When Robert Sutherland stepped down as head of the foundation in 1970, an old colleague of his wrote to Bernice Moore that he believed "the morale of the Hogg Foundation is the highest of any group I have ever known, and I think that is something you and Bob have brought about because of your sincere devotion to things that matter.”

By the time of Sutherland’s retirement, the “things that mattered” in mental health looked drastically different from how they looked in 1940. At the federal and state levels, entire agencies devoted significant budgetary resources to the provision of mental health services, the support of basic and applied research related to mental health and mental illness, the training of mental health service providers, and the promulgation of public education on mental health. The state’s leading public universities had developed undergraduate and graduate programs in psychiatry, psychology, social work, and other fields closely related to mental health. They also had begun to take seriously the provision of counseling services to their student, staff, and faculty populations. 

Similarly, at the local level, public and private agencies began to offer a range of mental health services, inspired by the community mental health movement and supported by newly available funding sources. No longer the sole actor on the scene, the Hogg Foundation was free to devote its resources to supporting innovative startup and demonstration programs outside of the sudden plethora of established agencies and institutions. Many of these programs offered innovations in service delivery methods for historically underserved populations in impoverished rural or urban areas.