Investments and Finances

James Irvine, a pioneer in California agriculture, began the Foundation in 1937 with $5.6 million. That endowment has since grown to $3.1 billion by the end of 2023, thanks to our investment partners, and continues to serve working Californians today through our annual grantmaking.

Mr. Irvine created the Foundation to live in perpetuity, so our investment team’s focus is to earn enough through our investments to allow us to consistently spend 5.5 percent of the Foundation’s endowment each year on grants and expenses, while also allowing the real value of the endowment to grow.

Our investment team’s key objective is to increase the value of our investment portfolio because those returns alone fuel our grantmaking capability. To achieve this, our investment team partners with both established and emerging investment management leaders who share our commitment to generating returns that translate into new opportunities for the people of California.

Investment Brochure

We pride ourselves as strong partners with our investment managers, and we are driven by the following principles:

• We are a long-term investor
• We believe that relationships matter
• We value independent thinking
• We are a conviction-based investor
• We are a flexible and nimble partner
• We are intellectually curious
• We align Irvine interests with the interest of our partners

We maintain a long-term view with respect to the Foundation’s investments. Our grantmaking has grown steadily from $67 million in 2012 to $160 million in 2024 due to strong investment performance and a spending formula that dampens the payout volatility.

This formula utilizes the prior three-year average assets in its calculation to smooth out short-term funding fluctuations so that we can plan properly and avoid disruptions in our grantmaking.