About — CS Fund

ABOUT CS FUND

CS Fund (CSF) was founded in 1981 by Maryanne Mott and Herman Warsh. They endowed CSF’s sister foundation Warsh-Mott Legacy (WML) in 1985.

CSF/WML are private family foundations that share common program areas, staff, and boards of directors. Proposals to the two foundations are considered collectively, and grants are made by both entities.

The boards of directors of CSF/WML also make recommendations to the donor-advised TOP Fund at the Marin Community Foundation, and the CSF Fund at Tides Foundation, for purposes of international grantmaking.

All together, CSF/WML have made over $90 million in grants.

FOUNDERS’ STATEMENT

We believe humanity is in mortal danger. This danger is rooted deep in human history; in an imperfect social order, in an ability to alter the natural system and its processes without immediately or directly experiencing the consequences, and in an insufficient wisdom to guide and govern that ability.

The danger is immediate, global and intensifying. Most easily perceived are its physical manifestations such as war, starvation, genetic damage, and resource depletion. However, these are but the overt signs of a far more complex system of individual and institutional habits, behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs that are moving us toward mass destruction. These include the ways in which different people think of their rights, of ownership, of security, of freedom; the ways in which they form political, religious, and social values; the stated and the assumed rights and responsibilities among individuals and between citizens and their institutions; and the ways they have learned to solve problems.

To continue these past practices is certain suicide. For the sake of survival, these overt dangers and the underlying beliefs that justify and shape them must be challenged and changed.

We believe diversity and the free exchange of ideas and information are critical to the health of society, enabling it to acknowledge and adapt in a productive, timely, and deliberate fashion to changing needs and circumstances. Dissent is honorable, desirable, and essential to responsible social evolution and, we believe, to survival.

We believe that humanity has the capacity and the choice to survive. To this end, within the CS Fund and in partnership through grants with others we will seek to expand our collective thinking beyond the habitual limits in order to discover and foster creative, imaginative, and effective strategies for survival.

The threats we seek to address are global threats that do not respect the boundaries that have historically separated peoples and their fates. Because we are bound by our beliefs, values, and experiences, we choose to live and work in our own country. However, we will direct our efforts in ways that both accept and respect the differences among all peoples and their social institutions in order to encourage recognition and solution of our common problems and peaceful resolution of our differences.

-Maryanne Mott and Herman Warsh, 1981