The Pew Charitable Trusts - Current Concerns

Current Concerns

The Trusts' public policy areas include the environment, state policy, economic policy and health and human services.

The Trusts, with other groups, backed an effort to create marine protected areas in the Pacific Ocean, near the Mariana Islands. The protected area was officially designated in January 2009, and includes the Mariana Trench, the deepest ocean canyon in the world. Another marine protected area that the Trusts and other groups sought to protect is Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument which was protected by President Bush in 2006.

Pew's environmental portfolio is designed to help meet what they view as one of the seminal challenges of our time: saving the natural environment and protecting the rich array of life it supports.

The aim is to strengthen environmental policies and practices in ways that produce significant and measurable protection for terrestrial and marine systems worldwide. In doing so, Pew works to advance scientific understanding of the causes and consequences of environmental problems, design innovative policy solutions to these problems and mobilize public support for their implementation.

Efforts are focused on reducing the scope and severity of three major global environmental problems:

1. Destruction of the world's oceans, with a particular emphasis on marine fisheries.
2. The loss of large wilderness ecosystems that contain a great part of the world's remaining biodiversity.
3. Changes to the Earth's physical and biological systems linked to the buildup of greenhouse gases that are altering the world's climate.

The Trusts also funds the Pew Research Center, the third-largest think tank in Washington DC, after the Brookings Institution and the Center for American Progress.

The Trusts have worked closely with the Vera Institute of Justice on issues related to state correction policies in the public safety performance project. In 2008, the Pew reported that more than one in 100 adults in the United States is in jail or prison, an all-time high. The cost to state governments is nearly $50 billion a year and the federal government $5 billion more. The report compiled and analyzed data from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics and Bureau of Prisons and each state's department of corrections.

Pew reported in 2009 that "explosive growth in the number of people on probation or parole has propelled the population of the American corrections system to more than 7.3 million, or 1 in every 31 U.S. adults." "One in 31: The Long Reach of American Corrections" examined the scale and cost of prison, jail, probation and parole in each of the 50 states, and provides a blueprint for states to cut both crime and spending by reallocating prison expenses to fund stronger supervision of the large number of offenders in the community.

"Based on data, science, and non-partisan research, the Pew works to reduce hidden risks to the health, safety, and well-being of American consumers." One program, the Pew Scholars Program in the Biomedical Sciences, is intended to support promising early and mid-career scientists investigating human health, both basic and clinical. The awards provide flexible support ($240,000 over a four-year period). Grantees are encouraged to be entrepreneurial and innovative in their research.

The trust also helped fund the Gospel and Our Culture Network, which published books such as Missional Church: A vision for the sending of the Church in North America.