The Liz Claiborne & Art Ortenberg Foundation

The Liz Claiborne & Art Ortenberg Foundation

Liz Claiborne and Art Ortenberg founded their foundation in 1987 after a safari to Kenya and Tanzania crystallized a conviction: national parks alone could not save migratory keystone species. The couple — who had already built a globally recognized fashion brand — structured their philanthropy around the idea that human communities and threatened wildlife must find a durable economic coexistence. That premise, decades ahead of mainstream conservation thinking, now defines a grantmaking portfolio anchored in Sub-Saharan Africa, Madagascar, Asia, Latin America, and the Northern Rocky Mountains. The foundation operates as a direct grantmaker rather than a passive endowment allocating to third-party funds. Its capital flows to field-based organizations running anti-poaching interventions, human-wildlife conflict mitigation, and land-use agreements with local communities — a deployment approach closer to an operating foundation’s rigor. Geographic concentration is highest in Africa and Madagascar, with significant programming in Asia and the American West. In 2018, the foundation committed $5 million over five years to the Wildlife Conservation Society’s elephant protection programs across Central and East Africa (per Philanthropy News Digest, 2018). More recently, it has funded community conservancy models in Kenya — where Maasai landowners receive lease payments to set aside rangeland for wildlife corridors — and has backed CFDA scholarship programs via an industry-association channel unusual for an environmental funder. The team operates out of a single office at 55 East 59th Street in New York. Kent Wommack serves as Executive Director, leading a lean staff and a board that includes former University of Cambridge Vice Chancellor Dame Alison Richard and Davis Wright Tremaine partner Victor Kovner. Aria Gallo co-chairs the Global Conservation Program at the Biodiversity Funders Group, signaling the foundation’s embeddedness in professional grantmaking networks. September 2023: The foundation’s website was refreshed but its core programmatic language — the tagline “Sustainability starts with you” and the emphasis on catalytic grants for wildlife and local people — remained structurally unchanged from prior years. The foundation is the primary vehicle for the Claiborne-Ortenberg philanthropic capital; it does not maintain a separate donor-advised fund or a public-facing impact-investing arm. Its structural differentiator is longevity in a single thesis: community-based conservation as the load-bearing wall of species protection. Three decades of grants have tracked the same logic — that lasting conservation requires aligning the economic incentives of the people who live alongside elephants, tigers, and predators — rather than chasing thematic pivots or short-term program cycles.