How Philanthropy Supports Big Ideas

Examples of how Bush Foundation has invested in community ideas that spread.

This piece was originally published by Bush Foundation on November 13, 2026.

This piece is part of "First Movers," a series from foundation leaders reflecting on moments when the charitable sector backed new and untested ideas, and the people behind them, before anyone else would, and asking where the sector should go first next.

In Saint Paul, MN in the early 1970s, a group of women volunteering at a legal hotline kept getting calls from women seeking housing. The callers were being abused at home and had nowhere safe to go.

In those days, domestic violence was treated as a private family matter. Police often declined to get involved. Few laws offered protection. There were no places for women to go that were dedicated to supporting women who were being abused and keeping them safe.

Those hotline volunteers believed change was needed. And they could help make that change happen. They established a nonprofit called Women’s Advocates and worked to create a refuge — a place where women could stay and be supported as they planned what came next.

They had an idea and conviction, but little money and no blueprint to follow. Nothing like it had been done before.

My predecessors at the Bush Foundation saw something worth backing. It wasn’t an established institution or a proven model. It was a group of people close to a painful problem, who had an idea and were willing to do the hard, unglamorous work of making it real. The Foundation invested in them early, trusting their judgment and their determination.

In 1974, Women’s Advocates opened what is widely recognized as the first domestic violence shelter in the United States. They were full to capacity from the first day they opened. People in other cities took notice, and the idea began to spread. Today, thousands of programs across the country trace their roots to that single house on Grand Avenue in Saint Paul.

In the 1980s, community leaders in Duluth, Minnesota, built on this idea. They had learned that a shelter alone could not solve the problem. The safety of women depended on police, prosecutors, courts, human service agencies and other institutions that were not aligned in their policies and practices. These leaders set out to bring the agencies together under one coordinated approach. The Bush Foundation supported the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project as it developed what became known as the Duluth Model, now one of the most widely replicated responses to domestic violence in the U.S. and globally.

The lessons of both these efforts are as true now as they were then. Real change often begins with people who see a problem up close, imagine a different way, and are willing to roll up their sleeves. And … ideas that are developed and tested at the community level can spread to benefit people across the country and around the world. And… charitable foundations can provide the financial support to help make it all happen.

The Bush Foundation’s role in these innovations was not to design the solution, but to believe in the people who could. That remains our approach.

Today, we are investing in ideas and people we believe could have the same kind of transformational impact that these two efforts had. Not everything we invest in will succeed. That’s okay. Our capacity for risk is part of what makes charitable foundations useful. We can support promising but unproven ideas that government or businesses can’t (or won’t) support. Charitable foundations have given the money needed to develop and test social innovations and support social change throughout our country’s history. It is still one of the most valuable roles we play.

This piece was originally published by Bush Foundation on November 13, 2026.

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