About Us
The Lawrence Foundation is a private family foundation focused on making grants to support environmental, human services and other causes.
Jeff Lawrence co-founded Trillium Digital Systems in 1988. Trillium was headquartered in Los Angeles, California and developed and licensed communications software to communications equipment manufacturers throughout the world. Intel Corporation acquired Trillium in August 2000. Jeff Lawrence and Diane Troth (husband and wife), established The Lawrence Foundation in 2000 with some of the proceeds received from the acquisition by Intel.
The Lawrence Foundation assets are currently over $4 million. We currently receive over 1500 grant requests per year and can only fund about 5 - 10% (by number, not dollars) of the requests that we receive.
As of the end of our December 2023 cycle, we have received over 23,000 grant applications since the inception of our foundation and approved over 825 of those applications for over $6 million. We have made both program and operating grants and in one case also directly sponsored, organized and hosted two workshops that brought together academics, non-profits and funders to explore the issue of environmental economics.
Mission
The mission of The Lawrence Foundation is support organizations that are working to solve pressing environmental, human services and other issues.
A background about our experience of forming and running a family foundation, as well as our views about the future direction of philanthropy is available below.