The Seeds They Planted

​The original trustees of the MacJannet Foundation gathered for this photo about a year after the foundation’s birth in 1968. From left are Howard Cook, Ruth Snyder, Amos Booth, Jim Halsey, Donald and Charlotte, and Jean-Pierre Francillon (an attorney in Annecy). Not pictured is Lucia de Viti Pecorella, a friend of the MacJannets who lived in Rome.

By George Halsey

How a unique community became a unique foundation

On the 50th anniversary of the MacJannet Foundation, the question persists: How did a modest school that never enrolled more than 60 students at any one time and a summer camp that never housed more than 80 campers spawn a foundation whose influence today extends around the globe?

The long-run answer is: values. From the 1920s onward, the original MacJannet School outside Paris and the MacJannet Camps in the French Alps instilled the values of Donald and Charlotte MacJannet in their young clients. And when those children grew up, they applied those values in directions that far exceeded the MacJannets’ original vision. But the immediate catalyst for what became the MacJannet Foundation was hunger. It was the MacJannets’ mutual concern for war-ravaged orphans that planted the first seeds of what subsequently evolved into the MacJannet Foundation.

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