Heinrich Böll Foundation

In West Germany, state-level foundations affiliated to the Green Party were set up in the early 1980s. In 1983, an effort to create a national foundation came to nothing, yet later in the 1980s three different nationwide foundations were established, reflecting the different political strands within this rainbow coalition. They were the feminist Frauenanstiftung, the Buntstift federation of regional foundations, and the Cologne-based Heinrich Böll Foundation. Later, an umbrella organisation, Regenbogen, was created whose task it was to co-ordinate the activities of the three separate foundations. In 1988, the Green Party recognised Regenbogen as the foundation allied to the party thus making it eligible for government funding.

In March 1996, a Green Party convention demanded that the separate foundations become one and the motion was passed with a large majority. The statutes drafted for this new unified foundation defined gender democracy and issues related to migration and diversity as key fields of activity. After some further debate, the new foundation took the name of one of its predecessors – Heinrich Böll Foundation. On 1 July 1997, the newly founded Heinrich Böll Foundation began its operations at headquarters located in Berlin's Hackesche Höfe. In 2008 the foundation moved to its current headquarters in Berlin's government district. The new, energy-efficient building was designed by Zurich-based e2a eckert eckert architekten and its design inspired by two Mies van der Rohe projects, Farnsworth House and the Seagram Building.

In May 2022, the Heinrich Böll Foundation was declared an undesirable organization in Russia. Earlier that year, the Russian Ministry of Justice had delisted the foundation from the NGO affiliates registry.

In August 2023, the Heinrich Böll Foundation announced that Masha Gessen was the winner of the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought. In December 2023, days before the award was due to be presented, the HBS said it was withdrawing its support because it objected to an essay by Gessen on the Gaza–Israel conflict, published in The New Yorker on 9 December.

The Heinrich Böll Foundation operates two archives in Berlin, the Archiv Grünes Gedächtnis (Green Memory Archive) and the Petra Kelly Archive; in addition, it supports the Cologne-based Heinrich Böll Archive.

Grünes Gedächtnis collects documents about the history of the German Green Party and the new social movements in Germany, including materials concerning West Germany's environmental, anti-nuclear, feminist, and peace movements after 1968, as well as East Germany's civil-rights movement. In addition to official documents of political parties and documents donated by activists or their estate, the archive has a substantial collection of campaign posters, photographs, web content, and voice and video recordings.

The Petra Kelly Archive collects and preserves the political legacy of activist and politician Petra Kelly, including materials concerning international movements against nuclear weapons and for disarmament, peace, human rights, and emancipation.

The Heinrich Böll Archive collects and documents everything to do with the life and works of German Nobel laureate in literature Heinrich Böll. In collaboration with the Historical Archive of the City of Cologne and members of the estate of Heinrich Böll it collects and indexes all works of Heinrich Böll as well as publications about him. Since 2002, the archive has been one of the co-editors of the critical edition of the works of Heinrich Böll.