First up to bat is the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in Palo Alto, Calif., which seeks to “creat[e] positive outcomes for future generations” through environmental conservation, science, and patient care. The foundation is the youngest of the group, being established in 2000 by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore and his wife, Betty. With $5.3 billion in assets, according to the Foundation Center, the foundation is a grantmaker in addition to operating five initiatives: the Andes-Amazon Initiative, the Betty Irene Moore Nursing Initiative, the Marine Conservation Initiative, the Marine Microbiology Initiative, and the Wild Salmon Ecosystems Initiative. The foundation also considerably funds the California Institute of Technology in nearby Pasadena, Calif., along with the proposed Thirty Meter Telescope to be built on the summit of the Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
