A Pledge for the Future

Katherine Lorenz and her grandfather, philanthropist George P Mitchell

It wasn’t until a teenage Katherine Lorenz saw her grandfather featured in Time magazine that she realised he was a billionaire. “I always knew my grandparents were very well-known and very giving, but as a child you don’t think about wealth in the same way. I was in high school when I saw that article, and when you’re 15 you don’t want to be different. I threw away the magazine and hoped no one had read it,” she recalls over the phone from her home in Colorado.

Her grandfather George P Mitchell was an oil man and a pioneer of hydraulic fracturing from Galveston, Texas. A teenager during the Great Depression, he grew up with Greek immigrant parents in “a meagre but loving environment.” 

Interior of a carbon capture facility. CGMF supports the development of advanced energy technologies, including carbon capture, through strategic funding initiatives.

He played a pivotal role in advancing sustainability and social equity in Texas, which revved up with the establishment of the Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation (CGMF) in 1978. Inspired by Dennis Meadows’ 1972 Limits to Growth, Mitchell brought global experts together to address challenges such as population growth, resource depletion, and sustainable development in Texas and created a community called The Woodlands, after acquiring 50,000 acres from timber companies.  

The plan was to establish a sustainable self-sufficient town that had around 28 per cent dedicated to green space. It eventually opened in 1974 and is still thriving today with some 120,000 inhabitants. “He was in so many ways ahead of his time,” reflects Lorenz.

Mitchell signed The Giving Pledge in 2010 to give away half of his wealth and established a prize to honour excellence in sustainable development. In total, through the foundation’s 46 years it has given away nearly US$1 billion.

A clean energy hydrogen facility. CGMF supports the development of advanced energy technologies, including hydrogen, through strategic funding initiatives.

Well before her grandfather passed away in 2013 at the age of 94, Lorenz had worked with him on the foundation and inherited his strong sense of philanthropy: “I was always drawn to things that gave back.” She studied how economic policies can improve the lives of people, after which she started a non-profit in Oaxaca to help indigenous communities with healthcare and nutrition.  

“That was when it clicked,” she says. It led to a course in strategic philanthropy at The Philanthropy Workshop (now Forward Global), a platform that provides philanthropy education and networking, inspiring individuals and families to give better. Around the same time, her aunt, Meredith Mitchell Dreiss, who had been running CGMF, wanted to step down and the opportunity arose for Lorenz to step up. “I had learned that giving away money is easy but having an impact can be hard, especially in a family foundation where there are lots of different opinions,” says Lorenz.

The annual grant-making budget for the foundation now is around US$20 million, which comes fully from the family endowment, with most of the focus of the work in Texas around sustainability and environment, water and land, including supporting Texas to become carbon-neutral by 2050.  

The offices of sustainability at the University of Texas at Austin. A 2011 CGMF grant established the University of Texas' interdisciplinary sustainability degree program, which catalyzed the university-wide expansion of sustainability education and research.

The Mitchell family decided to continue the focus on Texas, she says, because you can have a better impact when you go “narrow and deep. It’s better than being on the surface across many areas”.

According to EnvironmentAmerica.org, if Texas were a nation, it would rank as the eighth-largest emitter in the world. “So, to change Texas from within has a big impact, an actually meaningful impact on sustainability.” Another important approach to make philanthropic dollars go further is partnering with other initiatives, she adds. “When you coordinate with other funders and think through large strategies and plans, it is not random acts of improvement, you consider how we as a group move forward.”

Sometimes she finds her grandfathers’ original ideas are still brilliant. For example, George Mitchell dreamed of educating “100,000 young people” about sustainability to ensure they could address the multiple challenges they will face. So, it felt important that the state’s flagship university should provide sustainability training but the University of Texas at Austin did not offer a comprehensive bachelor’s degree in sustainability.

CGMF established a programme in sustainability education in 2011. The Austin campus is the main grantee, charged with establishing an interdisciplinary undergraduate degree in sustainability.  

In 2018 alone, more than 2,000 Austin students were working toward degrees and certificates in sustainability. Five of the sustainability programmes are ranked at number one and 49 programmes are ranked in the top 10. Of the Texas graduates on LinkedIn, over 7,000 of them have “sustainability “in their job titles or descriptions. The success of the degree development and the capacity built between interdisciplinary faculty helped lead to a $10 million investment over eight years by the university’s President’s Office in sustainability projects under the Planet Texas 2050 initiative. University staff credit CGMF’s initiation of the degree as the impetus for this new investment.

Three years into her role as director, Lorenz was named a leader of the Next Gen of the Giving Pledge, and Inside Philanthropy named her one of the most powerful heirs in philanthropy in 2021.  

“I hope my grandparents would be proud,” she reflects. “Yes, my grandfather was an oil man, but he was ahead of his time in sustainability, and that was his mandate. It’s a huge motivation to carry out their legacy and desires.”  

This article originally appeared in Billionaire's Escape Issue. To subscribe, click here.

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