Focus Areas

Edgy Arts

We focus our arts-funding on providing Bay Area audiences relevant, enlightening, intimate and high-quality arts experiences. We partner with creative leaders in the Bay Area, supporting their missions to bring diverse, under-represented, emerging artistic talent to audiences and to the public eye. RHE Charitable Foundation shares these organizations’ goal of increasing audiences attending and participating in the arts.

Human Resilience

We partner with nonprofits that provide for our challenged community members. Human Resilience is empowered through education, housing and social services, mental health and addiction-recovery services, and self-esteem building partnerships and mentorship. Our Executive Director witnessed remarkable human resilience when serving as a counselor for Swords to Plowshares housing program.

The Environment

We support a selected number of Northern California’s stewards of the environment. These leaders and their nonprofit organizations deftly watch after and advocate to preserve our region’s natural treasures through habitat preservation, conservation research, partnership-building and environmental advocacy, environmental science and environmental education. Our future depends on kids and families getting outdoors today.

Mission Statement

RHE Charitable Foundation’s Mission is to extend the legacy of compassion and generosity created by its founder, Richard Henry Epstein.

We provide grants to organizations whose work we admire.

We are particularly interested in:
– Protection of lands and waters that serve to enrich the lives of all creatures, including us.
– Restoration of human resilience
– Cultivation of edgy arts

Partnerships

Swords to Plowshares
When Their Service Ends, Our (or Their) Mission Begins: War causes wounds and suffering that last beyond the battlefield. Swords to Plowshares’ mission is to heal the wounds, to restore dignity, hope, and self-sufficiency to all veterans [...]
The Nature Conservancy
The Nature Conservancy is the leading conservation organization working around the world to protect ecologically important lands and waters for nature and people. The mission of The Nature Conservancy is to conserve the lands and [...]
Playwrights Foundation
Playwrights Foundation is one of RHE’s first grantees. As a center for new play development that supports and champions contemporary playwrights in the creation of new works to sustain theater as a vital, dynamic art [...]

Opera Noir

Opera Noir is a 501(c)(3) non-profit arts organization with a mission to promote cultural diversity in the classical arts. The company is committed to preserving and performing the works of African American composers and artists in addition to performing traditional European Classical Music. The shared goal of the Board of [...]

Edgy Arts|

Oregon Shakespeare Festival

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is a not-for-profit professional theatre founded in 1935. Our season runs from February through early November, and we have three theatres: our two indoor stages, the Angus Bowmer Theatre and the Thomas Theatre, and our flagship outdoor Allen Elizabethan Theatre, which opens in early June and runs [...]

Edgy Arts|

Pie Ranch

In 2002, three founding partners — Nancy Vail, Jered Lawson, and Karen Heisler — purchased a triangular 14-acre property on California’s San Mateo coast to establish Pie Ranch. The shape of the land, and their shared vision to create a model center of sustainable farming and food system education, inspired [...]

Environment|