called “the greatest
charter of liberty ever penned." Their simple yet audacious
hope was to create a “more perfect”—not perfect, but
more perfect—union than the world had previously seen.
The founding fathers understood free society to be a dynamic
place of untold challenges and inconceivable change, where
realities they could scarcely imagine—the good and the ill, the
profound and the profane—would force later generations to
question and reinvent all but the most fundamental truths.
That is what we face in this period of change, when an
economic recession is demanding creative responses and
technology is radically transforming not only the patterns of
our individual lives but also the globe we inhabit. Our national
history teaches us to look hopefully yet realistically toward
meeting the demands of an always-uncertain future. We can
learn much by considering lessons from the past: How does
change happen? When is it productive? What are the predicates
for its success?
One hundred years ago, when our society was, as it is today,
beginning to fully comprehend the unique moment presented
by the dawn of a new century, we saw both the promise
and limitations of modernity played out in sharp relief. The
turn into the 1900s marked the beginning of what has been
called the American Century. The founding fathers’ daring
experiment—building out of whole cloth a nation that grew to
stretch across an entire continent—was seen as a success.
Though yet to be truly tested in the international arena, the
expansion of wealth, population and confidence in America’s
power and purpose began to lay the foundation for our presence
on an increasingly interconnected global stage. During
this era, the ability of people around the world to communicate
in real time—a pipe dream for all previous generations—
had become an everyday reality.