About
Established in 1999
Established in 1999, The Howard G. Buffett Foundation’s mission is to catalyze transformational change to improve the standard of living and quality of life, particularly for the world’s most impoverished and marginalized populations. We use our resources to improve conditions and create change in the most difficult circumstances and geographies.
We invest our funding in four main areas: food security, conflict mitigation, combatting human trafficking, and public safety.
The Foundation continues to make smaller investments in cheetah and mountain gorilla conservation, where we have historical knowledge and relationships.
The Foundation does not accept unsolicited proposals, and we typically do not provide general operating support. December 31, 2045, is the final dissolution of the Foundation’s assets.
Leadership
Howard G. Buffett
Chairman & CEO
Howard G. Buffett is a farmer, photographer, businessman, sworn law enforcement officer, former elected official and Chairman and CEO of the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, one of the largest private charitable foundations in the United States. The Foundation invests primarily in global food security, conflict mitigation, combatting human trafficking and public safety.
Mr. Buffett farms his family farm in central Illinois and oversees a family farm in Nebraska. He oversees multiple foundation-operated research farms in Arizona, Illinois and Nebraska; two ranches in Arizona; a ranch and farm in New Mexico; and a farm in Texas.
Mr. Buffett served as Sheriff of Macon County, Illinois from September 2017 through November 2018 after serving as an Auxiliary Deputy for five years in Macon County and Shelby County in Illinois and serving in volunteer roles in the Christian County Sheriff’s Office in Illinois and Cochise County, Arizona.
Mr. Buffett currently serves on the corporate board of Berkshire Hathaway, Inc. and has served on a number of Fortune 500 boards. He has held several senior corporate executive positions; he was elected to serve as a Commissioner on the Douglas County Board in Nebraska from 1989-1992; and he served 20 years on the Commission on Presidential Debates.
He has been honored over the years for his leadership and contributions to agriculture, conservation, philanthropy and journalism, including receiving the highest honors bestowed on a foreign citizen by the governments of Mexico, Colombia, El Salvador, Rwanda and Ukraine for his work in each country.
Mr. Buffett has traveled to over 150 countries and authored 15 books on conservation, wildlife, and the human condition, including two New York Times bestsellers, 40 Chances: Finding Hope in a Hungry World and Our 50-State Border Crisis: How the Mexican Border Fuels the Drug Epidemic Across America. He is the executive producer of Virunga, an award-winning and Academy Award-nominated documentary about Africa’s oldest national park, and The River and the Wall, a documentary focused on the impact of a physical border wall on the Texas-Mexico border region.
View Howard’s writing and photography work.
Ann Kelly Bolten
President
Ann Kelly Bolten is President of the Howard G. Buffett Foundation. She supports the Foundation’s grantmaking strategy and philanthropic investments.
Prior to joining the Foundation full-time in 2011, Ann consulted the Foundation on its water and food security grantmaking as a partner and co-founder of Global Philanthropy Group (GPG). At GPG, she worked with corporations, high-net worth individuals and celebrity clients to better align their core competencies and philanthropic investment to maximize impact on a wide-range of social and policy issues.
Before GPG, Ann was a partner at Lake Partners Strategy Consultants, providing management consulting to a range of for-profit and non-profit clients on strategy, operations, public policy and investments.
Ann worked in private sector strategy consulting for a wide-range of for-profit and non-profit clients for nearly a decade before joining Lake.
Ann graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University and received her MBA with distinction from the Harvard Business School.
