For a number of years prior to his death in April 1998,Harry W. Bass, Jr. administered two non-profit foundations. The first, the Harry Bass Foundation, had been created by his father, Harry Bass, Sr., in order to give support to a number of Dallas area charitable and religious institutions as well as hospitals and museums. 

A second foundation, the Harry W. Bass, Jr. Research Foundation, was created in 1991as an extension of the younger Mr. Bass ’great interest during his lifetime in the study of numismatics, and in addition also engaging in significant philanthropic endeavors in several different areas. 

Since his death, these two earlier foundations have been joined to form the Harry W. Bass Jr. Foundation, with a continuing interest in helping persons primarily in the North Texas area through funding special projects of other non-profit 501(c)(3) endeavors. 

The original Foundation was funded from proceeds of family oil interests and subsequent investments. The new merged Foundation assets have continued to grow with the sale of a portion of the coin collection Mr. Bass gave to his Research Foundation. 

The current president of the Harry W. Bass Jr. Foundation is the founder ’s widow, Doris Bass. She is joined in leadership by two other Trustees, Michael Wylie of Dallas, and Michael Calhoun of Houston. David Calhoun serves as Executive Director of the Foundation. 

The Foundation has a primary interest in the welfare of children and youth, and thus makes grants primarily in the following areas: education, arts and culture, human services, religion and science. 

Under the terms of its charter, the Harry W. Bass Jr. Foundation can distribute grants only to qualified public entities or 501(c)(3) charities. The Foundation neither lends nor grants money to individuals. 

Under the grant areas mentioned earlier, grant applications for specific programs or projects, capital projects or (less often) general operations are considered. Endowment gifts are rare. The Foundation also considers program-related investments as part of its grant-making activities. 

The Foundation strives to be responsive to the needs of all eligible organizations and considers grant requests of any amount. There is no formal application form. Grant requests are accepted at any time through- out the year. Each requesting organization is limited to one application within a twelve-month period. Requests are usually processed within three to four months. For more information, contact the Foundation for Grant Application Guidelines. 

Please address Grant correspondence to: 

Grants Department
Harry W. Bass Jr. Foundation
4809 Cole Ave., Suite 252
Dallas, Texas 75205 

214-599-0300
214-599-0405 (fax) 

 

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Harry W. Bass, Jr. -- The Man Behind the Foundation 

Harry W. Bass, Jr. was born in 1927 in Oklahoma City, the elder of two sons of Harry Bass, Sr. When he was five, the family moved to Dallas, where he grew up and which became his home for the rest of his life. Following a short stint in the Navy as a young man, which had interrupted his college career, he returned to the Dallas area to begin a career in the oil business. 

As a young man, Mr. Bass developed an interest in politics, and during the 1950 ’s became the Dallas County Chairman for the Republican Party. Working on its Executive Committee, he was the first to use mainframe computers in Dallas to canvass the voting population and bring about the rebuilding of a two-party system in Dallas County. He went on to attend the Republican National Convention in San Francisco in 1964,and helped elect George H. Bush to the U.S. Senate. 

During his lifetime, Mr. Bass exercised his exceptional vision, management and leadership skills in many different areas. In the late 1950’s he became interested in skiing, before the sport became so popular and travel was so convenient. From his own skiing experiences in Aspen, Colorado he decided that Vail, Colorado would be the perfect place to build a world-class ski resort, and to that end spent the next several years bringing that to fruition, along with a new and undeveloped area a few miles west, called Beaver Creek. Both resorts today show the vision and creative leadership, which he invested in them in those early years. 

Mr. Bass was a collector and connoisseur of rare and beautiful objects of art throughout his life. He traveled around the world to China, Russia, England, and Europe during his life, and brought home many fine objects of art. He loved not only the collecting but also learning about the art and the countries, and the heritage, which had created it. This lifelong love of learning and collecting came to a unique focus, as he began collecting coins in the late 1960 ’s. 

Over the last thirty years of his life, he assembled one of the most complete collections of U.S. gold coins ever brought together by either an individual or a museum. In those three decades he collected over 8,000 U.S. gold coins, for he specialized in their die varieties (the die changes that occurred with use and aging), and upon his death left his collection to the his Foundation. To become a world-class expert in this very specialized area, he also assembled a private numismatic library of over 10,000 items. His Core Collection of U.S. Gold is now on display at the American Numismatic Association Museum in Colorado Springs. 

His leadership abilities and expertise in the field of numismatics also led him to be elected President of the internationally recognized American Numismatic Society for a number of years. He also pioneered the use of computers with coin collecting, and an index to most numismatic literature in the last century to lookup on the Internet, which has opened new vistas of numismatic knowledge around the world. 

Mr. Bass was very much a Renaissance man, achieving the best in whatever his varied interests led him, and mastering a number of different fields of expertise. That same drive toward perfection in his personal endeavors also led him to reach out to help others, and make their life better as well. Thus it was that the Harry Bass Foundation was formed.