The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations
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The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations are a group of charitable foundations established by American industrialist Arthur Vining Davis, onetime Alcoa president and Florida land developer. The original Arthur Vining Davis Foundation was created in 1952 by Davis during his lifetime; the second and third foundations were established by Davis' will in 1965. The first foundation was merged into the second in 2001. Since 1997 the foundations have been headed by Davis' great-nephew, J.H. Dow Davis.
Davis' charge to the trustees was that they fund programs that would "strengthen the nation's future," with the nation in question being his native United States. For this reason, the single restriction on the grants is that they are to be made only within the United States and its possessions (such as Guam or the Northern Mariana Islands). The foundations presently directs its funding into five basic categories: secondary education, private higher education, graduate theological education, health care, and public television. In 2006, the foundations announced they would resume a role as sponsor of Reading Rainbow, a children's book program on PBS that the foundations had sponsored from 1992 to 2002.
