Mary Bitterman, President and Trustee
Bernard Osher Foundation
Mary Bitterman is President and Trustee of The Bernard Osher Foundation, a 34-year-old philanthropic organization headquartered in San Francisco that supports higher education and the arts. Previously, Bitterman served as President and CEO of The James Irvine Foundation and before that as President and CEO of KQED, a major American public broadcasting center. She has served as Director of the Hawaii Public Broadcasting Authority, the Voice of America, the Hawaii State Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs, and the East-West Center's Institute of Culture and Communication.

Bitterman currently is a director of Bank of Hawaii, Bay Area Council Economic Institute, The Bernard Osher Foundation, Commonwealth Club of California, Hawaii Community Foundation, and PBS Foundation. She also is an Advisory Council member of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, the Public Policy Institute of California, and Pacific Forum/CSIS. She is an Honorary Member of the National Presswomen's Federation and a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.

Bitterman received her B.A. from Santa Clara University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College.

The Osher Foundation provides post-secondary scholarship funding to colleges and universities across the nation, with special attention to reentry students. It also benefits programs in integrative medicine in the United States and Sweden, including centers at the University of California, San Francisco; Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston; and the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. In addition, the Foundation supports a national network of lifelong learning programs for seasoned adults, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes, which currently operate on the campuses of 117 institutions of higher education from Maine to Alaska and Hawaii. Grants to selected cultural and arts organizations are made in the San Francisco Bay Area and the State of Maine.

Clara Miller, President
F.B. Heron Foundation
Clara Miller is President of the F.B. Heron Foundation. Prior to F.B. Heron, Clara was Founder, President and CEO of the Nonprofit Finance Fund (NFF), a national leader in nonprofit, philanthropic and social enterprise finance. She has written extensively on how and why the nonprofit sector is undercapitalized and is one of the most articulate advocates for philanthropy to provide growth capital to nonprofits.

NFF, which Ms. Miller founded and ran for over 25 years, serves as a “philanthropic bank” for both social sector organizations and their funders. Directly and with others, NFF invested over $1 billion of capital investment into nonprofits. NFF also provides a range of financial advisory and training services to funders and social sector managers.

Ms. Miller serves on a number of boards, including GuideStar, PopTech, GEO, Enterprise Community Loan Fund and the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation. She is a member of Bank of America’s National Community Advisory Council and Independent Sector's Nonprofit Programs and Practice Committee. Ms. Miller was also appointed to the first Nonprofit Advisory Committee to the Financial Accounting Standards Board.

In 1996, Ms. Miller was appointed by President Clinton to the U.S. Treasury’s first Community Development Advisory Board. She also chaired the Opportunity Finance Network board and was a member of the Community Advisory Committee of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Ms. Miller was named to The NonProfit Times “Power and Influence Top 50” in 2006 - 2010. She was awarded a Bellagio Residency for 2010 by the Rockefeller Foundation.

In the Nonprofit Quarterly, Ruth McCambridge wrote, “Widely acknowledged as one of the most incisive minds on nonprofit finance, Miller will take over as the head of the Heron Foundation, also well known for its willingness to ‘push the envelope’ on the financial practices of foundations.”

Created in 1992, Heron is a $240 million foundation with a grant portfolio of about $11 million annually. While F.B. Heron does not rank as one of the largest foundations, it is large enough to act as a model for its bigger peers. As McCambridge writes, “Multiply the grants by 10 and you have one of Heron's remarkable achievements over the years – a significant commitment to Program Related Investments (PRIs) and Market-Related Investments (MRIs).” As of the end of 2009, Heron had $21 million in PRIs and $89 million in MRIs on its books. Heron has been institutional philanthropy's leader in promoting MRIs, and a prime mover behind the More for Mission effort (the campaign for mission investing by foundations that challenges foundations to increase mission investing by $10 billion over the next 5 years by devoting at least 2 percent of their assets to MRIs and PRIs). Heron is the model for this effort as its combined PRIs and MRIs amount to almost half of its assets. Heron is just as much a leader in its grantmaking, by dedicating three-fourths of its grants as general operating support grants. Programmatically, Heron's grant support builds community assets and wealth through homeownership, enterprise development, and support for new approaches to opening and accessing the capital markets.