Crea’s Lintilhac Foundation:
Family Funds and Inherited Values

“If you want to accomplish anything, it’s important that you focus,” says Crea Lintilhac. The Lintilhac Foundation focuses on issues valued by her and the foundation’s creator, Crea’s mother-in-law Claire Lintilhac.  Under Crea’s watchful direction, the Lintilhac Foundation dispenses small annual grants to dozens of local community initiatives and major funding for nurse-midwives, birthing and breastfeeding programs at Fletcher Allen, as well as alternative energy development and environmental studies at the University of Vermont.

Despite dispensing $500,000 to $1,000,000 a year in grant funds, Crea does not think of herself as a philanthropist.  “It’s a means to an end,” she says. “The Lintilhac Foundation is really a composite of all the work people do in their communities.”

In 1976, Crea Sopher was doing graduate work in science education and geology at UVM; her roommate was a botany student, who came home one day with news of her professor’s bad car accident. She wanted company going up to the hospital to visit him. So Crea went with her to Fletcher Allen, and the professor in bed with a broken leg was Phil Lintilhac. Phil’s mother Claire was also visiting, and the three quickly engaged in conversation about laboratory testing standards and treatment at the hospital. 

Three months later, Phil called Crea and asked her out on a date—to Shelburne Farms to hear a piano concert.  Phil and Crea were married in 1983 at the Stowe Community Church. “Claire invited everyone in the town,” Crea recalls with a laugh. “The whole fire department, everyone, and all these Chinese people she knew from New York. After the service we went to the Stowehof for the reception outside, and there was this absolutely huge electrical storm, lightning crashing everywhere, and the Chinese kept saying, ‘Very auspicious, very auspicious.’”  An avid amateur pianist herself, Crea now lives with Phil in a house on Lake Champlain surrounded by the Shelburne Farms grounds. It’s a sunny home filled with light woodwork, bright artwork and a Yamaha grand piano.  They have three children: Louise, 27; Will, 23; and Paul, 21, a student at Dartmouth.

Crea was born in Ohio, where her mother’s family roots are deep in heartland farms. Crea’s mom had an abiding dedication to women’s reproductive health services. “She was from a very religious Protestant family, sober farm types. If it was Sabbath and there was a hailstorm coming, they wouldn’t go out to harvest,” Crea says, quite serious. “So it was interesting that she volunteered at Planned Parenthood, interesting that Mother was part of a community supporting women’s health. But they’d all come from big families.”

Her mother’s apparently contradictory values left Crea with one of her most important assets—tolerance—and an ability to listen to divergent voices with an intensity so powerful it hums. “I was raised by Republicans and religious people, but I’m a Democrat-Progressive-Atheist,” she says. “I’m very comfortable hearing different points of view.”

Moving around a lot through her youth also instilled Crea with flexibility. Her father Raeman Sopher worked as a metallurgist, first for the Battelle Memorial Institute, a nonprofit scientific research organization in Columbus, Ohio, and then at General Dynamic’s Electric Boat division in Connecticut. Crea’s mom, a homemaker, had her hands full getting Crea and her two older brothers settled and introduced into a new school each time they moved. “One fun thing was that we always designed and built our houses when we moved. The whole family would sit down and we’d pull out the architectural drawings and make it just the way we wanted it,” Crea says. “Then when we got there Mom would paint our houses. “

Once the family reached Vermont, however, Chittenden County became the fulcrum of Crea’s travels. She went to Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, then returned after graduation to teach at the Shelburne Community School.  She received her masters of Science degree in geology from UVM, where she worked with Allen Hunt who described the Champlain Sea. “I did cores, studying marine sediments for him, looking for single celled organisms called foraminifera that live only in ocean sediments,” Crea says, recounting long hours pulling core samples and meticulously searching for remnants of the tiny ancient creatures. “We called it picking forums. That’s why I went into oceanography.” 

She went to the University of Connecticut in Groton to start a doctoral degree, but succumbed to the temptation of a job offer in Edinburgh, Scotland, at a paleomagnetic lab, dating ocean sediments by looking for the layers in which there are reversals of the Earth’s magnetic poles. After a year, she returned to Vermont, married Phil, and went to work for a bit at IBM. The growing Lintilhac family would ski every winter weekend and holiday, at Stowe, or traveling afar to new trails or ski competitions. They would come home to Shelburne and cross country ski, and bike and hike in the summer. A favorite destination was the Cliff Trail on Mt. Mansfield in Stowe, capped off by a bowl of soup at the Cliff House restaurant.

Crea’s involvement with the Lintilhac Foundation started as soon as they were married.  Crea’s family values were a natural match with those of Phil’s mom, Claire, who began the Foundation with money inherited from Lin and his family in 1975. Claire was born in China, to missionary parents. Her father was a doctor, and Claire followed in his footsteps to become a private duty nurse, traveling throughout China. She often served as midwife in remote, impoverished areas of the country. Witnessing the devastating effects of poverty, disease and pestilence especially on women and young children, Claire developed a special affinity for the issues of women’s reproductive health, birth control and abortion, and safe childbirth. Phil’s father, Lin, courted Claire for many years until she consented to marry him; Lin was 7 years younger, and Claire worried that this rendered the relationship socially inappropriate, but their love won out.

They moved to New York City with young Philip, but at age 47, Lin died of a blood clot resulting from surgery. Claire and son Phil moved to Stowe, where the family had long vacationed, and Claire built a little house on Mountain Road. She had found it very difficult to adjust to coming back to the United States after living so long in China, but the fresh air and pure water of Stowe soothed her soul. “Claire said even the soil was clean here,” Crea recalls, noting that agriculture in the rural Chinese villages in which Claire had worked was still reliant on night soil, or human waste, to fertilize their fields. Claire wrote memoirs and recorded the oral history of her earlier life and travels, and could not shake her continued deep sense of caring for women’s reproductive health and choices. 

The Lintilhac Foundation helped create the birthing center and funded midwives at Fletcher Allen in Burlington. A banking embezzlement scandal would propel Crea to take over the Foundation’s business dealings. “It’s surprising. You think there are all these regulations and safeguards in place, but so much is based on trust,” she recalls.  Claire died in 1984.  Crea runs the Foundation from her home office, where she continues to work about 30 hours a week at its management.

Not Just a Grant Maker

Crea not only selects from among several hundred grant applications the Foundation receives every year, but also plays an active role in shaping and monitoring public policy on environmental and energy issues. She sits on the boards of the Conservation Law Foundation, the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.  She also serves on the advisory board of the UVM Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, as well as on the boards of UVM’s Vermont Water Resources and Lake Study Center.  She attends the annual Vermont Renewable Energy Conference and sits in on sessions of the Vermont legislature and legislative committees.

“To just work as a grant maker and not be involved with the people who make social policy, that’s not me,” Crea says.  “I have great appreciation for people who do public service. For me I wear two hats, I’m an interested, concerned citizen and I join boards and sit in on the legislature to be informed and involved at the grassroots level.  I get involved in politics and this house of ours is like a civic center.”

The recent short film Bloom: The Plight of Lake Champlain exemplifies the compounded impact of Crea’s many roles. Funded in part by the Lintilhac Foundation, and a project of UVM’s Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, the film offers first-person chronicles of the negative impact of phosphorous loading on Lake Champlain. Excess nutrient load in the Lake has been a topic of environmental concern for decades, but the fact that Vermont’s beloved dairy farms are one of the largest sources of the pollutants—along with wastewater treatment plants and storm water systems—makes the issue hotly contentious.

“It created so much hostility, but it elevated the conversation,” Crea says of Bloom. “It’s exciting.  It came out at the time that the EPA was going to disallow TMDL [The Maximum Daily Load] for phosphorous in the lake. We have moved forward with cleaning up sewage treatment and many other things regarding Lake Champlain pollution, but other sources are getting worse. This past May’s flooding caused shoreline erosion that resulted in a massive input of phosphorous. Then in August, with Tropical Storm Irene, there was flooding again. But when you start looking at steps to reduce that pollution for Lake Champlain, the headwaters of the Winooski are in Cabot. It’s an enormous basin.”

Supporting the video, produced by BrightBlue Media, has been a natural extension of the Lintilhac Foundation’s support of communication media as a means of promoting dialogue on social issues. The Foundation has long supported Vermont Public Radio programs like Switchboard and Vermont Edition, as well as other public informational programming on radio and community television. The impact of Bloom, which won a New England Emmy, has heightened Crea’s focus on short video as an effective means of energizing dialogue. 

When You Think You’ve Made Progress

At the heart of the Lintilhac Foundation’s work remains Claire and Crea’s vision of supporting women in their reproductive choices, their health, birthing and breastfeeding. The Lintilhac Foundation supports Planned Parenthood, and advocates for expanded access to birth control and abortion services for women in Vermont.  “None of the hospitals in the state will do second trimester, voluntary abortions,” Crea notes. “Hospital administrators said if I create a foundation for women to go out of state for later abortions, they’ll contribute to that fund. But the most progressive town in a progressive state should have abortion access. It is legal, and we should have access to a level 1 trauma center. The medical professionals need to stop lying to people about not being able to do it and suggesting that they are prohibited by law from doing it.  It’s not that they are not able to do it. It’s that they  won’t  do it. But that’s where I come in as an advocate and a grant maker. I don’t lose a job by raising these issues.”

It’s not enough to raise issues just once and think you’ve resolved them, Crea has learned.  Examples abound. One of the original aims of the Lintilhac Foundation was support for breastfeeding.  “It’s harder than it looks,” Crea notes, “especially when you have not been raised seeing women breastfeeding around you.”  Lactation consultants at the Fletcher Allen birthing center are a point of special interest for Crea and the Lintilhac Foundation. “But just when you think you’ve made progress, we find the number of nurses assigned to the lactation consultants are declining. The World Health Organization gives accreditation to hospitals that give support to breastfeeding moms, but in the Fletcher Allen Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), the staff is funded by a formula company. It does matter who writes the check.”

The nurse-midwife program founded by Claire Lintilhac also needs constant defending. “I got a call from Fletcher Allen the other day and was told that the nurse-midwives had done such a good job, that now the physicians are more confident with the deliveries. So they aren’t going to have 24/7 midwife service anymore,” Crea objects. She said she hung up the phone and called the nurse’s union. “It’s always a struggle. I’m a big supporter of unions in Vermont. It was always my hope that the nurse-midwives would have a great training program. Two percent of the population in Vermont is home-birthed. Once we get universal healthcare, birthing will be handled by nurse-midwives.”

“So much of what we call ‘charitable’ should be a human right. We have jars in grocery stores for people who have cancer or whose kids need surgery!” she says with dismay.

Life’s setbacks are the fertile ground of learning and progress for Crea. A few years ago, their vacation home in Stowe blew up due to a failure in the heating system, spewing oil and asbestos, thankfully when no one was around and no injuries were incurred. The Lintilhacs rebuilt with solar power running a ground source heat pump. “Installing the system was very interesting,” Crea says thoughtfully. “There are things you don’t think about unless you can do it.” 

Her personal experience and perception of energy issues helps inform the Lintilhac Foundation’s energy program support, which includes funding research for biodigesters at UVM. “I don’t promote an energy source that I wouldn’t want to live next to,” she says. “So if it’s a wind facility, I care that it’s installed appropriately and with all due diligence, if it’s a biomass facility, same thing. We need to make it easier to install solar thermal and preheat our domestic hot water supplies at the very least. Conservation first. Electric will be our transportation and the fuel for our industry in the future. Each of these sources may be small, but we have to do it all. Every bit counts.”

Every bit also counts in Crea’s ongoing active embrace of life in Vermont. Hip replacement surgery ten years ago put a damper on her competitive skiing, but “I walk now and enjoy it immensely,” she says.  With her children grown, she’s paused to capture some of the memories of their childhood to share with others who are now raising young kids. A pianist all her life, she loves to sing, and created a CD of the songs she sang to her children when they were little. But most of her energies remain focused on making connections between people, and between people and money, to create social progress for women and protection of the natural environment.