The foundation made a leadership gift to the University of California, San Francisco to design and build the UCSF Nancy Friend Pritzker Psychiatry Building, the new home of UCSF’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences as of Summer 2022. The building is the culmination of a long-standing vision to integrate physical and mental health at UCSF. It is designed to optimize patient care, drive collaborative research across disciplines and disorders, and destigmatize mental health care through intentional design.

A departure from the aesthetic of older psychiatry facilities, the Nancy Friend Pritzker Psychiatry Building is designed to elevate and inspire, with a five-story light-filled atrium and rooftop garden accessible to patients and staff. The building features thoughtfully selected photography to create a warm, welcoming, and calming space for patients and visitors, including an extensive photographic art collection by celebrated photographer Richard Misrach, as well as a collection by teen artists engaged in First Exposures, a local community-based art program. The building is named in honor of John’s sister, Nancy Friend Pritzker, who died by suicide at age 24 during a depressive episode in 1972.

The foundation is thrilled to share that the India Basin Waterfront Park at 900 Innes Ave. is now open to the public! Check out the video above and photos below to see the reveal plus SF Chronicle coverage here.

The India Basin Waterfront Park project is an ambitious effort to transform a post-industrial brownfield in San Francisco's historically underserved Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood into a 21st-century legacy park on a scenic waterfront. Remediation began in 2021, and construction will ultimately combine the new park at 900 Innes Ave., which opened on October 19th, 2024, with the existing India Basin Shoreline Park, creating a spacious 10-acre park that will deliver miles of winding trails, waterfront recreation, unbridled shore access, and resiliency to sea level rise. Construction on Phase 2 of the park, also shown below, will continue through 2027.

This project is unique, being one of the few park projects in the nation directly guided by a community-led Equitable Development Plan (EDP). The EDP ensures the park’s features and programming are culturally relevant and directly benefit the Bayview-Hunters Point community. Not only will the park increase access to clean land, water, and recreational space for local residents, it will create new economic and social opportunities, including workforce development, youth leadership, and space for community gathering.

The park is a testament to the countless community partners and residents who, in close partnership with SF Parks & Rec, the Trust for Public Land, SF Parks Alliance, and the A. Philip Randolph Institute, came together to make this dream become a reality. This initiative truly centered collaboration and community throughout the planning and implementation process to ensure the park equitably meets the needs of the local community—now and into the future.

The Bluff Collaborative for Research on Dada and Surrealism is an interdisciplinary initiative at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that brings together the museum, archive, and studio to advance fresh scholarship, perspectives, and conversations on the power of art and ideas in society today. Through study, lectures, performances, and more, the Bluff Collaborative inspires artists, scholars, and Museum visitors to find new meaning in history and to approach the uncertainties and challenges of contemporary times with curiosity, experimentalism, and a spirit of emergent collaboration. For its inaugural year, the Bluff Collaborative program is dedicated to the artist Man Ray in conjunction with the exhibition Man Ray: When Objects Dream (September 14, 2025 – February 1, 2026).

To help defend the core principles and institutions of democracy and the rule of law, the foundation supports the Protect Democracy Project. Protect Democracy’s nonpartisan mission is to prevent American democracy from declining into a more authoritarian form of government. The organization works on six key areas that concern scholars of autocracy: corruption of elections, executive power grabs, delegitimizing vulnerable communities, politicizing independent institutions, spreading disinformation, and quashing dissent. Protect Democracy deploys a range of tools in its work, including litigation, policy advocacy, and communications. Click here for more information.

The foundation supports the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC)’s vital work representing the Jewish community in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. In addition to general support, our grant making helps underwrite the JCRC’s Israel Study Tour program, which brings influential Bay Area civic leaders to Israel with the goal of exposing them to a deeper understanding of Jews, the Jewish community, and Israel; and its Advancing Democracy Initiative, through which the organized Jewish community employs advocacy, education, and coalition-building to fight for a strong, healthy democratic and civil society in the United States. Click here for more information.

The foundation supports Bring Change to Mind (BC2M)’s critical work to end stigma and discrimination surrounding mental illness. Through their evidence-based, peer-to-peer high school and undergraduate programs and Public Service Announcements (PSAs), BC2M offers platforms to share, connect, and learn about mental health. Click here for more information.