EARLY HISTORY AND INITIAL FOCUS
The John and Mary R. Markle Foundation, Inc. was established in 1927 "to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge...and the general good of mankind." The first foundation to name both husband and wife in its title, it was started with an initial endowment of $3 million.

Pennsylvania-born John Markle was the son of a coalmine operator, inventor, and financier. He was called on to manage the family enterprises when his father became ill, serving as director of George B. Markle and Company for nearly fifty years. When he and Mrs. Mary Robinson Markle moved to New York City in 1902, he devoted himself to philanthropy as well as to his business interests. The Markles became deeply involved in the city's--and in many cases the nation's--elite and their social, financial, industrial, and charitable interests.

The Markle Foundation's first major interest was in traditional social welfare. Its second program, begun in 1936, centered on medicine and provided small grants-in-aid for individual research projects. In 1947, the Foundation created the Markle Scholars-in-Medicine program in response to a need for more teachers, researchers, and administrators in the nation's medical schools. This program awarded grants to gifted practitioners planning to further their careers in academic medicine.

FOCUS ON COMMUNICATIONS MEDIA
The Foundation began seeking new approaches to "the advancement and diffusion of knowledge" in 1969 when Lloyd Morrisett became Markle's President. Morrisett, who co-founded the Children's Television Workshop the year before, changed Markle's focus to mass communications in a democratic society. The program subsequently expanded to include information technology and concentrated in three program areas: Media and Political Participation, Interactive Technologies, and Communications Policy.

During Morrisett's tenure, Markle supported major policy conferences, online policy simulations and debates, and research on subjects as varied as political advertising, effective interactive learning and international media law. It helped establish beneficial new services on the Internet, invested in companies creating educational multimedia products, and spearheaded a broad investigation of the potential for universal e-mail access in the United States.

Previous Markle grant recipients and partners include CNN, The Children's Television Workshop, Infonautics, Crossover Technologies, M.I.T., The RAND Corporation, Carnegie-Mellon University, and The Brookings Institution.

ADDRESSING CRITICAL PUBLIC NEEDS IN THE INFORMATION AGE
Zoë Baird became the foundation's president in 1998. She felt that emerging technology, woven into the fabric of the institutions that serve the public, can transform information into an ever more powerful tool that can help solve complex problems, meet critical public needs and empower people in ways that make life better for all of us.

This led to a reassessment of Markle's programs and activities in the rapidly changing field of information and communications technology. As a result of the review, Markle adopted three main program areas: Policy for a Networked Society, Healthcare and Interactive Media for Children.

In addition, Markle began to operate more of its own programs and developed an approach that brings together leaders and innovators from technology, government, public interest organizations and business to bring about the technical and policy changes needed to enable breakthroughs in the public interest. (Read more).

This approach allows Markle to contribute to large-scale, sustainable change that far exceeds the dollars the Foundation can apply to the problems it has chosen to address. This model also enables Markle to tackle issues that are ripe for change at the point in time when the most impact can be made.

Over the past few years, the Markle Foundation has pursued a number of projects with the goal of addressing critical public needs through the innovative use of information and IT. Many specific objectives have been accomplished and a number of key partnerships in the public and private sectors have developed as a result. Markle has developed an approach that works for the many extraordinary people with whom the foundation collaborates: convening multi-sectoral groups of leaders and innovators from technology, government, public interest organizations and business to bring about the technical and policy changes needed to enable breakthroughs in the public interest. This approach grew out of a broader undertaking, initiated in 1999 as IT and Internet policy were emerging rapidly to stimulate the participation of many needed actors in the public interest potential of IT.

In recent work, the Markle Foundation has been predominantly focused on two areas where IT holds great promise to create impact: the modernization of the complex and over-burdened healthcare system and the strengthening of our nation's security against the threat of terrorism.

These are two of the most critical issues of our time, where the benefit to be gained from the ability to put the right information into the right hands at the right time is enormous. In each of these areas, the effective use of IT can literally save lives. These are areas where IT promises great breakthroughs, and where without better use of IT, our nation's goals cannot be met. At the same time, healthcare and national security also highlight the major challenge in seeking better ways of using information: the risk such use poses to our established social values of privacy and civil liberties. The Markle Foundation has had major collaborative efforts addressing these areas for the last two years plans to continue our work on the challenges presented by these two program areas for the foreseeable future.