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- Assets: $173,631,303 (2009)
- Grants Awarded: $9,735,736 (2009)
W. Alton Jones, who was a top executive at Cities Service Company, created the original Foundation bearing his name in 1944, for the purpose of financing artistic and cultural ventures. The W. Alton Jones Foundation changed its funding priorities in the early 1980s when it became interested in the nuclear freeze issue, a Soviet-sponsored initiative that would have frozen Soviet nuclear and military superiority in place, and would have rendered the new American President, Ronald Reagan, unable to close that gap by any appreciable degree. A decade later, the Foundation hired the zoologist John Myers, who had previously worked for the National Audubon Society, to be its Director, and thenceforth began to earmark much of its philanthropy for organizations committed to the anti-capitalist agendas of radical environmentalism, whose ultimate goal, as writer Michael Berliner has explained, is "not clean air and clean water, [but] rather . . . the demolition of technological/industrial civilization."
In 2001, the W. Alton Jones Foundation was restructured into three separate foundations. One of these was the Blue Moon Fund, which Diane Edgerton Miller (granddaughter of W. Alton Jones) and Patricia Jones Edgerton (daughter of W. Alton Jones) together established in April 2002. The other two newly created entities were named the Oak Hill Fund and the Edgerton Fund.
The Blue Moon Fund currently ranks as the world's tenth largest financier of international causes; many of its grants are intended to help build the resources, infrastructure, and food production capabilities of Communist China.
The Blue Moon Fund condemns the fact that the U.S. has only 5 percent of the world's population but accounts for 25 percent of all energy consumption and (allegedly) one-fourth of all air pollution: "There is a complex relationship between human consumption, economic advancement and the condition of the natural world that profoundly affects human quality of life. Consumption is the engine of growth, but it can also fuel misery. Demand for cheap food leads to chemical use that can cause human disease; demand for goods leads to natural resource depletion; and demand for energy leads to pollution and global warming. Communities, economies, and the natural world all suffer.”
Among the many recipients of Blue Moon Fund philanthropy are: the Alliance to Save Energy; the American Friends Service Committee; Brookings Institute; the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Citizen Action; the Earth Island Institute; the EarthJustice Legal Defense Fund; Ecotrust; the Energy Foundation; the Environmental Defense Fund; Environmental Media Services; the Environmental Working Group; Friends of the Earth; Greenpeace; the League of Conservation Voters; the National Wildlife Federation; the Natural Resources Defense Council; the Nature Conservancy; Physicians for Social Responsibility; Planned Parenthood; Public Citizen; Rainforest Action Network (affiliate of the World Wildlife Fund); Rainforest Alliance; the Sierra Club; the Tides Foundation and the Tides Center; the Union of Concerned Scientists; the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG); and the World Wildlife Fund.
To view a list of additional noteworthy grantees of the Blue Moon Fund, click here.
(Information on grantees and monetary amounts courtesy of The Foundation Center, GuideStar, ActivistCash, the Capital Research Center and Undue Influence)
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