Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation

Nonprofit organization in Omaha, United States

The Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation is a charitable organization formed 1964 in Omaha, Nebraska, by investor and industrialist Warren Buffett as a vehicle to manage his charitable giving. It was known simply as the Buffett Foundation until 2004, when it was renamed in honor of Susan Buffett, who died that year. As of 2014, the Foundation ranked fourth among family foundations by grants paid. It invests heavily in reproductive health and family planning grants across the world, including substantial investments in abortion and contraceptives. According to Mother Jones, the Foundation is known for its focus on abortion access and for its "secrecy often appearing under grant acknowledgements only as 'an anonymous donor.'"

Allen Greenberg, the executive director of the foundation, was married from 1983 to 1995 to the Buffetts' daughter, Susie, who is chair. The Buffett Foundation was set up in 1964 but had no director until Greenberg took the job in 1987.

Susan Buffett's will bestowed about $2.5 billion on the foundation, to which her husband's further gifts of $315 million have been added.

The Buffett Foundation does not accept unsolicited requests, preferring instead to seek out worthy recipients on its own. The foundation provides grants to a large range of U. S. and a few international organizations, including the Willows Foundation in Turkey (€2.3 million), the World Food Programme in Italy (€800,000), Marie Stopes International in the UK (€571,000); and Grupo de Informacion en Reproduccion Elegida in Mexico (€196,000). By 2008, the Foundation had nearly $4 billion in assets. In 2007, Omaha's Building Bright Futures initiative promised financial support to low income students in the area who wanted to attend college.

In the 1990s, the Buffett Foundation helped finance the development of the abortion drug RU 486. Between 2001 and 2014, the foundation contributed over $1.5 billion to abortion related causes, including at least $427 million to Planned Parenthood and $168 million to the National Abortion Federation. It has also funded the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks demographic and legislative trends, and Gynuity Health Projects, which focuses on medication abortion. "Susan's Foundation" is to receive a bequest of about $3 billion over a span of many years.

The vast bulk of Buffett's wealth consists of his personal holdings in Berkshire Hathaway, a conglomerate of which he controls almost 40% directly, and which he has managed personally since the mid 1960s.