The Town Creek Foundation was established in 1981 by Edmund “Ted” Stanley, a retired printing industry executive. In the subsequent years, our grantmaking ranged across a broad geographic and programmatic scope, but by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century we had focused our work on providing resources to help catalyze, support, and accelerate progressive changes in environmental policy and practice within the State of Maryland.
We’ve supported research and stakeholder engagement processes to develop strategies for confronting Maryland’s most important environmental challenges; organizing and advocacy campaigns to build public support for stronger environmental policies; and administrative advocacy and litigation to reduce pollution and hold polluters accountable. Through all of this, we’ve intended to help build a bigger, stronger, and more diverse base of environmentally engaged Marylanders.

In the Fall of 2010, the Town Creek Foundation Board of Trustees decided to ‘sunset’ the foundation over a ten-year period. With particular respect to restoring the Chesapeake Bay and transitioning Maryland to a low carbon economy, they believed that the urgency of the challenges and the promise of the opportunities were such as to warrant a full commitment from the Foundation. The scale of our grantmaking expanded accordingly, culminating in the Stanley Initiative awards that were approved in the Spring of 2019.

On December 31, 2019, the Town Creek Foundation will close its doors.

The Town Creek Foundation archives will be housed at the Ruth Lilly Special Collections and Archives at IUPUI University Library.