Back in the Depression years, Stanford’s electronics lab was located in the attic at Engineering Corner. The roof leaked, and since there was no money to repair it, the students built big wooden trays lined with tar paper to catch the water. “One winter, Bill Hewlett added a homey touch by stocking the trays with goldfish,” recalled Frederick Terman, the legendary engineering dean.
It wouldn’t be the last time Hewlett made a contribution to improve Stanford. To date, he and the late David Packard, together with their family foundations and company, have given more than $300 million to the University – virtually equivalent in inflation-adjusted dollars to Leland Stanford’s founding bequest. Among their gifts: $77.4 million for the new science and engineering quad and $25 million for the Terman fellows program in science and engineering. Over the years, their help has been crucial in transforming the University from a respectable regional school into a world-class institution.
But the grand scale of their donations to Stanford is dwarfed by the size and scope of the charitable foundations they created. Depending on how HP shares fare on Wall Street, the endowment of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, valued at $8.9 billion at the end of 1997, ranks alongside the Ford, Getty and Eli Lilly foundations as one of the world’s largest private charities.
The Packard Foundation’s hundreds of millions have funded projects as varied as fishery preservation in the oceans around Antarctica, population planning in Tanzania and a shelter for battered women and their children in Santa Clara County. The foundation also makes major gifts to science and engineering education nationwide, including millions of dollars in university scholarships for minority and American Indian students.
Likewise, with an endowment of about $1.5 billion, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation ranks among the nation’s 20 largest. It has granted more than $650 million since its inception in 1966. Like the Packard Foundation, the list of programs it has supported covers broad territory, from conflict resolution and improved teaching to environmental protection and the performing arts.
All this comes on top of extraordinary personal giving. David and Lucile Packard gave $55 million to build the renowned Monterey Bay Aquarium (an independent oceanic research institute whose staff of 170 is primarily funded by Packard’s family foundation). Similarly, Hewlett pledged $15 million (plus $10 million added by his family foundation) to advance Bay Area public school reform.
But their generosity was matched by their modesty: Neither man ever permitted anything to be named for him. Instead, their gifts to Stanford resulted in buildings and fellowships memorializing their faculty mentor, Terman, a children’s hospital named for Lucile Salter Packard, ’35, and dozens of endowed professorships, including one named for Hewlett’s father, Walter Albion Hewlett. “That’s what’s so unique about these two guys,” says University principal gifts director David Glen, ’64. “They are doing it for what it accomplishes for others and not for themselves.”
Both foundations follow the HP Way when it comes to management and grant making: The staffs are lean – the Packard Foundation has fewer than 100 employees – and broadly empowered. “We sit down and decide what problems we want to work on, then go out and find the best people or best organizations we can,” says Hewlett’s son, Walter Hewlett, MS ’68, MS ’73, DMA ’80, chair of the Hewlett Foundation. “Once we’ve found the best talent, we don’t try to micromanage.” Like father, like son.
