Due to their diverse grantmaking interests, the children of Henry A. Wallace amicably split the Wallace Genetic Foundation into three separate foundations, one of which became the Wallace Global Fund, chaired by Bob Wallace. Bob and Gordie’s three sons - R. Bruce Wallace, Randall C. Wallace, and H. Scott Wallace - and their wives, joined the Fund’s inaugural board. The Fund’s initial mission was to “stimulate and leverage critically needed progress at national, regional, and global levels toward an equitable and environmentally sustainable society.”
Wallace Global Fund was a pioneer in supporting and advancing the field of Sustainable Development, which it saw as essential to advancing generational equity, global stewardship, long-term planning and improving the quality of life for all. Sustainable development requires systems change by private and public sector actors, and the Fund supported a range of interdisciplinary strategies, including developing sustainable development indicators, promoting multilateral development bank reform, and funding advocacy for policy change at the global and national levels.
The fund continued the work on FGM pioneered by Gordie Wallace decades earlier. Examples of these innovative efforts included support for Mandeleo, a major Kenyan women’s association, which embraced alternative rituals, and for the National Association of Nigerian Nurses & Midwives, an organization that recognized the impact of FGM on women’s ability to safely deliver children. Wallace Global Fund’s support of pioneering FGM
activists continues to this day.