Our Mission
Our mission is to advance policy, build partnerships, and strengthen public health to create communities where people can achieve their best possible health.
Our Vision
Our vision is a nation where every person in every community has the opportunity to achieve their best possible health.
What We Do
We create and invest in bold solutions to make public health work better for everyone, through four main strategies:
- Advancing Policy: We advance policies that improve health and create thriving communities.
- Creating Partnerships: We build partnerships, often among unlikely allies, to help leaders achieve their shared goal of strengthening communities and improving lives.
- Strengthening the Public Health System: We support the state and local government public health workforce and create practical solutions that help professionals improve their impact.
- Improving Communication: We empower health communicators and build support for public health through research, training, and tools.
Our core beliefs drive our priorities and programs:
- Health is the foundation for a strong nation, a healthy economy, and thriving communities.
- Every person in every community should have the opportunity to achieve their best possible health.
- Health is more than healthcare. We approach our work with the knowledge that many factors influence health.
- Policy is one of the most powerful and effective tools to achieve lasting change and create optimal conditions for health.
- Local approaches and practical solutions are vital to achieving broad, lasting change.
- To make communities healthier, we need strong state and local health departments and a thriving public health workforce.
How We Work
The foundation is not a traditional grant-making organization, and we do not accept unsolicited grant proposals. Instead, we identify gaps, develop solutions, and create tools to maximize our national impact.
Among the principles that drive our work:
- We are more than a funder. We are hands-on, we create programs, and we work closely with our partners.
- We use entrepreneurial problem-solving to design solutions and test them for viability, improving the body of practical evidence for the public health field.
- We invest in measurable, replicable, scalable projects that have the potential for systemic impact.
- Our projects integrate into existing systems to improve the health of communities.
The Vose River Charitable Fund is an independent public charity that collaborates with the de Beaumont Foundation and serves as a fiscal agent for several programs, including The BUILD Health Challenge® and CityHealth.
Our History
The de Beaumont Foundation was created in 1998 by Pierre S. (Pete) de Beaumont, the founder of the Brookstone Company, with the broad purpose of relieving human suffering. Mr. de Beaumont wanted the foundation to have a broad mandate and supported a concentration on public health, where he thought his resources could make the biggest impact. More than 25 years later, his commitment to innovation and entrepreneurial problem-solving continues to drive the foundation’s work.
Born on August 1, 1915, Mr. de Beaumont was raised in New York City and earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Harvard University in 1938. After graduating, he began a successful career as a mechanical engineer with Packard Motor Car Company, where he was granted several patents, and General Motors. During World War II, he served as an officer in the U.S. Naval Reserve. Following the war, he continued his engineering career at Apex Electrical Manufacturing Company and Bostich Inc.
In 1965, Mr. de Beaumont and his wife, Mary Deland (Robbins), founded the Brookstone Company as a catalog retailer of hard-to-find tools. They grew the company into a successful chain of retail stores before retiring in 1980 and selling the company to the Quaker Oats Company.
The foundation was fully funded upon Mr. de Beaumont’s death in December 2010.