PBS Foundation

About PBS Foundation

What if...

It’s a simple but powerful question.

It challenges conventions, pushes limits, and inspires new ideas. It invites collaboration, cooperation, and communication.  It launches the human imagination into worlds of possibility, inspiring innovation, change, and progress. It makes the future happen.

For almost 40 years, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) has championed this quest for knowledge and experience. No other organization has done more with the power of media to discover our shared history, exalt our experience of the arts, explore our relationships to each other and the world around us, and ford the frontiers of science, technology, and medicine.

Those who ask—and answer—the great what-if questions of our time look to PBS to be engaged, educated, and enlightened. This spirit is at the heart of the PBS challenge to “Be More.” 

But what if PBS itself could be more?

What if we could transform public television into an even stronger and more powerful institution? What if we could tap new technologies to reach and inspire more people? What if we could fund and develop all the compelling ideas we encounter?

Through the PBS Foundation, we can.

Mission

The mission of the PBS Foundation is to enlist philanthropic support of public broadcasting through establishing special initiatives funds and a permanent endowment to ensure PBS's continued excellence, and to promote and enhance outstanding public broadcasting programs and services. Working collaboratively and cooperatively with member stations, the Foundation will secure the extraordinary funding necessary to maintain and enhance its commitment to serving the American public.

History

The PBS Foundation was formed in 2004 for the purpose of helping PBS thrive in this world of ever expanding digital technology and myriad media choices by providing a mechanism for seeking, cultivating and receiving extraordinary major gifts and grants at the national level. We have opportunities never before available to us in programming, education and community outreach – hallmarks of PBS that have made it the national treasure it is today. The Foundation was established by the PBS Board of Directors and is incorporated as a 501(c)(3) organization and a 509(a)(3) supporting organization to PBS.