The History of the Foundation
by Laurie Kahn, Chair of the Creativity Foundation Junto
The Creativity Foundation was the brainchild of my father, Frank Kahn. I wasn’t there at the foundation’s birth, but some members of the foundation’s board (Trey Sunderland, Jim Pruett, and Mara Mayor) were there at the very beginning. It has been great fun listening to their stories, which helped me piece together the foundation’s early history.
Anyone who visits the Creativity Foundation website, or comes to one of the foundation’s events, soon discovers that the spirit of Benjamin Franklin hovers benevolently over the foundation’s Laureate and Legacy programs.
The connection to Benjamin Franklin goes back to my immigrant grandparents (from Poland) proudly naming their fourth and youngest child Benjamin Franklin Kahn. Frank, as he was called, was intrigued by his namesake. As a boy, he read lots of books about Benjamin Franklin, he went to the University of Pennsylvania, the university Franklin helped found, and was a member of their Ben Franklin Debating Society. He was a founding member of Friends of Franklin, a group of amateur and professional Benjamin Franklin enthusiasts who support Franklin scholarship, publish a newletter, and organize annual trips to places connected to Franklin’s life. Dad’s passion for Franklin was often contagious, sometimes overwhelming. Over the years, he collected any and all things with Benjamin Franklin’s likeness: from 18th century oil portraits and marble busts to 20th century Ben Franklin kites and bobble-headed toys. The office of the real estate investment trust he created was filled with Franklin objects. When he retired, they all moved home with him (a rather alarming prospect for my mother).
So when my father retired, it’s not surprising that he looked to Benjamin Franklin for inspiration. His first project was sculpting a bust of Benjamin Franklin, which took the better part of a year. One day, as he was putting the finishing touches on his sculpture, he told his friend and doctor, Trey Sunderland, that he had a new idea. “Frank told me he wanted to create a Junto,” Trey remembers, “and I had no idea what he was talking about. Did this have something to do with drugs?” My father told Trey he was referring to the Junto that Ben Franklin once created in Philadelphia, with "like minded aspiring artisans and tradesmen who hoped to improve themselves while they improved their community" (“junto” comes from the Latin “to join”). Ben Franklin’s Junto discussed the issues of the day. They also created civic institutions ranging from the city’s first fire department, to the nation’s first public library and first hospital. “Frank wanted to create his own Junto,” Trey recalls, “I thought it was a little nutsy, but he couldn’t be dissuaded.” When Dad invited Trey --who was doing path-breaking medical research on the human brain -- to become the first member of his Junto, Trey graciously accepted.
Others followed. Dad recruited music scholar Jim Pruett, who was the head of the music division of the Library of Congress, and anthropologist Wilton Dillon, from the Smithsonian. Dad’s ideas for the foundation slowly took shape in lengthy conversations with the first three members of his Junto. They spent hours discussing Franklin’s legacy and the Junto’s mission. “I can pinpoint the origin of the Laureate program,” Jim Pruett told me. “Your father was awed by the breadth of Franklin’s accomplishments, and he wanted to celebrate the lives and creative functions of extraordinary people, across a wide range of disciplines. He asked me what I thought. And I said, without thinking, ‘We’ll call them Laureates.’ And your father loved the idea.”
The plans for the organization gradually filled in: the Junto would create a non-profit corporation called the Benjamin Franklin Creativity Foundation; every year they would select a Creativity Laureate who was extraordinarily creative in the arts, sciences, humanities, or business; and there would be an annual Creativity Celebration honoring the Laureate. The Laureate would receive a cash award and a framed silver medallion with the bust of Benjamin Franklin. Most importantly, the event would feature an intimate Q&A exploring the nature of the Laureate’s creative process. “Frank wanted to achieve quality in all of our actions,” Jim Pruett recalls, “He wanted the event to have a certain stature.” The Junto needed a venue for their Creativity Celebration. Given the logistics of planning and publicizing an annual event on this scale, Dad suggested they partner with an established, high profile institution. The Junto agreed, and it was my father’s idea to approach Mara Mayor, who was head of the Smithsonian Associates.
“He met me in my office which was underground,” Mara Mayor recalls, “and he asked me if I was willing to go outside and sit on the mall. So we went up, ambled across the mall, and sat on a bench. And he pitched his idea. You’ve got to understand that everyone has program ideas. I’d get twenty program ideas in a day. But he had a hook. The event would not be a traditional interview about the Laureate’s accomplishments. Instead, it would focus on the creative process. How did the brains of these extraordinarily creative people work? What is creativity? I thought that was appealing. And I said OK.”
In 2002, Yo Yo Ma was chosen to be the first Creativity Laureate. The Creativity Celebration, a collaborative effort of the Creativity Foundation and the Smithsonian Associates, took place in the Smithsonian’s largest auditorium, with every single seat filled. One of Yo Yo Ma’s longtime friends talked with him on stage about the sources of his inspiration, his cross-cultural perspective, and his creative process. Yo Yo Ma was articulate, warm, and enthusiastic -- and he frequently picked up his instruments to illustrate the points he was making. There was a reception afterwards, for everyone who’d come. It was a magical evening. And those who’d been skeptical about Dad’s new venture (myself included) were won over.
2003’s Creativity Laureate, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, passed away before the celebration took place, so there was no celebration that year. During that hiatus, the Junto created the foundation’s Legacy Program, to recognize and reward extraordinarily creative young people, and bring them into a discussion about creativity with the Laureate, the Junto, and one another. “From the beginning,” Jim Pruett recalls, “Frank always said there had to be a Legacy program.” He wanted to carry forward the tradition of Benjamin Franklin’s legacy gift to Boston’s free grammar schools, a fund for awarding silver medals to outstanding students, a tradition that has continued from 1793 to the present.
Dad and his Junto initially made arrangements with three institutions that agreed to choose an extraordinarily creative young Legacy winner each year: in the arts (the Duke Ellington School for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C.), the sciences (the Intel Science Talent Search), and public service (the Philips Brooks House at Harvard). The young Legacy winners would attend the Laureate event at the Smithsonian, they would stay overnight at the Cosmos Club, and the following day, the Legacy winners and the Laureate would have an intimate Round Table discussion about creativity, the sources of inspiration, sustaining a creative life, and mentoring others. The Junto members weren’t sure the plan would succeed. Would young people from the arts, sciences, and public service want to talk about creativity with one another? Was the Round Table idea hopelessly romantic, or would it work?
Eric Kandel, winner of the Nobel Prize in physiology for his groundbreaking work on learning and memory at the cellular level, was the 2004 Creativity Laureate. At the Creativity Celebration at the Smithsonian, the public audience was totally engaged during the Q&A about Kandel’s creative process. Kandel, who’s as affable as he is brilliant, thoroughly enjoyed the evening. But he was even more enthralled with the Legacy winners and their Round Table discussion the next day. Their conversation ranged widely across the arts, sciences, and public service, touching on personal, artistic, and professional issues one faces in a creative life. The Legacy Program was off to a great start!
Since that year, the foundation has celebrated the creative lives of Laureates from many different disciplines. Each Laureate has added new dimensions to the foundation’s ongoing exploration of the creative process:
2005 - Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor,
2006 – cartoonist, playwright, and author Jules Feiffer,
2007 – entrepreneur Ted Turner,
2008 – actress Meryl Streep,
2009 – theoretical physicst Lisa Randall,
2010 – philanthropist Greg Mortenson,
2011 – anthropoligist and educator Johnetta Cole,
and this year our the Creativity Laureate will be the remarkable choreographer Mark Morris.
Over the years, new Legacy institutions have been added to the Creativity Foundation’s Legacy Program: the Friends of National History Day, the Longy School of Music, and the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance. The Junto has grown larger (Dudley Herschbach and Mara Mayor have joined it) and its average age has dropped as we’ve brought former Legacy winners on board, to share in shaping the future of the Creativity Foundation. Their energy and their ideas have been invaluable.
After my father passed away in 2007, the foundation’s office moved from Washington to Watertown, MA, and the administrative direction of the organization passed from the capable hands of Lorely Crewe-Halici to the equally capable hands of Susan Centofanti. I am now the Chair of the Junto, a lively and extremely interesting group that is doing its best to keep my father’s vision alive.
I’d like to think that his spirit, along with Benjamin Franklin’s, now hovers benevolently over the foundation, its Laureates, and its Legacy winners.
LAURIE KAHN, Chair of the Creativity Foundation, is the daughter of the foundation's founder, B. Franklin Kahn. As a filmmaker, Laurie brings the lives of compelling, unknown women to the screen. Her films have won major awards, been shown on Netflix and PBS primetime, broadcast worldwide, screened at prominent museums and film festivals, and used widely in classrooms and community groups. Laurie’s first film, A Midwife’s Tale (a doc/drama hybrid based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book) won a primetime EMMY for Outstanding Non-Fiction. Her documentary TUPPERWARE! won the George Foster Peabody Award and was nominated for the primetime EMMY for Nonfiction Directing. And her documentary Love Between the Covers received festival awards and five stars at Netflix. Many years ago, she taught philosophy at Harvard and Tufts. And she’s been a Resident Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University since 2004.