
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.
