Brian Eule, who spent nearly a decade leading communications at the Heising-Simons Foundation, is returning to the organization as CEO with plans to use his journalism and communications background to help steer the organization through what he called “some of the most urgent and enduring challenges of our time.”
Eule’s appointment, announced last week, comes more than a year after he left to serve as managing director for “Frontline,” the PBS documentary series.
The Heising-Simons Foundation is a family foundation with offices in Los Altos and San Francisco, Calif., and assets totaling $872 million. It was established in 2007 by Elizabeth Simons, daughter of the late billionaire hedge fund manager James Simons, and her husband, Mark Heising. Since then, the foundation has awarded approximately $1.2 billion in grant funding, with a core grant-making strategy that focuses on climate and clean energy, education, human rights, science, and journalism.
Eule will start January 1, replacing Jennifer Shipp, who has been serving as acting CEO since last July. Shipp joined the foundation as general counsel in 2020, and will retain that title and add the role of chief operating officer in January.
Eule was previously director of journalism and communications at the foundation. He has been a staunch advocate for increasing funding for journalism, especially nonprofit newsrooms filling gaps left by traditional local news outlets that have been disappearing for decades nationwide. Eule also was a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and authored the 2009 nonfiction book Match Day: One Day and One Dramatic Year in the Lives of Three New Doctors, about three women completing their first year of hospital internships.
Eule said it was his passion for journalism and communications that led him to take on the role of managing director at PBS’s “Frontline,” which has been a Heising-Simons grantee since at least 2019. The experience of working in a fast-moving news environment where there often isn’t room to think about “unimportant stuff” will help inform how he leads at Heising-Simons, Eule said.
“It’s a transition from one dream job to another,” he said. “I absolutely love ‘Frontline.’ I think it’s incredibly important, has amazing leadership, and it’s been just a privilege to be there.”
Eule’s move from the news industry back to philanthropy comes as public media, climate, scientific research, and many of the other causes Heising-Simons champions are facing steep federal funding cuts. Boosting philanthropic funding in those areas is among Eule’s goals.
“To be at an organization, working on these issues with resources and with strength right now, feels very important to me,” he said.
While it is too early to lay out concrete grant-making strategies, Eule said one of his chief goals will be to work with grantees to figure out how the foundation can help lift some of the barriers and challenges nonprofits are facing. It’s about listening and asking lots of questions, he said. That investigative-listening approach is a key reason foundation leadership selected Eule to lead the organization.
“His lifelong experience as a journalist and communicator is exactly what we need in this moment,” Elizabeth Simons said in a statement.
His appointment also means grantees will be working with someone familiar to them. Eule said he feels like he’s coming home to a team of “incredibly intelligent and passionate” people. He said he was especially happy to hear that Shipp would remain as chief operating officer after serving as interim CEO because “she’s an incredibly talented leader.”
“It’s just a very special place,” he said. “It’s the honor of a lifetime to be able to come back.”
