History
W. Alton ‘Pete’ Jones was a self made man who made his name as an industrial giant while working with The Cities Service Company. He came from humble beginnings, working before and after school, anything from sweeping floors to washing blackboards, to help contribute to the family income. He was very close to his mother and is quoted as saying ‘Any good in my life is due to her”, as well as, “One thing she impressed on me was always to tell the truth. If I have established a reputation for anything, it is for integrity”. His personal fortune along with his integrity, concern for his fellow man, and a strong sense of responsibility, led him to establish the W. Alton Jones Foundation for the “betterment of mankind” in 1944.
In 1982, the W. Alton Jones Foundation moved its headquarters from New York City to Charlottesville, Virginia and elected a new Board of Directors. Joining Nettie Marie Jones (W. Alton Jones’ widow) to head up the board was his daughter, Patricia Jones Edgerton, who was instrumental in steering a new course for the foundation. She, along with the board, honed the foundations’ focus to supporting two major uncertainties facing mankind– the degradation of the earth’s natural resources and the possibility of large-scale destruction by nuclear war.
A Global Focus
The new goals of the W. Alton Jones Foundation were to build a sustainable world by developing new ways to interact responsibly with the planet’s ecological systems, and to build a secure world by eliminating the risk of nuclear war and by providing alternative methods of resolving conflicts.
The significant impact of the W. Alton Jones Foundation can be attributed to focused grantmaking around foundation-defined initiatives in its two program areas:
Sustainable World program—protecting the global environment
- Climate protection
- Maintaining biological diversity
- Energy as it relates to climate change, air toxics, and depletion of nonrenewable resources
- Toxic contamination of human and natural systems
Secure World program—preventing the risk of nuclear war
- Nuclear disarmament
- Non proliferation
- Common Security strategies and policies
- The nuclear weapons production complex
Activites supported by W. Alton Jones Foundation to advance these programmatic issues ranged from applied research and scholarship to explore new solutions, to litigation, and to efforts that helped policymakers and the public understand issues and opportunities.
In 2001, the W. Alton Jones Foundation was restructured and from its endowment evolved three separate foundations.
