A History of the Foundation

At Phil and Crea Lintilhac’s Shelburne, Vermont, home there are two views of Lake Champlain. The view west from the back of the house is a breathtaking panorama of the lake and Adirondack Mountains that recalls the sublime landscape paintings of the 19th-century Hudson River School. Inside hangs a brilliantly colored topographical chart, called a bathymetric map, of the bottom of the lake. It is the first such record, and the product of an innovative partnership between Middlebury College and the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum, funded in part by the Lintilhacs’ family foundation. Completed in 2005, this chart will be an invaluable tool in addressing a host of issues affecting the biological health of the lake, and the cultural and economic viability of its surrounding communities. For Phil and Crea, both scientists, the view from the bottom is the view from above.

In 2005 the Lintilhac Foundation celebrated 30 years of charitable giving in Vermont. Established in 1975 by Claire Lintilhac, Phil’s mother, as the launching pad for a nurse-midwife program at Fletcher Allen Health Care in Burlington, the Foundation has grown to embrace a broad range of challenges and opportunities, today granting between $500,000 and $1 million a year to dozens of not-for-profit organizations working for the medical, educational, environmental, and social well-being of Vermont. Through locally focused, proactive philanthropy that is informed by research and a palpable love of home, the Lintilhacs have reached hundreds of thousands of Vermonters in the Foundation’s first 30 years, with many more yet to come.

The origins of the Lintilhac Foundation are in China and in birthing. Claire Lintilhac was born Claire Malcolm in 1899 in Honan Province, central China, to missionaries from Ontario. Her father was a doctor who became the port health officer for a coastal town that was the summer base for the Amer-ican navy in the region. The family moved frequently, and from an early age Claire became aware through her father’s practice of the stark poverty and severe medical afflictions common to much of rural China at the time. She followed her father into medicine and by 1920 became a traveling private-duty nurse, providing freelance medical care, and between 1920 and 1935 was the only nurse of this kind in northern and central coastal China. Much of her work was in remote areas and in midwifery, and she developed a supportive, nurturing approach to her patients and the birthing process. This was as much a matter of personal philosophy as of the necessity of minimal working conditions; in her memoirs China: A Personal World Claire wrote: “Technically, we can study and learn to travel to the moon, but emotionally each of us has to go through the gradual biological stages of growth with the limits that nature imposes.” The China of Claire’s youth was still a place where most women’s feet were bound, and from the very early stages of her nursing career she felt a special calling in helping women, particularly those who found themselves in difficult circumstances related to an unwanted or unplanned pregnancy. 

Often Claire worked for room and board only, though sometimes she was offered gifts as payment. “I didn’t think you got paid,” she said at one point, and the first time she completed work at a western hospital she was in for a surprise: “The doctor asked how much money he owed me,” she wrote in her memoirs. “I was covered with confusion, for I had never before asked for money and was embarrassed at the thought.” Today several of the gifts made to Claire in exchange for medical services are displayed in Phil and Crea’s Vermont home.

In 1936 Claire married Francis “Lin” Lintilhac, a British national born in China and a rising star with the British company Imperial Chemical Industries (I.C.I.). The newlyweds made their home in Shanghai, and four years later Phil was born. Lin worked his way up the ladder at I.C.I., eventually becoming head of the company’s China office. With the onset of World War II Claire and Phil left for New York City but Lin stayed in Shanghai. He was imprisoned in 1940 by the Japanese and not released until 1944, when, severely jaundiced, he traveled to New York to recover his health and be with his family, particularly the young son he hardly knew. The family returned together to China in 1945 when Lin was able to resume his post at I.C.I.

The Lintilhacs lived in the northern city of Tientsin for two years and then moved once again to Shanghai where Lin was promoted in 1948 to be a director of the firm. After the success of the Communist Revolution the following year, it became clear the Lintilhacs would need to leave China once and for all. Operating a capitalist venture such as I.C.I. was nearly impossible in the new order, the family’s social and business networks collapsed as westerners fled, and murky threats of harassment persisted as a police state took hold. In 1950, after months of patience and obstacles, Lin was finally able to obtain exit visas for the family. Still, they took every precaution to leave in secret, minimizing the risk that someone with a grudge would lodge an official complaint that could detain them. Phil, now 10, was pulled out of school in the middle of the day and the family quietly left their house completely intact. The three boarded a train north and caught the last tramp steamer out of northern China headed for Hong Kong. After seven days in difficult conditions they arrived, then three days later set sail for England.  It was the last Phil would see of China for fifty years. Claire never returned.   

The following year Lin accepted a job offer from Neil Starr, Claire’s brother-in-law and the founder of American Insurance Group (A.I.G.), and the Lintilhacs moved to New York where the company was headquartered. It was the first job change of Lin’s career, but he thrived and in a short time rose to become a vice president.

In the mid-1950s the Lintilhacs were introduced to Vermont. The town of Stowe was a kind of informal retreat for A.I.G. — Starr’s love of Vermont and of skiing led to the company’s purchase of what became Stowe Mountain Resort and he paid for the first ski lifts to be installed. The Lintilhacs frequently visited Stowe, as did many A.I.G. employees including Buck Freeman, another senior executive at the company and eventual founder of the influential Freeman Foundation.

Claire felt a kinship with Vermont right away. Says Phil, “Stowe embodied a little bit of her heritage that she’d always heard about in Ontario.” The pristine quality of Vermont made a strong impression on her as well, conveying a sense of health that contrasted with the basic conditions of rural Chinese life she had observed growing up and through her years as a private-duty nurse. “I still can’t take for granted the pure, cold water that comes out of the tap,” she wrote of Stowe in her memoirs, and at one point exclaimed to Phil and Crea “Here, you can eat the dirt!”         

In October 1957, Lin died suddenly at the age of 49. He’d had a hip replacement, one of the first such operations performed, and during the recovery suffered a fatal pulmonary embolism. Phil was at the time in his last year of boarding school in Connecticut, and when he finished the following June he and Claire decided to make a permanent move to Stowe, where they built a house at the foot of Mount Mansfield that is still in the family today.

Though Claire quickly became involved in the Stowe community it wasn’t until the early 1970s that she organized major philanthropic activity. A.I.G. was growing, and the company shares inherited from Lin were exploding in value. With her new wealth she established the Lintilhac Foundation in 1975 to address issues of women’s reproductive freedom, particularly the state of obstetrical care at the time which she found very troubling.

Claire’s top priority was to create and formalize a nurse-midwife program at Fletcher Allen Health Care. She was shocked at the prevalence of the drug-focused, clinical approach to birthing common in American hospitals and the near-complete absence of midwifery. Her life and work experience had taught her the humanitarian and economic advantages of midwifery for low-risk pregnancies, which amount to about 80% of all pregnancies.

In Stowe Claire had established a friendship with her neighbor Dr. John Van S. Maeck, chief of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Fletcher Allen, and the two had a shared philosophy about the benefits of midwifery. Working together they were able to leverage his position at the hospital with her passion and financial support for the cause, and successfully convinced the hospital administration of the need to introduce nurse-midwives. This was no small task, as the American medical establishment at the time generally dismissed midwifery.

In 1969 Claire personally funded the hiring of the first nurse-midwives at Fletcher Allen, and in 1976 the newly minted Foundation provided major seed funding for the establishment of a formalized, four-person, 24-hour nurse-midwife program. Kathy Keleher was among the first staff midwives brought on in the 1970s and eventually became director of the program. “For Claire, it was a human way to treat a human event,” she says. “She had an ultimate respect for motherhood and the strength of family, and in working towards a sense of connectedness in women’s lives. She and Dr. Maeck felt a responsibility to bring midwifery to the hospital, to where the babies were being born. They were very clear they wanted the midwives working with the physicians, and the hospital supported it.” 

Since 1976 the program has expanded and flourished: today midwifery is an accepted, popular option for low-risk pregnancies in Vermont, with about 300 babies delivered annually by midwives at the hospital. In 2004 Fletcher Allen, with a $500,000 grant from the Foundation, completed construction of a new birthing center which was named for Claire.

With the creation of the Foundation Claire also began to support other organizations and causes advocating women’s health and reproductive freedom such as Planned Parenthood, the Lund Family Center, and the Visiting Nurse Association. Her experience in China had instilled in her a commitment to compassion for women, sometimes in desperate circumstances, and that was the signature of the Foundation’s first decade. Says Phil, “She had a perspective that enabled her to look through and past some of the notions that a lot of the people around her had simply because they had never been exposed to the kind of depredation she had seen.”

Claire also financed several projects in Stowe, such as her idea for the creation of a walkway on the town’s Mountain Road that would keep pedestrians at a safe distance from traffic. The path eventually became the town’s famed four-season recreational path, one of the first of its kind in the country and a major attraction for locals and tourists. Claire died peacefully in Stowe in 1984, beloved in her community and successful in expanding options for generations of Vermont women.

Phil and Crea, married in 1983 and living in Vermont, assumed control of the Foundation after Claire’s death. Today the two continue to oversee most functions, along with Crea’s father, metallurgist Raeman Sopher, who is the Foundation’s third officer. With their extensive backgrounds in science (Phil is a professor of plant biology at the University of Vermont; Crea holds a master’s in geology and has done post-graduate work in oceanography), Phil and Crea worked to expand the Foundation’s scope to address local scientific, environmental, and educational issues. Their first major project was reinstituting lake research at the University of Vermont. Recalls Phil, “One of the things that really changed the direction of the Foundation was Crea’s idea. The university had lost its research vessel on the lake. She remembered some of the interesting things that had been happening with lake studies, and saw that there was a big opportunity if they could just get the boat back. So we approached the university and it was a little bit unusual... usually it’s the grantee who approaches the funder and it took a little bit of talking to get them interested. But in the end we bought the new boat and it started the whole lake research program again.”  

This entrepreneurial spin on philanthropy and a shared philosophy of working with existing institutions to identify and reach common goals quickly became the modus operandi of the Foundation. Explains Crea, “It’s a question of determining what people’s interests and priorities are, and looking for a match.”

A case in point is Shelburne Farms, the extraordinary 1,400-acre former agricultural estate of Dr. William Seward and Lila Vanderbilt Webb that today operates as a multifaceted environmental education center. In 1972 descendents of the Webbs formed a non-profit organization to preserve the Olmsted-designed landscape, including its stunning ensemble of historic barns and residences, and apply its resources to teach and demonstrate best practices in stewardship and conservation. Critical to achieving this goal was repurposing Shelburne House, the grand 1887 lakeside residence of Dr. and Mrs. Webb. They transformed the “Big House” into an inn and restaurant that would generate revenue to support the new organization’s educational ambitions. Noting that the most immediate need was for a new roof for the enormous house, Phil and Crea approached the farm and proposed to pay for one. This gift in 1985, coupled with a lead gift the next year towards the complex undertaking of rehabilitating the National Historic Landmark property, were, in the words of Farms president Alec Webb, “two of the key events that allowed the vision of the non-profit to take hold and turn it into an enterprise that could develop programming into the future.” Since then the Foundation has supported program development, the transformation of the great Farm Barn into an education space, landscape improvements, and several other initiatives. Today over 120,000 people participate in Shelburne Farms programs each year.

In the past two decades this collaborative approach has resulted in dozens of major, innovative projects including the bathymetric map, the Vermont Public Radio program Switchboard, the Student Matinee Series at the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts, microscopy research at Crea’s alma mater Skidmore College, numerous water and wildlife studies, land conservation initiatives, and many, many others. In the early 1990s the Foundation successfully worked for and funded the implementation of French language study in the Shelburne and South Burlington Public Schools, where it was offered for close to a decade. Additionally the Foundation annually supports over 100 smaller projects and organizations across the state, from artisan guilds to ice hockey teams to hunger-relief programs. Nearly all its gifts stay in Vermont.

In recent years the Foundation, through Crea in particular, has devoted increasing time, energy, and resources to advocacy for clean water, renewable energy, and social justice. “One of the big reasons we’re a Vermont foundation and will remain a Vermont foundation is because what happens in a small state can resonate across the country,” she explains. Working with organizations such as the Vermont Public Interest Research Group (VPIRG) and Conservation Law Foundation (CLF), Crea attends legislative committee meetings in Montpelier, contributes opinion pieces to local newspapers, and actively participates in the debate on issues such as stormwater regulations, license renewal for the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, and the development of wind power. For Crea it is an important new direction for the Foundation and an investment in Vermont’s future: “I think we have excellent advocacy in this state but it is grossly under-funded,” she says, “It’s not a level playing field between the business community, the utilities, and the public. With a little money and a lot more advocacy, we can go a long way.”

As the Lintilhacs have seized upon new interests and broadened the Foundation’s mandate they have not forsaken Claire’s original vision. “Women’s reproductive freedom is a bedrock value of this foundation,” says Crea, and in addition to funding the new birthing wing at Fletcher Allen the Foundation continues to support Planned Parenthood, The Howard Center, and other organizations whose priorities they share.

Thirty years after the Foundation began it shows no signs of slowing down. Crea’s advocacy work finds her regularly participating in statehouse committee meetings when the legislature is in session. The Lintilhacs serve or have served on the boards of the UVM School of Natural Resources, Shelburne Farms, Conservation Law Foundation, Shelburne Museum, and the Vermont Public Interest Research Group. The Foundation recently financed the broadcast of the independent radio news program Democracy Now! on central Vermont’s WDEV-FM, adding a feisty and influential new voice to the state’s media spectrum. 

A fine-tuned balance of compassion, science, curiosity, and a love of Vermont is constant now through two generations of Lintilhac philanthropy. As the challenges facing society become increasingly complex, these qualities prove increasingly effective in meeting them.