The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation announced today that Margery Bronster, a lawyer and Hawaiʻi’s former attorney general, will join the Foundation’s Board of Directors, and Paula Pretlow, who has served as a trustee since 2018, will begin a three-year term as chair of the board, both effective June 23, 2023.
Bronster and Pretlow are stepping into roles currently held by Ambassador Fay Hartog-Levin (Ret.), who has served as a Foundation trustee since 2016 and as the board chair since 2020. Hartog-Levin’s term on the board will conclude June 23, 2023.
The Weinberg Foundation, one of the largest private charitable organizations in the United States, is dedicated to meeting the basic needs of people experiencing poverty. Its five-member board — which, in addition to Hartog-Levin and Pretlow, includes current trustees Gordon Berlin, Nimrod Goor, and Robert T. Kelly Jr. — is responsible for setting the policies that guide its investments and grantmaking. With assets of about $3.1 billion, the Foundation provides $150 million in grants and other activities each year.
Bronster is an internationally and nationally recognized civil litigation attorney with extensive experience advising trusts and foundations on fiduciary duties. Before becoming a founding partner of Bronster Fujichaku Robbins (formerly Bronster Crabtree Hoshibata), she served as Hawaiʻi’s attorney general from 1995 to 1999. In that role, she showed steadfast leadership throughout a multiyear investigation into the Kamehameha Schools/Bishop Estate charitable trust, the largest private trust in the country, resulting in lasting improvements of its overall administration and selection process for board members to better serve the community. She also won a settlement agreement from tobacco companies amounting to more than a billion dollars for the state of Hawaiʻi that has led to decades of new statewide health care programs and improved health across the islands.
Bronster earned a bachelor’s from Brown University and a law degree from Columbia University, where she was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar. She is a recipient of the Profiles in Courage Award from the Conference of Western Attorneys General; Kelly-Wyman Award for Outstanding Attorney General from the National Association of Attorneys General; and Outstanding Women Lawyer Award from Hawaiʻi Women Lawyers.
Pretlow has extensive finance and investment management experience, building a career in helping company leaders maximize shareholder and stakeholder value. As a former senior vice president of Capital Group, a $2.2 trillion privately held investment management firm, she headed the firm’s public fund business development and client relationship group and was responsible for large client relationships.
Pretlow serves on a number of boards in the private, philanthropic, and nonprofit sector, including Williams-Sonoma, Vroom, The Kresge Foundation, Northwestern University, and her synagogue, Congregation Emanu-El, in San Francisco. She holds a bachelor’s in political science from Northwestern University and a Master of Business Administration in finance and economics from the university’s Kellogg School of Management. Read the news release.