The Laura and John Arnold Foundation (LJAF) was established in 2008 by Laura and John Arnold. Having worked as a hedge fund manager for 17 years, at the age of 38, John Arnold decided to retire and dedicate all his time to philanthropy. The fundamental objective of the LJAF is “to produce substantial, widespread and lasting reforms that will maximize opportunities and minimize injustice in our society.” The way it sets out to accomplish this is by understanding current challenges and dealing with them at the root “through innovative, multi-disciplinary solutions.” It is hoped that a culture will be developed in which people are faced with the best environment in which to “succeed and prosper”; becoming “responsible and compassionate toward their communities and society as a whole.”
The Foundation “systematically examines areas of society in which underperformance, inefficiency, concentrated power, lack of information, lack of accountability, lack of transparency, lack of balance among interests or other barriers to human progress and achievement exist.” Thereafter the LJAF applies a business-based problem-solving approach by looking at all potential strategies to develop solutions.
The approach of the Foundation is “not limited to what has been tried, or even what has been proposed, in the past.” Rather the LJAF tries to develop unique untried methods as a way of “igniting a renaissance of new ideas and approaches applied to persistent problems.”