Increasing the stability, resiliency, and vitality of communities

Running beneath the city’s elevated Metroline, Miami’s Underline, a 10-mile linear park, is transforming the area for residents and visitors. The River Room (above) provides recreation, relaxation, and a green infrastructure to help mitigate stormwater flooding.
Strong and vibrant communities provide not just a safe place to live, but an opportunity to thrive. Griffin Catalyst helps communities in times of need and enhances public spaces and inspiring cultural institutions.

Our Impact Stories

Helping Communities in Need

We act boldly and decisively to provide aid in moments of urgent community need. By identifying and leveraging the unique strengths of public and private organizations, we have addressed complex community challenges close to home and far afield.

When the war in Ukraine interrupted students’ studies, we launched the Ukraine Math and Science Achievement Fund to ensure that students have the opportunity to pursue their academic ambition. When we saw an opportunity to enhance disaster preparation and response, we helped establish a first-of-its-kind resilience fund in Miami.

And during the COVID-19 pandemic, our wide-ranging efforts included working with the State Department to repatriate 800 Americans from Wuhan, China, addressing food insecurity in Chicago, and increasing the supply of medical oxygen in India.

A Catalytic Investment in the Future of Miami

Vibrant communities include accessible, modern public spaces that bring people together. Griffin Catalyst is working to energize communities by increasing access to such spaces. Through investment in innovative urban infrastructure like The Underline in Miami—a 10-mile linear park bringing vital amenities to diverse Miami neighborhoods—we are empowering individuals to grow and communities to prosper.

Supporting Vital Cultural Institutions

Some of America’s most storied and visited museums invite people to engage with science and nature in imaginative ways. From the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, world-renowned cultural institutions are destinations of learning and exploration, drawing millions of visitors from around the globe.

Through partnership with these and other institutions, Griffin Catalyst is ensuring new generations of learners have the opportunity to engage with science, technology, and nature in ways far beyond what’s possible in the classroom.

4.5M+

Meals funded through the Greater Chicago Food Depository to address food insecurity during the COVID-19 pandemic

800

Americans repatriated from Wuhan, China at the start of COVID-19 in 2020

100

New mini-pitch soccer fields in Chicago and Miami to be completed by 2026

In addition to encouraging casual use, The Underline hosts hundreds of public events and programs, such as group walks and yoga classes.
The Underline allows people to do what I think is a basic right: being able to walk and bike and connect in your community, safely.
Meg Daly
Founder, Friends of The Underline
In addition to encouraging casual use, The Underline hosts hundreds of public events and programs, such as group walks and yoga classes.

Featured Partners

Our partner organizations are doing vital work to strengthen communities. We’re proud to support them.

In Brief

June 30, 2020
Griffin Catalyst has made the largest gift in the history of the Navy SEAL Foundation, to provide critical education, health care, and financial support to members of one of the U.S. military’s most elite special operations forces and their families.
September 8, 2023
In 2022, Griffin Catalyst joined with partners to support the Organs Initiative, a coalition leveraging data to drive change with broad bipartisan support. The challenge: To fix a broken, inefficient organ donation system that leads to tens of thousands of healthy organs going unrecovered each year and contributes to 30 Americans dying every day for lack of an available organ. In August 2022, the group achieved the first major overhaul of the organ donation system in 40 years, projected to save over 7,000 lives annually. Almost a year later, in July 2023, Congress unanimously passed legislation to break up
May 23, 2024
To pay tribute to the nation's most distinguished military heroes—and to unite our country around the values their stories represent—Griffin Catalyst is supporting the National Medal of Honor Museum Foundation with a $30 million gift. The National Medal of Honor Griffin Institute is a key component of a three-pronged, $300 million effort that also includes a new museum in Arlington, Texas, and a new monument in Washington, D.C.
October 28, 2024
Griffin Catalyst provided a seed gift of $2.5 million to accelerate the efforts of Feng Zhang, a faculty member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, to develop “programmable therapeutics,” an approach that holds promise for revolutionizing medicine by reprogramming cells to cure a wide range of human diseases.
August 30, 2024
Since 2023, Griffin Catalyst has announced transformative gifts to three major health care institutions in Miami. Taken together, the support—totaling $125 million—represents an investment in the future of medical care and research in South Florida.
May 31, 2024
Launched in 2023, the Miami-Dade Innovation Authority leverages the power of competition and innovation to support start-ups, scale solutions to local problems, and improve lives.
May 20, 2024
In December 2023, Griffin Catalyst and the David Geffen Foundation announced a gift of $400 million to New York's Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK), one of the most renowned and advanced cancer research and treatment institutions in the world. This landmark gift—the largest donation to the institution in its nearly 150-year history—will allow MSK to significantly expand and upgrade its research, educational, and treatment facilities toward a singular goal: eradicating cancer.
February 12, 2024
The Lincoln Memorial has long been one of America’s most visited monuments and the scene of some of the defining moments of the last century. In time for the 250th anniversary of the country, a new expansion project will transform a massive, long-hidden space beneath the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall into an immersive museum, exhibition, and theater space, encouraging visitors to explore the story of one of America’s greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln, and to learn about the nation’s progress toward becoming a more perfect union.
December 27, 2023
The success of Operation Warp Speed in 2020, which brought forth an effective COVID-19 vaccine in less than twelve months, was not only a scientific breakthrough but also a demonstration of the power of an approach called an advanced market commitment (AMC). By creating a demand so that pharmaceutical companies could invest in production prior to proving the efficacies of vaccines, this successful approach accelerated time to market and highlighted the opportunity for a class of similar “market-shaping tools” to accelerate progress. To expand this approach, Griffin Catalyst and Schmidt Futures have partnered with the University of Chicago to launch

News & Announcements