Overview

The Charles & Agnes Kazarian Foundation’s (Kazarian Foundation) core competency is to improve Government Financial Management (GFM) and Government Total Balance Sheet (GTBS) literacy.

The Kazarian Foundation seeks to educate both key stakeholders and citizens on the importance of GFM and GTBS literacy through conferences, presentations, communications, articles, master classes, and white papers.

“The Kazarian Foundation cares about Government Financial Management because government financial decisions directly affect the probability of debt, currency, and financial crises, which have a disproportionally large impact on society’s most disadvantaged.”

The Kazarian Foundation created the Citizens’ Wealth Framework 2023, with 12 KPIs that provide a true and fair picture of government financial performance, that is both “a quantum leap in government financial performance management” and “the greatest advance in sovereign risk analysis”.

Citizens’ Wealth is an improvement over the financial debt and deficit metrics, and over the focus on a single (federal) debt number, in part because Citizens’ Wealth includes all government assets and all government debts and, ideally, from the audited financial statements (the total government balance sheet), as well as a nation’s GDP.   Citizens’ Wealth provides insight into government financial performance and position, and the relationship to GDP for both historical and international comparison.

The Kazarian Foundation’s spending since its founding plus year-end 2022 assets is over a quarter-billion US dollars (US$278 million).  Year-end 2022 assets were $208 million.

The Kazarian Foundation has three guiding principles:
1. empower great aspirations in the whole human family;
2. a society is best judged by how it empowers the most disadvantaged;
3. the wisdoms contained in the book New Philanthropy Benchmarking: Wisdom for the Passionate.

The Kazarian Foundation also engages in a wide range of mission-related activities including founding JI-Analytics, co-founding the Kazarian SyCip Fund Zero Dropout Program, and establishing a geographically diverse range of economic development loan programs. The Foundation has a special focus on projects that support Armenian culture, in both the Diaspora and Armenia.

The Charles & Agnes Kazarian Foundation has benefited from the timeless wisdoms of its advisors on a wide range of topics, including philanthropy, commerce, and governance.  Our legacy advisors and their former positions have included:  John C. Whitehead, Goldman, Sachs & Co. Co-Chairman/Co-Senior Partner and United States Deputy Secretary of State; Victor Menezes, Senior Vice-Chairman of Citigroup; Roderick M. Hills, Chairman of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission; and Washington SyCip, founder of The Asian Institute of Management and EY SGV & Company. 

The Kazarian Foundation is named in recognition of two outstanding Armenian immigrants to the United States of America who both survived, but lost members of their families, during the first genocide of the 20th century, the Armenian Genocide.  Charles Kazarian served with distinction in the French Foreign Legion during World War I as an Armenian Gamavor to show his gratitude to the people of France who welcomed survivors of the Armenian Genocide.  Agnes Kazarian inspired her family and all those blessed to know her with the most valuable Armenian Christian wisdoms.

The Kazarian Foundation is a philanthropic affiliate of Japonica Partners.