May 24, 2013 3:42 PM ET

Company Overview of Howard Heinz Endowment

Snapshot

People

Overview Board Members Committees

Executive Profile

Teresa Heinz

Chairman, Howard Heinz Endowment

Age	Total Calculated Compensation	This person is connected to 4 Board Members in 4 different organizations across 0 different industries. See Board Relationships
--	--

Background

Ms. Teresa Heinz is Chairman of the Howard Heinz Endowment and the Heinz Family Philanthropies. She is also a Director of the Vira I. Heinz Endowment. She is also the creator of the prestigious Heinz Awards, an annual program recognizing outstanding vision and achievement in the arts, public policy, technology, the economy, and employment, the environment, and the human condition. After the death of her husband, U.S. Senator John Heinz, in 1991, Ms. Heinz was urged by ... national and Pennsylvania political leaders to seek election to his Senate seat. She chose instead to assume direction of the family's extensive philanthropic operations, undertaking a major reorganization designed to sharpen the foundations' strategic focus. Today, the foundations she oversees are widely known for developing innovative strategies to protect the environment, improve education, enhance the lives of young children, broaden economic opportunity and promote the arts. Following on the work of her late husband, Ms. Heinz has championed the education of women regarding the importance of pensions, savings, and retirement security. Products of her support in this area have included the publication of a nationally-acclaimed book, Pensions in Crisis; a magazine supplement, “What Every Woman Needs to Know About Money and Retirement,“ that was published in Good Housekeeping and US Airway's AttachÈ magazine. In a related area, she directed the development of the Heinz Plan to Overcome Prescription Drug Expenses (HOPE), a program to make prescription drugs affordable for older Americans. The Boston Globe hailed the plan as “a great service for Massachusetts...presenting the state government with a credible plan to provide its elderly citizens with prescription drugs. In addition to Massachusetts, similar “blueprints“ have been studied or adopted in five other states including Pennsylvania, Maine and Mississippi. Heralded by the Utne Reader in 1995 as one of 100 American visionaries, Ms. Teresa Heinz has long been recognized as one of the nation's premier environmental leaders. In 1995, she announced one of the largest grants ever made to the environment, a $20 million gift to create the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment, a unique attempt to bring together representatives of business, government, the scientific community and environmental groups to collaborate on the development of mutually acceptable yet scientifically sound environmental policies. In addition to serving on the Center's board, she serves on the board of Environmental Defense and was one of ten representatives from non-governmental organizations attached to the U.S. Delegation to the U.N. Conference on Environment and Development (Earth Summit) in Brazil in 1992. Since 1995, she has sponsored annual conferences on Women's Health and the Environment, bringing women together with health, environmental and policy experts to learn how the environment impacts their daily lives. As a member of the Advisory Board for the Earth Communications Office, she has helped to pioneer an internationally acclaimed public service campaign promoting citizen environmental action in countries around the globe. Similarly, she has sponsored The Environminute and The World ECO Minute, a daily radio campaign reaching citizens in more than 100 countries, and HealthWeek, a weekly PBS-produced program with a strong focus on women's health and the environment. She helped to conceptualize and launch Second Nature, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to support the development of an environmentally-literate citizenry. She is a co-founder and board member of the Alliance to End Childhood Lead Poisoning and serves on the Advisory Council for the Center for Children's Health and the Environment at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. An advocate for human rights and economic, scientific and creative freedom, Teresa Heinz was an original member and later a co-chair of Congressional Wives for Soviet Jewry. Guided by a belief in thoughtful problem-solving and the power of informed debate, she has served on the board of the Carnegie Corporation of New York and is a trustee of the Brookings Institution. She also sits on the Visiting Committee for Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and serves on the board of the American Institute for Public Service (Jefferson Awards). In addition, in 2001, she was elected to be a Fellow for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has been active in the past as a board member and trustee of schools in Pittsburgh, Washington D.C., and elsewhere, including Georgetown University, Phillips Exeter Academy and St. Paul's School. She was a board member of Family Communications, which produced Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, and she co-founded the National Council for Families and Television, an organization that works to enhance the quality of prime time television for children by facilitating discussion among members of the entertainment industry, educators, parents and other interested groups. Deeply inspired by the arts, she and her late husband began a collection of late 16th and 17th-century Dutch, Flemish and German art, as well as a collection of 19th and 20th-century American art. Because of her commitment to the arts generally and American art in particular, Mrs. Heinz gave a major grant in her late husband's memory to the Yale Art Gallery, where she is a Trustee of the Governing Board. She is a member of the Trustee's Council of the National Gallery of Art, and a member of the board of the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh. Teresa Heinz, formerly Teresa Sim?es-Ferreira, is now married to U.S. Senator John Kerry. She has three sons, John, AndrÈ and Christopher Heinz. Born and raised in Mozambique, she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in romance languages and literature (French, Portuguese and Italian) from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. In 1963, she graduated from the Interpreters School of the University of Geneva. Fluent in 5 languages, she later served as a full-time consultant to the United Nations Trusteeship in New York City. She has been awarded honorary doctorate degrees from Beloit College (Wisconsin), the University of Massachusetts (Boston), Bank Street College of Education (New York), Pine Manor College and Clark University (Massachusetts), as well as Carnegie Mellon University, the Medical College of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, Washington and Jefferson College and Carlow College, all of Pennsylvania.

Read Full Background