Teresa Heinz Kerry
brings an extraordinary range of experience and talent to the campaign trail
for her husband. She has been deeply involved with a number of issues that
are equally important to her husband, including the environment, children,
women's issues, and health care and wellness. She has been an outspoken
advocate for human rights, and a strong supporter of the arts.
Born in Mozambique, fluent in five
languages, she has combined compassion and common sense to become a force
for innovation and social progress as leader of one of the nation's largest
private foundations. After studying in South Africa and Switzerland, she
moved to the United States to work for the United Nations. In 1966, she
married Senator John Heinz, with whom she had three sons. Shortly after
celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary in 1991, she lost her husband in
a plane crash.
Turning down offers to run for her husband's Senate seat, she became chair
of The Howard Heinz Endowment and the Heinz Family Philanthropies. Under her
leadership, the Heinz foundations are widely known for developing innovative
strategies to protect the environment, improve education and the lives of
young children, broaden economic opportunity, and promote the arts.
She started advocating for women early, attending the first meeting of the
Women's Political Caucus in Pennsylvania in 1972. She established the
Women's Institute for a Secure Retirement in 1996 to educate women about
pensions, savings, and retirement security.
Their mutual interest in environmental issues brought Teresa and John
together. She was first introduced to John Kerry by Senator Heinz at an
Earth Day rally in 1990. In 1992, she ran into Kerry at the Earth Summit in
Rio de Janeiro, where she was representing U.S. non-governmental
organizations. In 1993 they began dating, and were married in the presence
of her three sons and his two daughters on Memorial Day weekend in 1995.
Teresa has received numerous awards and 10 honorary degrees for her many
works. In September of last year, she was presented with the Albert
Schweitzer Gold Medal for Humanitarianism, for her work protecting the
environment, promoting health care and education and uplifting women and
children throughout the world. She was recently elected a fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In addition to her three sons and two step-daughters, Teresa is the almost
inordinately (but understandably) proud grandmother of one grandchild.
Teresa Heinz Kerry is Chairman of the Heinz Family Philanthropies and The
Heinz Endowments. She is also the creator of the prestigious Heinz Awards,
an annual program recognizing outstanding vision and achievement in the arts,
public policy, technology, the economy, and employment, the environment, and
the human condition.
After the death of her husband, U.S. Senator John Heinz, in 1991, Teresa was
urged by national and Pennsylvania political leaders to seek election to his
Senate seat. She chose instead to assume direction of the family’s extensive
philanthropic operations, undertaking a major reorganization designed to
sharpen the foundations’ strategic focus. Today, the foundations she
oversees are widely known for developing innovative strategies to protect
the environment, improve education, enhance the lives of young children,
broaden economic opportunity and promote the arts.
Following on the work of her late husband, Teresa has championed the
education of women regarding the importance of pensions, savings, and
retirement security. Products of her support in this area have included the
publication of a nationally acclaimed book, Pensions in Crisis; a magazine
supplement, “What Every Woman Needs to Know About Money and Retirement,”
that was published in Good Housekeeping and US Airway’s Attaché magazine. In
a related area, she directed the development of the Heinz Plan to Overcome
Prescription Drug Expenses (HOPE), a program to make prescription drugs
affordable for older Americans. The Boston Globe hailed the plan as “a great
service for Massachusetts…presenting the state government with a credible
plan to provide its elderly citizens with prescription drugs.” In addition
to Massachusetts, similar “blueprints” have been studied or adopted in five
other states including Pennsylvania, Maine and Mississippi.
Heralded by the Utne Reader in 1995 as one of 100 American visionaries,
Teresa Heinz has long been recognized as one of the nation’s premier
environmental leaders. In 1995, she announced one of the largest grants ever
made to the environment, a $20 million gift to create the H. John Heinz III
Center for Science, Economics and the Environment, a unique attempt to bring
together representatives of business, government, the scientific community
and environmental groups to collaborate on the development of mutually
acceptable, yet scientifically sound, environmental policies. In addition to
serving on the Center’s board, she was one of 10 representatives from non-governmental
organizations attached to the U.S. Delegation to the U.N. Conference on
Environment and Development (Earth Summit) in Brazil in 1992. Since 1995,
she has sponsored annual conferences on Women’s Health and the Environment,
bringing women together with health, environmental and policy experts to
learn how the environment impacts their daily lives.
As a member of the Advisory Board for the Earth Communications Office, she
has helped to pioneer an internationally acclaimed public service campaign
promoting citizen environmental action in countries around the globe.
Similarly, she has sponsored The Environminute and The World ECO Minute, a
daily radio campaign reaching citizens in more than 100 countries, and
HealthWeek, a weekly PBS-produced program with a strong focus on women’s
health and the environment. She helped to conceptualize and launch Second
Nature, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to support the development
of an environmentally literate citizenry. Teresa Heinz was honored in 2003
with a special "Shades of Green" award presented by the Pittsburgh Green
Building Alliance for her vision and contributions to the greening of the
region. She is a co-founder and board member of the Alliance to End
Childhood Lead Poisoning and serves on the Advisory Council for the Center
for Children’s Health and the Environment at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
An advocate for human rights and economic, scientific and creative freedom,
Teresa Heinz was an original member and later a co-chair of Congressional
Wives for Soviet Jewry. Guided by a belief in thoughtful problem solving and
the power of informed debate, she has served on the board of the Carnegie
Corporation of New York and is a trustee of the Brookings Institution. She
also sits on the Visiting Committee for Harvard University’s Kennedy School
of Government and serves on the board of the American Institute for Public
Service (Jefferson Awards). In addition, in 2001, she was elected to be a
Fellow for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
She has been active in the past as a board member and trustee of schools in
Pittsburgh, Washington D.C., and elsewhere, including Georgetown University,
Phillips Exeter Academy and St. Paul’s School. She was a board member of
Family Communications, which produced Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and she
co-founded the National Council for Families and Television, an organization
that works to enhance the quality of prime time television for children by
facilitating discussion among members of the entertainment industry,
educators, parents and other interested groups.
Deeply inspired by the arts, she and her late husband began a collection of
late 16th and 17th-century Dutch, Flemish and German art, as well as a
collection of 19th and 20th-century American art. Because of her commitment
to the arts generally and American art in particular, Mrs. Heinz gave a
major grant in her late husband’s memory to the Yale Art Gallery, where she
is a Trustee of the Governing Board. She is a member of the Trustee’s
Council of the National Gallery of Art, and a member of the board of the
Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh.
Teresa Heinz, formerly Teresa Simões-Ferreira, is now married to U.S.
Senator John Kerry. She has three sons, John, André and Christopher Heinz.
Born and raised in Mozambique, she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in
romance languages and literature (French, Portuguese and Italian) from the
University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. In 1963, she
graduated from the Interpreters School of the University of Geneva. Fluent
in 5 languages, she later served as a full-time consultant to the United
Nations Trusteeship in New York City. She has been awarded honorary
doctorate degrees from Beloit College (Wisconsin), the University of
Massachusetts (Boston), Bank Street College of Education (New York), Pine
Manor College and Clark University (Massachusetts), as well as Carnegie
Mellon University, the Medical College of Pennsylvania, Drexel University,
Washington & Jefferson College and Carlow College, all of Pennsylvania.
