The Waitt Family Foundation has donated almost $100 million to non-profit and charitable organizations. Our efforts have been focused on four key areas of interest: community building, historical discovery, scientific breakthroughs, and violence prevention.

Ted Waitt established the Foundation in 1993 and soon connected us with a number of community groups in the Siouxland region of Iowa, where he was born. The Foundation granted $13 million in support of 228 local projects, mainly in the youth and education sectors. Our scholarship program has so far helped send 384 at-risk students to college in the Siouxland region. Other notable endeavors include the “Success by Six” early childhood initiative, the “Saturday in the Park” free music festival, the restoration of the historic Orpheum Theater, and the creation or enhancement of school gymnasiums, athletic facilities, bike trails, and more. The Foundation was also a sponsor of the Gateway Pro Am Charity Golf Classic, which raised $4 million for dozens of worthy Siouxland projects, notably the Boys and Girls Home of Siouxland. In honor of his commitment to the community, Ted was named Sioux City Philanthropist of the Year in 1997 and 2001.

When Ted moved the Foundation to San Diego in 1999, its geographic and programmatic reach expanded. With a non-traditional approach, the Foundation tackled traditional problems such as community building and domestic violence prevention. Using an innovative "past-present-future" perspective, the organization examined the root causes of community problems, the current state of best practices to address them, and far-reaching future trends that hold promising solutions.

In 2000, The Waitt Family Foundation created the “Digital Divide Fund,” a $10 million effort that funded “PowerUP,” a network of hundreds of computer labs with over 30,000 computers serving children and youth in low-income neighborhoods nationwide.

In the San Diego area, the Foundation has supported the Children’s Convalescent Hospital, Monarch School for Homeless Children, UCSD Cancer Center Foundation, YWCA, American Red Cross, United Way, PBS, Hope in the City, and the Center for Community Solutions. The Foundation has also helped launch several other groundbreaking programs such as San Diego's Family Justice Center, which is nationally recognized as an exceptional model for treating victims of domestic violence.

Internationally, the Foundation’s most recent support of “Rwanda Gift for Life” is helping the women of Rwanda become economically self-sufficient through training and support for small business start-ups selling to the global marketplace.

In 2005, the Foundation further evolved and took on new missions. Ted's intellectual curiosity and drive to explore new areas led to the formation of two operating foundations: the Waitt Institute for Discovery and the Waitt Institute for Violence Prevention. Both continue the past-present-future framework, and both maintain the Waitt Family Foundation traditions of seeking new solutions for old problems and fostering collaborative learning.

Today, the Waitt Family Foundation is looking for bold new ideas in the areas of Scientific Research and Exploration and Ocean Exploration, Conservation & Rejuvenation.  Our interests lie in the areas of discovering and preserving the past for the benefit of humanity; environmental issues to help create and inspire change for a better world today; and developing scientific techniques that will lead to future scientific breakthroughs. We are looking for people with the skills and determination to make these ideas happen -- ideas that can make a deep, lasting, and sustainable difference in the lives of many people. This is the next step in our efforts to create a better world, and we invite you to learn more.