How Grant Oliphant is reshaping philanthropy in San Diego

Grant Oliphant became CEO of the Conrad Prebys Foundation, with its $1.13 billion in assets, in 2022. His trajectory into philanthropy, unbeknownst to him at the time, began on April 4, 1991. It was the day United States Senator from Pennsylvania John Heinz died in a plane crash. Oliphant, then 30, was Heinz’ press secretary. He was supposed to have been aboard the twin-engine Piper Aerostar airplane that collided with a helicopter.

“I had made a decision to go with him on that trip, and at the very last minute, I decided that I wouldn’t,” Oliphant says. “Thinking about the plane crash is sobering,” he adds. He’s sitting for an interview in an airy, pristine office within the Prebys Foundation’s headquarters in Little Italy. He’s dressed in a dark suit and white shirt with prominent blue buttons, sans a tie. In conversation, it’s plain to see he is contemplative and reflective, while simultaneously empathetic and likeable. 

“I had a newborn son and I was such a homebody,” Oliphant says. “When John used to do these trips, it was pretty grueling, and I didn’t want to be gone for days on end, so I decided instead I would just meet him in Philadelphia. It was on that leg that he was killed.”

His death was surreal. Oliphant notes Heinz was just 52 and a widely liked moderate Republican who worked with both sides of the political aisle. Many believed he was on track to be a presidential candidate. If Heinz had won the office, Oliphant says he would have proudly served on his staff.

When the senator died, his widow, Teresa Heinz, offered Oliphant a job at her foundation. “Because I was stupid, I said no,” Oliphant says. He didn’t know at the time what a foundation did. Instead, he went into corporate public relations.

A couple of years later, Teresa offered him a job as communications director for the Heinz Endowments and her family foundation. This time, he said yes in a heartbeat. “I cared about big issues out in the world,” Oliphant says. “That’s what I loved about being on Capitol Hill.”

John and Teresa, he says, were people who went down to the Amazon Rainforest and came back full of ideas about using market forces to address the problems of the Amazon.

“You don’t get to have those conversations when you’re in a corporate PR shop,” Oliphant says. “I really missed that. Once I was working for Teresa, I saw how she used her philanthropies as an opportunity to focus on these really big issues in the world.”

He was born in Adelaide, Australia. His mother’s Dutch family emigrated there after World War II left Holland in shambles. His father is Pat Oliphant, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist. After graduating from Swarthmore College, Oliphant started up a short-lived political magazine in Washington, D.C., where he dabbled in talk radio. He’s also written a novel, a thriller called Ring of Years.

Oliphant spent nearly three decades working in philanthropy in Pennsylvania, at both the private Heinz Endowments and the public/community-based Pittsburgh Foundation. After all that time on the East Coast, he saw the move to San Diego as an opportunity to be on the ground floor of what he saw as a start-up organization.

Until his death in 2016, Conrad Prebys, who became wealthy as a property developer, made his own philanthropic decisions. His first $1 million gift was in support of the Boys & Girls Clubs of East County. He donated $20 million to create an endowment at San Diego State University that annually supports 150 students. In June 2015, Prebys donated $100 million to the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute. After his death, the Blackstone Group bought the Prebys apartment portfolio for $1 billion in 2021. That transaction drew mixed reviews in affordable housing circles and became the monetary bulk of the Prebys Foundation’s assets. 

When Oliphant came on in 2022, he expanded the foundation’s staff and board. “We had to grow and we had to diversify,” he says. “We’ve done that beautifully. Now, we’ve got an incredible team here. We talk about the presence we want to have in the community, and we’ve been methodically working toward that.”

The Prebys Foundation, with its offices now in downtown San Diego, has certainly set sights on the urban core. It funded a $300,000 study looking to get specific ideas about how to reimage land use around the age-worn City Hall and the Civic Theatre. The foundation also paid $40 million to purchase the Well Fargo Plaza at 401 B Street to help “signal a commitment to helping downtown deliver on its potential,” Oliphant says.

Down at the Mexico border, the foundation has invested $1 million into research and advocacy to end pollution in the Tijuana River Valley. “I was flabbergasted that the border communities have to put up with that public health issue,” Oliphant says. “Yes, we wanted to take on harder issues like that with our philanthropy.”

He says the organization is careful about wandering into partisan political territory. All over San Diego County, Oliphant says the foundation funds arts, medical research, programs that support youth issues, and much more. More than $55 million was granted via 214 gifts in 2024. Important in all funding conversations, Oliphant says, is a message that diversity is imperative, but need not become politicized.

“Diversity has become kind of a context-dependent word,” he says. “We talk about that, and equity, and we talk about inclusion — but we don’t use the shorthand DEI as a term. Why? It’s become something that means different things to different political camps.”

Oliphant believes most Americans are open to the idea that everyone should have access to opportunity. “In our philanthropy, we’re just trying to focus on delivering on the American promise,” he says.