Oak Foundation
Swiss Charitable Foundation
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Oak Foundation is a charitable foundation headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.
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 | |
| Formation | 1983 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Alan M. Parker |
| Headquarters | Geneva, Switzerland. |
President | Douglas Griffiths[1] |
| Website | oakfnd.org |
The foundation was founded in 1983 by billionaire Alan M. Parker, cofounder of the duty-free company DFS Group.[2][3]
In addition to its headquarters in Switzerland, the Oak Foundation has offices in Denmark, the UK, the US and Zimbabwe.[4]
The foundation makes grants in eight major program areas plus two country-level programs (in Denmark and Zimbabwe).[5] In 2025, the Oak Foundation reported making roughly one thousand grants in 33 countries totaling USD 383 million.[6]
The program areas are:
- Environment
- Climate
- Preventing Child Sexual Abuse
- Housing and Homelessness
- International Human Rights
- Issues Affecting Women
- Learning Differences
- Special Interest (trustee-driven grants outside the other program areas)
Historically, most of Oak's grant making has been for specific programs but has been shifting recently to making core, unrestricted grants to organizations.[7][8]
Oak Foundation's support for issues such as climate justice[9] and human rights has attracted criticism from conservative organizations[10] and governments such as Russia's, where in January 2026 it was announced that the Oak Foundation was classified as undesirable in Russia[11] under the Russian undesirable organizations law.