About the Clinton Foundation

Since 2001, the Clinton Foundation has transformed philanthropy through programs that develop leaders and accelerate solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges. Under the leadership of President Clinton, Secretary Clinton, and Chelsea Clinton, our unique approach prioritizes solutions over ideology — bringing people together in the spirit of collaboration and pragmatic problem-solving. In an increasingly complex, divisive, and interconnected world, we strive to help fill the gaps between what the public sector can provide and what the private sector can produce.

The foundation is a unique organization that has created a partnership model to tackle our world’s biggest challenges. Our senior leadership reflects this collaborative approach, with more than 200 years of management experience in diverse fields including global logistics, international development and finance.

All Foundation employees are paid for work through the Foundation payroll. As a former President, President Clinton has separately allocated funding for a private office and for associated costs (rent, utilities, and salaries and benefits for staff). No Foundation staff are paid for Foundation work with taxpayer dollars.

Secretary Clinton was not involved in the work of the Foundation when she was serving as Secretary of State. During her time in office, she attended the Annual Meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative – as did many other national and international leaders, including heads of state, U.S. Cabinet members and President Obama himself.

After leaving office, she served on the Board of Directors of the Foundation, and helped launch three initiatives:

• No Ceilings: The Full Participation Project is an initiative to inspire and advance the full participation of girls and women around the world;
• Too Small to Fail, is an initiative to help parents and businesses take meaningful actions to improve the health and well-being of children ages zero to five, so that more of America’s children are prepared to succeed in the 21st century;
• Job One, an effort to help close a critical gap in our country’s education and economic systems through business-designed and implemented training, hiring, and mentoring pathways for youth.

No. Both in legal standing as a 501(c)(3) organization, and in practice, the Foundation is apolitical. We serve only the millions of people around the world whose lives we seek to improve. In fact, the Foundation has a long tradition of working across the aisle. This has included work, first with President George H.W. Bush and later George W. Bush, in response to natural disasters in the Indian Ocean, New Orleans and Haiti; the establishment of the Presidential Leadership Scholars Program; and countless commitment makers and featured speakers at CGI.

All of our supporters – corporations, non-profits, and individuals – get something in return, which is helping to improve lives around the world. Our contributors give to us because they want to see the circle of opportunity extended around the world; they want to see communities, businesses and governments working together to address problems that we all face but collectively have the know-how and resources to fix. That is what the Clinton Foundation does every day.

No. President Clinton and Chelsea Clinton, who serve on the Board of Directors, do not take a salary from the Clinton Foundation and receive no funding from it. Secretary Clinton did not take a salary when she served on the Board of Directors.

We regularly conduct a thorough internal review of our programs – including the impact of each initiative, based on key metrics. For example, metrics include the number of lives affected by CGI commitments; the number of tons of carbon emissions reduced by our home energy affordability loan and building retrofit program; and the number of farmers in Africa who are seeing better livelihoods and incomes as a result of our development work. These impact metrics are reported yearly in our annual reports.

For large scale projects or initiative-wide metrics, we will engage external groups to conduct comprehensive analysis and evaluation. For example, at the 10th CGI Annual Meeting, we presented a report done in concert with Palantir, one of the world’s leading computer software and services company that specializes in data analysis, and offers the world’s leading data integration platform. With the help of Palantir’s data analysis platforms, we looked at CGI Commitments to Action and evaluated what’s worked, what hasn’t, and what remains to be done – aiming to be more efficient and effective in the years to come. This report analyzed the 2,872 Commitments to Action that were made from the first CGI in 2005 through 2013.