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Founding Support

Frederick S. Pardee’s Founding Support

Frederick S. Pardee’s support helped make the University of Denver the institutional home for International Futures.

His philanthropy created the conditions for a long-running modeling project to become a research center, and later an institute, with the capacity to develop open-source tools, publish long-term analysis, train students and researchers, and work with partners on questions about the global future.

Continue reading for a full history

Support that created an institutional home

The Pardee Institute’s history is closely tied to Frederick S. Pardee’s belief that people need better ways to think about the future.

In the early 2000s, Mr. Pardee met Dr. Barry B. Hughes at RAND in Santa Monica. Hughes had been developing International Futures (IFs), a computer simulation system for studying long-term national, regional, and global change. Their shared interest in using data, systems analysis, and long-range thinking to improve understanding of the human condition led to a partnership that shaped the future of IFs at the University of Denver.

Mr. Pardee’s support helped establish the Frederick S. Pardee Center for International Futures at DU’s Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs. The Center gave IFs a durable institutional home and created space for a team to strengthen the model, expand its applications, and bring long-term analysis to broader research and policy communities.

Building capacity around IFs

The significance of Mr. Pardee’s support was not limited to the founding gift. It helped create the conditions for sustained work around IFs.

In the Center’s early years, support from Mr. Pardee helped fund major model development and the Patterns of Potential Human Progress series. The five-volume series used IFs to examine global challenges in poverty, education, health, infrastructure, and governance. Together, the volumes showed how an integrated model could help users examine development pathways across connected systems rather than treating each issue in isolation.

Mr. Pardee also supported the physical and organizational capacity the Center needed to grow. In 2009, his support helped create an annex to Ben Cherrington Hall, giving the team space for research, collaboration, videoconferencing, and presentations. Annual endowment support, along with continued institutional support from the Korbel School, helped sustain the Center’s work over time.

That durable support mattered because IFs is not a static tool. It requires ongoing model development, data updates, documentation, training, and research. Mr. Pardee’s support gave the Center room to invest in the infrastructure behind long-term analysis.

Sustaining the next phase of Pardee’s work

In 2023, the Center became the Pardee Institute for International Futures, reflecting its growth as a research organization and its expanding contribution to the University of Denver’s research community.

In 2024, a gift from Mr. Pardee’s estate brought his total giving to DU to just under $25 million. That continued support strengthens the Institute’s ability to invest in tools, datasets, model development, training, and public-facing applications.

The Institute’s work today remains anchored in IFs. As an open-source, integrated forecasting platform, IFs helps users compare plausible futures under different assumptions. It does not predict a single future. It helps researchers, students, policymakers, and partner organizations examine how choices and structural trends may shape outcomes across human, social, natural, economic, and geopolitical systems.

Mr. Pardee’s support helped make that work possible at DU. It allowed the Institute to grow beyond a single project or partnership and build a broader body of work around open-source modeling, scenario analysis, research, teaching, and policy-facing engagement.

A broader commitment to long-range thinking

Mr. Pardee’s support for DU was part of a broader philanthropic commitment to institutions that help people think carefully about the future.

He also supported future-oriented centers and schools at Boston University and RAND, including Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, RAND’s Frederick S. Pardee Center for Longer Range Global Policy and the Future of the Human Condition, and the Pardee RAND Graduate School.

He also supported an International Futures installation at the African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg, helping bring IFs-based learning to students preparing for future leadership across Africa.

Together, these efforts point to a consistent purpose: supporting institutions that help people examine long-range questions with greater evidence, structure, and imagination.

Key moments in Frederick S. Pardee's support

2006 | Frederick S. Pardee’s support helps establish the Frederick S. Pardee Center for International Futures at the University of Denver.
2009 | His support helps create an annex to Ben Cherrington Hall, giving the growing team space for research, collaboration, and presentations.
2013 | The University of Denver awards Mr. Pardee an honorary PhD.
2023 | The Center becomes the Pardee Institute for International Futures.
2024 | A gift from Mr. Pardee’s estate brings his total giving to DU to just under $25 million.

Supporting sister centers

Mr. Pardee has also provided support to build or enhance a number of other institutions that are thus siblings of our own Institute. In 2000 he provided the support to establish Boston University's Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future. In 2013 he provided another gift for the creation of the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Global Studies School.

In 2001, he provided a gift to RAND that created the Frederick S. Pardee Center for Longer Range Global Policy and the Future of the Human Condition. With additional subsequent funding to RAND, he greatly strengthened what is arguably the premier policy-oriented Ph.D. program in the country, the renamed Frederick S. Pardee RAND Graduate School.

Charitable work

Recently, Mr. Pardee has funded an International Futures installation at the African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg, a secondary education institution that prepares an elite cadre of students from across Africa for future careers of leadership and service. Along with the Frederick S. Pardee Library for the Future of Africa on campus, the school now hosts the Pardee Center for African Futures, which offers interactive, hands-on training in the IFs model to help young scholars think about the future in data-driven, integrated ways.