Earliest Roots

The story of The Rensselaerville Institute begins in 1870 when Francis Conkling Huyck (Frank) quit his profession as a Rensselaerville Village storekeeper.  He wanted to take advantage of what he considered to be a great opportunity- modern paper manufacturing- which was just beginning in the United States.  Papermaking then required woolen blankets, or felts, to cover rollers that pressed pulp into paper.  Despite warnings of inevitable failure from his family and close friends, Frank convinced Henry Waterbury to form a partnership with him to make felt in Rensselaerville. 

The fourth felt mill in the United States, H. Waterbury & Company, opened in 1870, but by 1879, the business had outgrown the community. The partnership dissolved, and Frank relocated the mill and his family to Albany.  Despite the move, the Huycks spent their summers in Rensselaerville and established a philanthropic tradition of care for structures in the village. Before his death in 1907, Frank Huyck endowed the Rensselaerville community with Conkling Hall (once the Methodist church building) and the Library on Main Street.

The Institute’s Intellectual Base

In 1897, Frank Huyck’s oldest son, Edmund Niles Huyck, employed prominent architect Marcus Reynolds to design for Niles and his wife a stone and shingle summer residence on Pond Hill.  In 1904, the youngest Huyck son, Francis Conkling Huyck, Jr., enlarged the Huyck estate with a second summer home named Stonecrop. Today, both Huyck and Stonecrop are used for guest accommodations.

After World War I, Laura Talmage, the wife of Frank Huyck, Jr., brought noted leaders in education, economics, labor relations, and history to Rensselaerville to meet with outstanding college students from the United States and abroad.  These meetings, the Country Forums on Human Relations, laid the foundation for The Rensselaerville Institute.  Everett and Winifred Clinchy, Lee Elmore, and Katharine Huyck Elmore (daughter of Francis Jr. and Laura Huyck) met here as young people and formed a lifelong friendship built on common interests.

In the early 1960s, the Elmores inherited Stonecrop and the Clinchys bought the Edmund Huyck house. Along with many of their influential friends, they then formed the Rensselaerville Institute, to which the Elmores and Clichys donated their Rensselaerville homes and the 100 acres of surrounding land.

The Years of Man and Science - the 1960s to the early 1980s

In 1963, The Rensselaerville Institute became The Institute on Man and Science. The Elmores and Clinchys brought notable figures to Rensselaerville, including United Nations Secretary General U Thant, ambassadors to the United Nations, as well as experts on space, science, history, philosophy, and medicine.

The first overnight guesthouse on the Institute’s new campus was The Ford Residence, built in 1968 and named in honor of Father George B. Ford, a colleague of Everett Clinchy. The Straus Guest Residence opened in 1969; it is named after Gladys Guggenheim Straus, President of the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Foundation, and her husband Roger Straus. Oscar Straus served as first chairman of the Rensselaerville Institute Board of Trustees for many years and continues to this day as honorary chairman.

The Conference Center

In 1970, the newly appointed Program Director Hal Williams, a graduate of Stanford University and previous Program Director of the Aspen Institute, opened The Rensselaerville Institute to the public as a conference center.  After the retirement of Everett Clinchy in 1972, Hal became President of the Institute.

Institute Development and Pivotal Programs

The dedication of The Guggenheim Pavilion in the summer of 1971 included an extraordinary program called “The Trial of Technology”. The aim of the Trial was to investigate the control and direction of technology at a time that was later recognized as the dawn of the computer age. Famed attorney Louis Nizer presided as judge at this mock trial.

A 1972 program, “Man in the Media”, featured three influential women -- Lenore Hershey, Duncan McDonald, and actress Geraldine Fitzgerald. Because of their strong objections to Institute’s emphasis on “Man”, the name was changed in 1983 to simply “The Rensselaerville Institute”.  The program attracted world-renowned science fiction writer Isaac Asimov to Rensselaerville. He was so taken with the village and the Institute that he returned every summer until his death in 1992.

Self-help, Innovation and Guiding Principles

In 1973, the New York Times advertised the sale of a dying company town called Stump Creek in Western Pennsylvania. An intrigued and entrepreneurial Institute Board of Trustees approved the purchase for $125,000. Their purpose was to restore the small town in the spirit of Louis Mumford, an influential 20th century urban planner. It was also the beginning of the Institute’s current focus on “human effort leading to human gain”. Through its actions over the next ten years, the Institute learned first hand how self-help can restore a community, both physically and psychologically.

In 1977, the Institute purchased and facilitated self-help rehabilitation efforts in a second dying town- Corbett, New York.  The Corbett experience attracted the attention of Charles Kuralt who featured the project on CBS’ Sunday Morning program in 1977.

As a result, in 1981 the Institute began a self-help collaboration program with the small Cherokee town of Bell, Oklahoma. Using the self-help program developed by the Institute in Stump Creek and Corbett, residents in the town of Bell built a 16-mile waterline, bringing water to their own homes for the first time. Their success inspired other such communities within Oklahoma, resulting in the self-help community building of over 100 miles of waterlines in that state.

In 1986 the Institute published The Self-Help Handbook, written by STEP Director, Jane Schautz. This book has become the bible for community self-help projects across the US. STEP received three national environmental awards from Renew America, a coalition of pro-environment organizations - one in 1990 for Drinking Water Improvement, another in 1996 for Improved Public Health and in 2000 for Environmental Sustainability.

Leading Innovation in Government

The experience with innovation at these self-help programs convinced the Institute that what worked in distressed communities could be applied elsewhere. As a result, in the mid-1980s the Institute began to test its guiding principles on improving the results of non-profit organizations and government through innovation. It first successfully collaborated with the New York State Office of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities and Arthur Webb, its Commissioner at the time.

Webb was so impressed with the results that he took a leave of absence from his job to work with the Institute on applying its guiding innovation principles to other government agencies. At the end of the 1980s, the Institute established the Innovation Group based on the set of principles developed from its self-help programs. Bill Phillips, who came to The Institute from the New York State Department of Social Services where he served as Director of Program Development, became the head of this group.

Two Institute publications grew out of this focus on Innovation. In 1990, Hal Williams created a quarterly journal called INNOVATING with articles about leading change. In 1991, Arthur Webb, Bill Phillips, and Hal Williams published the book entitled Outcome Funding, A New Approach to Targeted Grantmaking. This book takes the approach that grantmakers are investors who track the value of their investments through specific results achieved with their money. In 2004, Robert Penna and William Phillips wrote Outcome Frameworks, which provides an overview for nonprofits and community organizations on how to apply outcome thinking.

A Mature Institute

By the year 2000, the Innovation Group had grown into an international network of staff and consultants working with a variety of products and programs. The programs focus on improving outcomes for foundations, governments and individual donors and educating individual nonprofit and community organizations to more effectively set and track targets.

It also began to make its mark in the educational community, turning around low-performing schools with a signature program called “School Turnaround”. In addition, the Institute’s work in communities has expanded from water and wastewater self-help programs to economic and civic development.  Recognized for their hands-on approach that results in real change, the Institute became known as “the think tank with muddy boots”.