The Pew Charitable Trusts is a major philanthropic organization based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The Pew Memorial Foundation, the predecessor of the Pew Charitable Trusts, was organized on May 15, 1948, by J. Howard Pew, Joseph Newton Pew, Jr., Mary Ethel Pew, and Mable Pew Myrin. The Pew family possessed one of the leading industrial fortunes in Pennsylvania, based upon the Sun Oil Company, founded by Joseph Newton Pew, Sr. in the late nineteenth century.

The Pew Memorial Foundation was endowed with 880,000 shares of Sun Company stock. At its first meeting, the board of directors designated four areas of giving: scientific, charitable, religious, and educational. In 1949 the Foundation inaugurated a program to assist historically black colleges. Subsequently, it made large donations to Cornell University, the Hoover Institution, Bucknell University, Grove City College (J. Howard Pew's alma mater), Dickinson College, and Ursinus College. These grants provided support for fellowships and chaired professorships in science and engineering, as well as for programs designed to explore the relationship between public policy and free-market economics.

Between 1956 and 1970, the Pew Charitable Trusts were administered by the Glenmede Trust Company. When J. Howard Pew and his sister, Mabel Pew Myrin, died in 1971; the Trusts diversified their portfolio in response to government regulation and began issuing grants which were valued at 5 percent of the market value of its investments. By 1975 this total had risen to $33 million per year. This profoundly changed the nature of the Trusts, and in the 1970s, it hired professional staff and formalized its grant application procedures.

Traditionally, the Trusts, now America's second-largest private foundation, have concentrated their resources in the Philadelphia region, assisting secondary schools, libraries, seminaries, and hospitals. In recent decades, however, they have adopted a proactive approach to grantmaking. They now initiate programs and identify agencies capable of implementing them. In the 1980s, Pew launched two new programs, the Health Policy and the Biomedical Scholar Programs. These initiatives have funded important work in medical education, biochemistry, AIDS research, dentistry, and veterinary medicine.

The Pew Research Center began as the Times Mirror Center for the People & the Press in 1990, a research project of the Times Mirror newspaper company, which conducted regular polls on politics and policy issues. Upon becoming the program's sponsor in 1996, Pew Charitable Trusts renamed it the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. In 2004, Pew Charitable Trusts created the Pew Research Center to encompass the project and other information initiatives including the Project for Excellence in Journalism; Pew Internet & American Life Project; Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life; Pew Hispanic Center; and Pew Global Attitudes Project. The center "conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, content analysis and other data-driven social science research."[1]

Citations: [1] "About Pew Research Center." Pew Research Center. Accessed October 18, 2021. https://www.pewresearch.org/about/.