The Kendall Company produced baby products, bandages, medical products for hospitals and homes, non-woven fabrics, and pressure-sensitive tapes — ranging from hospital and home health-care items to vinyl plastic tapes used for corrosion protection for natural gas and oil pipelines. In 1972, the Company, then among the Fortune 500, was sold to Colgate-Palmolive.

Henry W. and John P. Kendall established the Norfolk Charitable Trust in 1957. Following the death of their father in 1959, they changed the name to the Henry P. Kendall Foundation in his honor. The Kendall Foundation began an emphasis on environmental concerns in the early 1970s by supporting land, water and wildlife conservation. A key component was the nurturance of environmental advocacy in Alaska as a national debate centered on which parts of more than one hundred million acres would gain long-term protection as national parks or wildlife refuges. A decade later, as the threat of nuclear war persisted into the 1980s, the Foundation focused on nuclear non-proliferation and arms-control activities. One of its grantees, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

With the Cold War now part of twentieth-century history, the Foundation is once again emphasizing the imperative of protecting nature's integrity.

In 1999 the Foundation initiated a climate change program when it created a new organization, Clean Air-Cool Planet, to focus specifically on steps to address accelerating greenhouse gas emissions. Over the past seven years, the Foundation began to expand its climate change program to support a wide-range of organizations, predominantly those with directed efforts in the Northeast region. In 2005-2006, the Foundation dramatically re-oriented this program, giving primary emphasis to strategies for reducing greenhouse gases and to developing early steps for adapting to the impacts of global warming on the landscape.