In 2015, I became the second president of the John Templeton Foundation. Since then, I have had the wonderful, life-changing opportunity to work with the incredible team at the Foundation to steward my grandfather’s philanthropic vision. I am very proud of our accomplishments. Now, during a time of great strength and opportunity, I am ready to step away from my role as President and CEO of the John Templeton Foundation at the end of June 2025 when I will reach the statutory limit of my term.
This marks the end of one chapter, and the beginning of a new one. Over the coming months, a committee of our Board of Trustees will conduct a search with the assistance of Korn Ferry to find a replacement to lead the organization as its third president since the John Templeton Foundation’s founding in 1987.
Over the last nine years, we revolutionized our work by refining and reframing our grant making initiatives, launching innovative and collaborative programs, building a multi-faceted communications platform, adding new expertise to the team and creating a solid foundation for future success. My aspirations for the John Templeton Foundation culminated in a new mission statement released earlier this year and a consolidation of our grant making into six funding areas.
Our funding interests span nearly every academic discipline. We provided the initial investment in Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative. We supported programs led by the Greater Good Science Center to translate academic research on character and virtue for parents, teachers and other practitioners. We funded large programs and small research projects to explore how the free-market system can and should work for all people. And we continued to pursue questions about human meaning and purpose and funding to understand the science of purpose in all scales of biology.
If you spend time working at the John Templeton Foundation or attending our events, you begin to understand how these seemingly disparate areas of work hang together in one philanthropic mandate. But I wanted the wider world to know what we fund and why it matters. From the announcement of the Strategic Plan for Science and the Big Questions in 2019 to the launch of Templeton Ideas in 2022 and a revised mission statement in 2024, we are better at telling our story and that means we can be better at tapping new networks of researchers, funders and communicators in the future.
My grandfather once said, “Each of us should make our lives beneficial. We don’t know why God put us here. It may have been because we are supposed to make the best use of our lives to serve humanity in general.” John Templeton’s first career focused on helping people grow their financial resources. In his second career, John Templeton set out to invest in humankind’s spiritual wealth.
He was born in 1912 and witnessed transformative changes in transportation, communication, medicine and technology. He believed similar progress was possible in the spiritual domain, and he sold his successful investment firm to Franklin Resources, Inc. so that he could dedicate all his time and energy to creating an organization that would serve humanity for many, many years to come.
John Templeton described it this way, “The growth of prosperity in the world will be better when we can each invest in each other’s progress. That is indeed a very inspiring idea.”
For me, it has been one of the most challenging and fulfilling tasks in my life to work alongside inspiring colleagues. Everything we accomplished is a result of their contributions and dedication.
And this is not the end of our efforts. Over the next year, we will begin planning for future grant making programs and initiatives; we will undertake a concerted effort to find and support project leaders who have never received a grant from the John Templeton Foundation; and we will endeavor to reach a larger audience with the Templeton ideas that animate our work.
We are working to create a world where people are curious about the wonders of the natural world, free to pursue lives of purpose and meaning and motivated by great and selfless love. This is the inspiring vision we have built and the one that I will pass on to the next president of the John Templeton Foundation.
