The Lawrence Foundation is a private family foundation focused on making grants to support environmental, education, health, human services and other causes.

Jeff Lawrence co-founded Trillium Digital Systems in 1988. Trillium was headquartered in Los Angeles, California and developed and licensed communications software to communications equipment manufacturers throughout the world. Intel Corporation acquired Trillium in August 2000. Jeff left Intel Corporation in 2002 and is currently at Clivia Systems. Jeff Lawrence and Diane Troth (husband and wife), established the Lawrence Foundation in 2000 with some of the proceeds received from the acquisition by Intel. They feel it is important to give something back and support organizations that are trying to make the world a better place.

The Lawrence Foundation assets are currently about $5 million. This places our foundation in the top 15% (on the basis of assets) of all family foundations in the U.S. There are over 25,000 family foundations in the U.S. The vast majority of family foundations have assets of less than $5 million.  About 250 family foundations hold over 50% of all family foundation assets. (source: Foundation Center).

We currently receive over 500 grant requests per year. The average family foundation receives about 150 grant requests per year (source: ASF). We are unfortunately only able to fund about 5% (by number, not dollars) of the requests that we receive.

We have made over 100 grants and commitments worth over $2.5 million since our inception. We have made both program and operating grants and in one case also directly sponsored, organized and hosted a workshop that brought together academics, non-profits and funders to explore the issue of environmental economics. Our grants have been primarily for environmental, education, health and human services causes. By way of comparison, the top 4 areas of family foundation grant making in the U.S. are education, human services, health and the arts and culture (source: ASF).

Our initial mission statement was fairly broad and is becoming more narrowly focused as we learn what value we can bring to the non-profit world. Our grants now tend towards supporting environmental and human services issues and causes. Our initial grants were generally unsolicited one year program grants. In the future we plan on moving towards making multi year program and operating grants. As we gain a better understanding of the issues that we think are important we will begin to solicit organizations directly for grant requests.

A summary of about the foundation and its activities is available in the Fact Sheet. The Annual Letters describe our foundation’s past years events and future years planned activities. A background about our experience of forming and running a family foundation, as well as our views about the future direction of philanthropy is available at: “The Game of Philanthropy”.