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 [...]

Americans for Responsible Solutions

On January 8, 2011, a mentally ill young man shot Congresswoman Gabby Giffords in the head, killed six of her constituents, and wounded 12 others. Since that tragedy in Tucson, America has seen too many more mass shootings – but no response from Congress. This inaction on gun violence was [...]

Human Resilience|

Artist Fellow Reggie White

2014 TBA Artist Fellowship, sponsored by RHE Charitable Foundation Theater Bay Area (TBA) unites, strengthens, promotes and advances the theater community in the San Francisco Bay Area. www.theatrebayarea.org “Art, for me, is humanity’s greatest mirror on the wall. Not only does it put us face to face with our greatest faults, [...]

Edgy Arts|

ArtSeed

ArtSeed is a unique and innovative arts education program. Our intergenerational and multi-disciplinary projects put students from diverse backgrounds in touch with artists and other professionals in a variety of fields. Working side-by-side in experimental and classical apprenticeships that include non-western styles of art, participants share hands-on artmaking, exhibition and [...]