Philanthropy Fall 2016

FOUNDING FUNDERS OF ISRAEL • JULIAN ROBERTSON • BIBLE TRANSLATION AT WARP SPEED A PUBLICATION OF THE

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The Educators Training musicians Standing up schools Informing policymakers

Meet Bruce & Suzie Kovner 2016 winners of the William E. Simon Prize for Philanthropic Leadership

PhilMag.org

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Save the Date 2018 Annual Meeting

2017 Annual Meeting

October 24-26, 2018 The Breakers Palm Beach, Florida

October 25-27, 2017 Fairmont Scottsdale Princess Scottsdale, Arizona

The Philanthropy Roundtable extends its sincere thanks to the donors listed below for their generous support of our 2016 Annual Meeting.* The Ahmanson Foundation Anonymous (2) Hilda E. Bretzlaff Foundation Edyth Bush Charitable Foundation Duke Endowment M. J. Murdock Charitable Trust * as of September 21, 2016

There’s still time to register for this year’s 25th Annual Meeting, November 16-17, 2016. Register today at PhilanthropyRoundtable.org/annual

#annual16

table of contents

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PHILANTHROPY

A P U B L I CATI O N O F THE

features

14 T he Educators

Bruce and Suzie Kovner give to schoolchildren, music students, and policymaking. Here’s how and why.

By the Editors

24 P artners Against Misery

A loyal funder and a visionary took on tenement squalor, and won.

By Susan Hertog

30 F ounding Funders

How American philanthropy built a Jewish homeland.

By Karl Zinsmeister

38 2 million dollars, 1 billion souls

An improvising leader and ten donors brought the Bible to unreached peoples.

By Liz Essley Whyte

44 Philanthropy or Social Activism?

With the valuable pro bono hours they volunteer, lawyers can change lives or change the country.

By Justin Torres

58 2 5 Years of Sparkling Conversation

departments 4 Briefly Noted

Little platoons on pontoons.

Crisp progress in the Big Apple.

Screwtape for millennials.

10 N onprofit Spotlight Old graves offer new vocational possibilities.

11 I nterview Julian Robertson The wizard of Wall Street on small-town values, big-city schools, and seeding a new generation of philanthropic leaders.

50 Ideas Seven Results of the Charter-School Revolution The most consequential developments after 25 years of charter schools.

By Chester Finn, Bruno Manno, and Brandon Wright

54 Books Minor Characters The NEA and NEH have minimal roles in U.S. arts and letters.

By Monica Klem

Improving Political Diversity on Campus Can philanthropy help mend our one-party universities?

By Jacqueline Pfeffer Merrill

Adam Meyerson PRE SI D E N T

Karl Zinsmeister

VI C E PR E S ID E N T , P U BL ICA T IO N S

Caitrin Keiper E D I TO R

Ashley May

MA NAG I N G E D ITO R

Andrea Scott

A SSO C I AT E E D IT O R

Taryn Wolf

A RT D I R E CT O R

Anna Jeffrey Ryan Shinkel I NTE RNS

Arthur Brooks John Steele Gordon Leslie Lenkowsky Christopher Levenick Bruno Manno John J. Miller Tom Riley Naomi Schaefer Riley William Schambra Evan Sparks Justin Torres Scott Walter Liz Essley Whyte

C O NTRI B U T IN G E D IT O R S

Philanthropy is published quarterly by The Philanthropy Roundtable. The mission of the Roundtable, a 501c3 tax-exempt educational organization, is to foster excellence in philanthropy, to protect philanthropic freedom, to assist donors in achieving their philanthropic intent, and to help donors advance liberty, opportunity, and personal responsibility in America and abroad.

All editorial or business inquiries: Editor@PhilanthropyRoundtable.org Philanthropy 1120 20th Street NW Suite 550 South Washington, D.C. 20036 (202) 822-8333 Copyright © 2016 The Philanthropy Roundtable All rights reserved Cover: Villano Photo LLC

FALL 2016

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paddles diapers and sandwiches to a young mother stranded by the Louisiana flood.

Private Funding Fuels African-American Museum The new National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in September, thanks largely to unprecedented participation from individual donors.

The Smithsonian Institute raised $265 million from private contributors in order to build the $500 million museum. Major donors included the Lilly Endowment, Atlantic Philanthropies, Oprah Winfrey, David Rubenstein, Colin Powell, and the PHILANTHROPY

roma g

A self-appointed “Cajun Pocahontas”

Crisp Progress in the Big Apple The latest test scores out of New York City indicate that a Hail Mary to save some high-risk Catholic schools just may have worked. Catholic schools governed by the Partnership for Inner-City Education network revealed that reading and math learning gains outpaced those of public schools across the city and state, including charter schools.

Third through eighth graders in Partnership-run schools displayed a 16-point year-to-year increase on English assessments, and a 13-point gain in math.

There is still work to do, as fewer than half of students are proficient in math and reading, but the last couple years’ progress has been almost miraculous.

The Partnership is the result of an unusual agreement that shifted operation of six struggling schools from the Catholic Archdiocese of New York to a donor-backed charity. The Partnership’s philanthropists and staffers assumed management of everything from hiring and firing, to curriculum development, to payroll. The schools maintain their Catholic identity. One of the Partnership schools, Our Lady Queen of Angels, hosted Pope Francis in 2015 during his first-ever visit to an American parochial school.

Had the Partnership and its supporters not intervened, the doors to these schools would have been permanently closed several years ago, leaving thousands of students displaced in low-income neighborhoods in the Bronx and Harlem. Instead, they are sparkling with new promise. —Pat Burke

Joshua Bihm

Little Platoons on Pontoons In August, a no-name tropical storm flooded more than 60,000 homes in Louisiana and turned half the state into an emergency zone. The Red Cross deemed it “the worst natural disaster to strike the U.S. since Superstorm Sandy,” but it received only a fraction of the national attention and support.

Louisianans did not wait for help to come to them, but dove right in to assist their neighbors. A volunteer flotilla dubbed the Cajun Navy puttered around rescuing people and delivering supplies. Residents whose homes were still intact hosted people overflowing from crowded shelters as guests. Hospital employees traveled through floodwaters to keep services available. One Good Samaritan delivered tequila drinks in the rain.

Schoolteacher Thomas Achord summed it up this way: “Louisiana is most beautiful when it is a great disaster. The entire society spontaneously comes together as if joined by familial ties. No one watches his neighbor suffer but all selflessly and voluntarily go about seeking whom they can help. And they do so with their own personal means—trucks, boats, rafts, chainsaws, shovels, food, and often at risk of their lives. We work hard and we eat grand,

we are filthy but laughing, we lose our homes yet are welcomed into others. I have seen finer lands but not people. Keep the world and give me Louisiana, even in disaster.”

roma g

Joshua Bihm

Gates, Ford, Rockefeller, and Mellon Foundations.

African Americans represent 74 percent of the individuals who gave $1 million or more.

Individuals donated many family artifacts to the museum’s Save Our African American ­Treasures program. Shirley Burke donated her enslaved great-grandfather’s violin. T. B. Boyd III offered the printing press his grandfather used to support himself after slavery. Robert Hicks donated a white shirt he wore when he became the first black supervisor at a factory in his town.

Director Lonnie Bunch believed “it was important to show average people owned this project,” so the museum also conducted grassroots fundraising.

Months before the museum even opened, more than 100,000 people had already pledged $25 a year to become members. This is the largest member base out of all the Smithsonians. —Jen Para

Nonprofits Brace for New Overtime Rules New regulations from the U.S. Department of Labor promise to upend the balance sheets of many nonprofits. Their new rules say that full-time employees earning a salary of $47,476 or below— more than double the current threshold—must now be paid overtime any week they put in more than 40 hours.

Experts say that could wreak havoc with nonprofit budgets. Many organizations run on thin operating margins, can’t raise prices on the services they offer, and do cyclical work that employees know will be heavy one week and light the next.

Charities tried to warn federal bureaucrats, expressing concerns when the Administration proposed to change the Fair Labor Standards Act (a New Deal remnant). YMCAs said they would have to cut staff or the hours staff could work. The Boy Scouts of America said the consequences would be “devastating.” MHY Family Services, which helps troubled youth, told a House committee that the new rules could result in nearly $800,000 added to its annual expenses, a 9 percent increase in its budget.

Some groups like Catholic Charities, Easter Seals, and the YWCA, however, stated that “the justice we seek for our clients in the world must also exist within our own organizations.”

With the new rules slated to go into effect December 1, nonprofits are scrambling to figure out how to comply. “We don’t want the federal law to change our level of compassion and caring,” says

Introducing a new Smithsonian, with the largest donor base of them all.

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David Thompson, a former labor lawyer who now works at the National Council of Nonprofits. The major options for charitable groups will be to put careful caps on employees’ work hours or move them to hourly wages instead of salaries.

Nancy Duncan of Operation Smile isn’t sure which tactic her organization will use. While the rule was being considered, Duncan told federal legislators that Operation Smile would incur an additional $1 million in payroll costs and be forced to do 4,200 fewer surgeries on poor children with cleft lips or other facial deformities. Her biggest challenge is figuring out how to pay about 30 program coordinators who currently earn between $33,000 and $35,000 on average. Based in the U.S., program coordinators oversee Operation Smile’s work in a particular country and often put in far more than 40 hours per week when they visit that country for trips to meet with local donors or hospitals.

While the new rules may boost salaries of some nonprofit jobs, it will mean less of the flexibility that workers value in many nonprofit jobs. Many charities are finding out that the compensatory time they currently offer to employees is illegal under federal law.

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briefly noted There will also be increased administrative work, since the rules have nuances related to job duties and other matters. Payroll may become more cumbersome where more employees are paid hourly or need overtime bonuses. Even the Department of Labor itself has trouble following the rules: It recently agreed to fork over $7 million after it failed to pay overtime wages to thousands of employees.

“At the end of the day you are increasing costs, so you have to figure out how make up for it,” says AEI economist Aparna Mathur. —Liz Essley Whyte

Smile frown.

2 million …manufacturing jobs are expected to go unfilled in the next decade because of a lack of candidates with the ­necessary “middle-level” skills. For information on how donors can prepare workers for these positions, read the Roundtable’s newest guidebook Learning to be Useful. *The Manufacturing Institute and Deloitte consulting 6

PHILANTHROPY

Education Reform at an Ideological Crossroads Robert Pondiscio and Checker Finn of the ­Fordham Institute have recently commented on

Operation Smile

New regulations are making Operation

A Screwtape for Millennials A critic, a playwright, a choreographer, and an Olympic gymnast have teamed up with donors to bring a new C. S. Lewis-inspired show to the stage.

It’s a satire called The Loser Letters that follows the spiritual travails of a young woman. According to Jeff Fiske, who wrote the script, she is “dealing with a lot of things that women in their twenties deal with,” from a lousy boyfriend to large questions of life purpose and God’s existence.

The play is adapted from a novel by Catholic writer Mary Eberstadt, a fellow at Washington, D.C.’s Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of several books, most recently How the West Really Lost God. As its young protagonist journeys away from faith, she writes letters to famous atheists like Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens, offering pithy advice in the hope of helping them win over more Christians. The clever dialogue ends up being a defense for God’s existence.

Catholic intellectual Michael Novak suggested to Eberstadt after she published The Loser Letters in 2010 that it should become a stage play. And he wrote her the first check to help make that happen.

The John Templeton Foundation and philanthropists Bill Simon and Gay Gaines offered support, and a theatrical production was created. Olympic silver-medal gymnast Chelssie Memmel starred as Shadow, the inner demon of the protagonist, in the premiere at Catholic University of America.

the ideological rift now being seen within the school reform m ­ ovement—which is marginalizing participants who bring anything other than textbook “progressive” credentials to their work.

Education conferences, think tank discussions, funder gatherings, and media stories increasingly focus on racial topics, economic issues, ethnicity, political goals, and ideological priorities. The NAACP recently called for a moratorium on charter schools at its annual convention. The broad coalition that has pushed for better urban schools, which often brought together strange bedfellows, is now showing signs of splintering over litmus tests on issues other than education policy.

Pondiscio, Finn, and others warn that ostracization is starting to replace collaboration, and that the leftward shift of education reformers threatens bipartisan coalitions in scores of state legislatures that have produced valuable advances like improved teacher training and assessment, school choice, and personalized learning. Tying the education reform movement to contentious side issues like immigration, policing, and causes of poverty can only slow progress on classroom priorities. Donors need to be aware that politicization is threatening the coalitions that have created excellent schooling in underser ved ­neighborhoods—and use their grantmaking influence to preserve the broad community alliances that have avoided ideological battles over the last generation in order to put kids first. —Pat Burke

Sweet Charity

Operation Smile

Hear Ye, Hear Ye

The first audiobooks were products of philanthropy—part of a program to bring literature, history, science, and other knowledge to the blind. Audiobooks later caught on among the general public, and the steadily growing appetite for spoken recordings eventually led to today’s podcasting boom. Podcasts allow commuters, exercisers, or people just pushing a Swiffer around their house on a Saturday morning to listen to talks, tales, and spoken information of all sorts.

The Philanthropy Roundtable recently entered the golden era of podcasting. Once a week we release a new episode of Sweet Charity, a short show (8 minutes per installment) that tells lively stories about how private giving solves public problems.

Drawing on the rich information in The Almanac of American Philanthropy, these podcasts recorded

by Karl Zinsmeister bring to life the range, effect, origins, and power of philanthropy.

The audio format allows delights like hearing the voice of washerwoman and donor extraordinaire Oseola McCarty, the calls of animals saved from extinction through charitable action, the sound of Laura Bush dumping ice water over her husband’s head to raise money for Lou Gehrig’s disease, clips of music saved by donors, and more.

With a subscription through iTunes or SoundCloud, each episode will arrive automatically once a week. To view sample episodes and subscribe, visit SweetCharityPodcast.org

51 vs. 34

When they are told what charter schools are, 51 percent of respondents in a recent national survey say they support them. When asked if they support charter schools, without any description, 34 percent answer yes. *Education Next FALL 2016

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PhilAphorism

Let no one be discouraged by the belief that there is nothing one person can do against the enormous array of the world’s ills, misery, ignorance, and violence. Few will have the greatness to bend history, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. And in the total of all those acts will be written the history of a generation.

—ROBERT KENNEDY

(from The Almanac of American Philanthropy)

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PHILANTHROPY

In Memoriam: Terry Kohler “When do we leave?” was the common refrain of philanthropist Terry Kohler, who passed away in late September at the age of 82. Known for his love of the outdoors, particularly sailing and birds, he and his wife, Mary, were often up for special missions, specifically ones linked to aviation and conservation. When Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson asked Kohler to fly to Alaska to transport precious trumpeter-swan eggs to the Milwaukee Zoo, there was no hesitation, and his penchant for adventure resulted in more than 5,000 trumpeter swans, with their eight-foot wingspan, now gracing the Midwest. Ever-ready to take to the skies, he also helped save the whooping crane by leading flocks to a new habitat in an ultralight airplane, and helped excavate rare dinosaur fossils with his copter.

A native of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, Kohler was the great-grandson of the founder of the plumbing company by the same name. Both his father and grandfather were governors of the Badger State, and Kohler himself ran for office in 1982.

While he lost the election, he married his campaign manager, Mary, and together they embarked on a philanthropic journey rooted in curiosity, patriotism, and elbow grease, taking on volunteer roles to supplement their checks. Informed by Terry’s experience leading the ­Vollrath Company from $13 million in annual sales to $300 million, the couple supported efforts to bolster the free enterprise system that buoyed them and their employees. Other beneficiaries of their generosity include the International Crane Foundation, Ducks Unlimited, and conservative policy thought leaders like the Institute for World Politics and the St. Croix Review.

The Kohlers also focused on strengthening marriage, supporting Great Marriages Sheboygan and The Philanthropy Roundtable’s Culture of F ­ reedom project. Having gone through a divorce before his marriage to Mary, Kohler told Philanthropy that “intact families are most successful for the upbringing of children…. I’m not trying to imply that everybody who is getting or has gotten a divorce is bad. I’ve failed in that department myself. But we ought to make it as easy and desirable as possible for people to maintain intact families.”

To learn more about Mary and Terry Kohler’s philanthropy, read the Summer 2014 issue, with an exclusive interview and additional information about Terry and Mary’s trek across Russia to save the Siberian crane. Their conservation work is also documented in The Almanac of American Philanthropy in the Great Achievements in Nature compendium.

What’s allowed in policy advocacy?

Tax-deductible

In an election year, it’s hard to keep straight the options available to philanthropists to advance public-policy change. Here’s your cheat sheet from The Philanthropy Roundtable’s guidebook From Promising to Proven, describing what various types of tax-exempt groups are, and are not, allowed to do:

Publicly disclosed Can lobby Can campaign

501c3 Private Foundation

501c4 Social Welfare Organization

Tax-exempt. Donations to the entity are tax-deductible, and are publicly disclosed (if $5,000 or more). Grants made by the group are publicly disclosed. Organization can lobby (advocate for specific rules or legislation with elected officials or their staff ) as long as it is in “self-defense.”

For example, oppose legislation that would change how foundations are governed and oppose changes that would limit the charitable deduction. Can provide funds to charities that lobby with funds from other sources. Can directly inform public opinion and public policies through research and communications. Prohibited from engaging in political campaigns. Main advocacy role is to conduct policy research and run public-awareness campaigns.

Tax-exempt. Donations to the entity are not tax-deductible.

Donors can be anonymous. Organization can advocate for public policies without limitation. Can lobby without limitation on topics related to its mission. Can participate in political activity, including urging particular votes and depicting candidates in positive or negative ways. Also allowed to engage in active electioneering so long as that is not the “primary purpose of the group,” and the electioneering is relevant to the organization’s primary purpose. (These same basic rules apply to 501c6 trade associations, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which often do similar work in the policy arena.)

(example: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation)

501c3 Public Charity (example: KIPP)

Tax-exempt. Donations to the entity are tax-deductible, and donors can be anonymous.

Organization can advocate for public policies. Can engage in a limited amount of lobbying.

May engage in nonpartisan election activities like debates, candidate forums, and voter assistance. Prohibited from engaging in political campaigns.

Main advocacy role is to push for public policies it believes in.

(example: Club for Growth)

527 Political Action Committee

527 Super PAC

Tax exempt. Donations to the entity are not tax deductible, and they are capped at $5,000 per year. Donors are publicly disclosed. Only minimal lobbying allowed. Can make unlimited contributions to political campaigns, including directly to candidates, subject only to federal reporting and dollar requirements.

Main purpose is to directly supply campaign expenses in support of specific candidates, ballot initiatives, or legislation.

Tax exempt. Donations to the entity are not tax deductible, and they are unlimited. Donors are publicly disclosed. Only minimal lobbying allowed. Can make unlimited contributions to political campaigns, subject only to federal reporting and dollar requirements, but these cannot go directly to candidates or be coordinated with candidates.

Main purpose is to inform voters of the positions of candidates on public issues, or the merits of ballot initiatives or legislation.

(example: National Education Association Fund)

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(example: AFL-CIO Workers’ Voices PAC)

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Woodlawn Cemetery Preservation Training Program

Madam C. J. Walker, Joseph Pulitzer, Rowland Macy, Herman Melville, Fiorello LaGuardia, and Miles Davis are all buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

Established in 1863 and interring over 300,000 individuals, the 400-acre property is a national historic landmark. Many of the 1,300 mausoleums and 150,000 monuments in this graveyard are paragons of American design, but they don’t keep themselves. Maintaining the treasures of this peaceful property is a job for skilled artisans fluent in the languages of marble, slate, and stained glass.

But here, as in most cemeteries around the U.S., decay outraces repair. When administrators at Woodlawn found themselves in need of more restorative hands, they also noted troubling trends among the living in their Bronx community. The borough has an 8 percent unemployment rate, and one of the highest youth incarceration rates in the state.

Enter the Woodlawn Cemetery ­Preservation Training Program, a partnership between the cemetery, World Monuments Fund, International Masonry Institute, and additional funders. It created a nine-week internship on the grounds, providing 16 young adults with work resetting, cutting, polishing, caulking, and renewing ­stonework—and getting paid $10 per hour for a 30-hour workweek. Resident craftsman Robert Cappiello offers participants professional training. He helps them “grasp the basic safety skills, terminologies, stone types, and hand skills needed to be in this trade.”

Students develop their social aptitudes as well, through life-skills classes and services provided by the nonprofit 10

Making a living among the dead.

­ pportunities for a Better Tomorrow, O thanks to a grant from the Heckscher Foundation for Children. “We wanted to be as creative as we could in addressing other life issues these young people are facing,” says Frank Sanchis, the U.S. program director at the World Monuments Fund.

Young people who complete the program have a chance to build a family-sustaining career in building trades and preservation, in the heart of the architecturally robust and high-maintenance Big Apple.

Meanwhile, Woodlawn receives muchneeded help with its restoration backlog.

“Historic cemeteries are facing the losing battle of maintaining an overwhelming number of monuments with limited interest in care from descendants,” says Woodlawn’s historian, Susan Olsen. “Using the historic cemetery as a training site, or ‘outdoor lab,’ is a way to address the issue.”

Although the program is young, its results are promising. In the first cohort, 11 of 12 students completed the nine PHILANTHROPY

weeks of training; eight of the interns are now employed directly in the masonry trade, including three who continue at ­Woodlawn Cemetery in a follow-on 19-month paid apprenticeship program.

At the outset, Woodlawn only intended to hire two apprentices in this capacity, but ended up taking three, a testament to the initial training program’s effectiveness. “These young people were not college-bound, but now they’re working in jobs at good salaries—most are making $45,000 a year with benefits,” says Sanchis.

For Luis Cruz, one of the three apprentices now employed by Woodlawn, the best part of the program is how it brought all the interns together in a shared goal—restoring and preserving relics of the past. He plans to continue working at Woodlawn and eventually pursue a career in engineering.

In addition to the Hecksher funding, WCPTP has attracted other philanthropic support, including a $30,000 grant from the New York City-based Achelis and Bodman Foundations. Executive director John Krieger says one of the initiative’s most impressive attributes is the coalition of partners supporting it. “It’s not easy to put together a program of this kind. The fact that so many high-quality organizations were willing to participate gave us confidence,” Krieger says.

WCPTP generated enough success to lead Woodlawn to explore a second cohort in the summer of 2016. All 16 students completed the program and each is on track for a job placement, including two young people who are continuing to work with Woodlawn as apprentices.

The World Monuments Fund is now looking for other U.S. cemeteries struggling to find good workers with preservation and restoration skills, so similar programs modeled on the Woodlawn pilot can be established. Local training partners and funders will be needed. And reducing the high cost per youth served, without eliminating the one-on-one attention, will be the next challenge for making this kind of program more common. —David Bass

Robert Cappiello

nonprofit spotlight

interview with the aim of expanding that remarkable chain of charter schools to 100 campuses.

The Foundation Center estimates that he has so far given away more than $1 billion.

Philanthropy spoke with this wizard of Wall Street and Giving Pledge signer about his charitable priorities, how he models generosity, and his philanthropic heroes.

An early bird to the hedge-fund industry, Julian Robertson built one of the largest private investment vehicles in the world—while steadily giving away

sums beyond anyone’s expectations.

Philanthropy: Many business titans have a moment where they transition from accumulating wealth to giving it away.

Did this happen to you?

Robertson: There was no transition for me, because I’ve always enjoyed giving away money, and I’ve never stopped ­trying to earn wealth, though I’m not doing a very good job of that lately.

I came from a town and a family that were very public-spirited. I learned that spirit from my parents particularly. When a school needed something, the populace took care of it. When there was a need for a park or something like that, the public gave generously. That was the beautiful part about the town where I grew up. One man in town had established a tremendously successful retail-store chain and a lot of people had invested with him, and those people were givers. It was a wonderful town to grow up in, and it gave me great values.

Forbes Media LLC / Contributor / Getty Images

JULIAN ROBERTSON Though his adult life has passed almost entirely in New York City, Julian Robertson still commands a rich southern drawl. This early ­progenitor of the American hedge fund grew up in small-town Salisbury, North Carolina, attended the University of North Carolina, and landed in the Big Apple as a stockbroker.

In 1980, he founded what became known as the Tiger Fund.

And boy did this tiger earn its stripes. Averaging net returns as high as 25 percent a year, the fund peaked at $22 billion in assets. While Robertson was busy scrutinizing investments, he was also betting on people, especially his Tiger employees, who he hoped would become both great investors and arch philanthropists. Nine years after starting the Tiger Fund, ­Robertson

created the Tiger Foundation and asked his employees to help him distribute his charitable funds wisely across New York City.

In 2000 Robertson closed his hedge fund and used its proceeds to seed the hedge funds of former employees, many of whom are household names in finance today: Lee Ainslie, John ­Griffin, Stephen Mandel, Andreas Halvorsen, and many more. And to Robertson’s delight, most also became leaders in New York’s philanthropic community. Ainslie and Griffin, for instance, went on to serve on the board of the Robin Hood Foundation, which in 2016 raised over $61 million in a single night to fight poverty.

Robertson continues to be a major giver in his own right. For instance, he donated $25 million to Success Academy this year, FALL 2016

Philanthropy: How many foundations have you started, and what are their purposes?

Robertson: I started three. One was the Tiger Foundation, whose main purpose was to create philanthropists within our company.

Another was the R ­ obertson Foundation, which makes grants to education, to medicine, and to the environment, primarily. And the third is one I created in honor of my parents, a foundation that gives money to the town where I grew up.

Philanthropy: What is your involvement with the Robin Hood Foundation?

Robertson: I am a great admirer of the Robin Hood Foundation. It raises more money in one sitting than any other charity in the world and does tremendous things here in New York City.

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interview Philanthropy: Of your charitable gifts, what are you most proud of ?

Robertson: Probably the best thing I’ve ever done was start the Tiger Foundation.

I gave my employees the money. Told them to go spend it. And told them they were responsible for it.

It succeeded wildly beyond my expectations. They did a mar velous job of researching anti-poverty efforts in New York City, which is the Tiger ­Foundation’s focus. Other people saw how successful the foundation was and joined in—there was a real big magnification effect. I think it also helped our business. People liked working in an organization that had charitable giving as part of it. And then so many of my employees went on to found their own firms and their own philanthropic endeavors. Now their projects are probably bigger than my own.

I don’t think you teach generosity; I think you encourage generosity. People like to help their fellow man and they really love working when they’re doing good for others.

The way both the Robin Hood ­Foundation and the Tiger Foundation work, people monitor the gifts, they see where the money goes, they actually are responsible for what the money does.

Philanthropy: You’ve been known to translate investment principles to charitable giving. Are there any that don’t translate?

Robertson: I’m sure a lot of them don’t translate. But there are some key things for both investing and giving. One is that you get good management. For a foundation head, you need decency, smarts, practically the same things that you’re looking for in a good investor.

And when I look at these philanthropic projects, I evaluate them the way I would an investment. We at the foundation try to find out as much as we can. What good will it do? What are the chances of us winning on this thing?

It’s important that the people involved in the project are producing results. You 12

have to have expectations and if those expectations aren’t made you aren’t doing a good job.

People who evaluate the impact of their giving will have a good reputation for giving, and be more capable of getting others to follow them.

Philanthropy: Tell me about your investments in education reform.

Robertson: There are a few people who are really doing a great job in charter schools and one of them is certainly Eva Moskowitz.

It’s just fabulous what she’s done. That’s discernible by the test scores her students make.

We try to get school operators to use national standards so we can see where they stand against the regular schools and the best and worst charters.

I’ve seen people want to start charter schools and then forget that they have an obligation to the pupils. They still have some great schools but their newer schools are not really performing.

It’s very important to select your schools, just like it ’s very important which stock you buy. We’ve stayed with the charter schools in New York and we think they’re extremely good.

Philanthropy: Do you think the public schools have gotten better since the introduction of competition from the charter schools?

Robertson: Certainly. That shows up in some figures we get from Texas. That shows up in all kinds of businesses. A filling station that had been all by itself improves dramatically when a station opens right across the street.

Philanthropy: What are the big barriers to progress in education reform?

Robertson: Well, the press can be extremely anti-charter school because the schools employ non-union teachers. The New York Times has fought charters vigorously. I gave a $25 million contribution to PHILANTHROPY

Success Academy and the New York Times did a story on it—but they asked me in the interview if I had read their stories on Success Academy.

And I said, “Indeed I have read your stories,” but I added, “When I see a line a mile long for every child that gets in the school via lottery, I know there’s something good there that’s attracting people.”

Philanthropy: Tell us about the ­R obertson Scholars Program at the ­University of North Carolina and Duke.

Why did you establish that program, and why at both schools?

Robertson: The schools are ten miles apart, and are among the very best schools in the United States, but for some strange reason there wasn’t a whole lot of action between them. This scholarship has brought the schools together.

Scholars can go to either school for classes. One requirement is that you have to spend at least one semester at the school that you did not apply to. In other words, if you are enrolled at Duke you have to spend one semester at North Carolina, and vice versa.

Scholar selection is based partly on grades and test scores, but I’d much rather have a student body president than a 4.0 student. Last year, for instance, I interviewed a girl and she told me that she had a twin brother who was the president of the Bronx High School of Science, which is a terrific school. So we contacted him too to get a scholarship.

We’re really looking for leaders.

Scholars have tremendous opportunities to travel, to go to schools in different parts of the world, to attend leadership seminars. They’re receiving the best that private education and ­public education have to offer together.

My goal is that they become the leaders of tomorrow.

Philanthropy: You’ve been very involved in medical funding in New York.

Robertson: We’re at work in all sorts of different areas. I’d love for you to see our

TIGER CUBS, ALL GROWN UP beautiful operating theater for Sloan Kettering here that I gave in honor of my wife, who was a cancer victim. And we’re very involved in stem-cell research; we think that’s an important new ­frontier. We’re also big givers to Rockefeller ­University—a lot of people haven’t heard of it, but it should be a household byword. Rockefeller U ­ niversity alone has more Nobel laureates than all but six countries in the world. Isn’t that ­amazing?

Philanthropy: Who are some of your philanthropic heroes?

Robertson: I’d say Paul Tudor Jones.

Steve Mandel, who comes from our Tiger Foundation. Oh and Eli Broad— he’s built more museums, done more for education, than just about anybody you’ll ever know.

New York has so many great philanthropists. I mean, George Soros, whose politics are totally different from mine, but, boy, is he a great philanthropist. Dan Loeb with Success Academies. Harlem Children’s Zone’s Geoffrey Canada and Stan Druckenmiller. They’re fabulous people who’ve done fabulous things and I’m so privileged to work with them.

Philanthropy: What do you think about leaving your wealth to your children? Is that a good idea or a bad idea? Do you plan to sunset your foundation?

Robertson: I’m not going to try to manage things from the grave. Hopefully my sons will want to continue to manage the foundation and will jointly work on it.

Parenting is a tough thing, and I think people ought to do it the way they see best. But I came from a giving family and I want my family to be giving. I have children that I’m really very proud of—one of them is a charter-school principal—they’re wonderful boys. I have great confidence that they will give away the money they’re given in an effective manner. And they’ll use some of it themselves, too. P

Julian Robertson’s goal in creating the Tiger Foundation was to make philanthropists out of his employees. Was he successful? You decide.

Stephen Mandel, Lone Pine Capital: From 2010 to 2014, Mandel chaired the board of Dartmouth College, where he received his bachelor’s degree. In 2011, he contributed $25 million to create an endowment fund for Teach For America, where he serves on the national board of directors. (Other donors who joined him in this endowment funding were the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, Laura and John Arnold Foundation, and—guess who— Julian Robertson.) Since 2001, Mandel’s Lone Pine Foundation has given over $60 million in grants to fight poverty through education.

Andreas Halvorsen, Viking Global Investors: Halvorsen serves on the board of his New England alma mater, Williams College. He’s also chairman of the board of the Clark, a renowned art museum and research center. He formerly served on the board of Right To Play, an international nonprofit that uses games to foster community, resolve conflict, and improve public health.

Robert Citrone, Discovery Capital Management: Focused on his childhood hometown of Pittsburgh, Robert Citrone and his wife, Cindy, sponsor the annual banquet that raises money for the Boys and Girls Club of Western Pennsylvania. Cindy is a member of the board of visitors of M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, and the Citrones are major donors to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation.

Philippe Laffont, Coatue Management: Laffont is on the board of the Robin Hood Foundation and also serves on the advisory board for the Robin Hood Prize, which awards interventions that will help more community college students graduate within two to three years. He’s also serving on the FALL 2016

board of New York Presbyterian Hospital, and founded the Nantucket Dreamland Foundation, which purchased a theater in 2007 and restored it to be a thriving film and performing arts center.

Lee Ainslie, Maverick Capital Management: Ainslie also serves on the board of the Robin Hood Foundation.

He told Institutional Investor, “I give Julian Robertson and Paul Jones a great deal of credit. Both over 25 years ago embarked on different foundations, each of which have become very important, very successful, in attacking poverty here in New York City. That really started this culture that you can see which is now pretty pervasive in the hedgefund industry. To me it’s a pursuit that’s been pretty rewarding. I’ve been quite involved at Robin Hood over the years and you really can tell very directly the difference we’re making, with the support of thousands of new donors.”

John Griffin, Blue Ridge Capital: In 1999, Griffin co-founded i­Mentor.org. The nonprofit identifies students in high school who don’t come from college families and matches them with volunteer mentors who agree to devote three years to working with the student. Starting with 49 young people in the South Bronx, the nonprofit now serves over 6,000. Griffin is a highereducation donor; he endowed the McIntire Center for Financial Innovation at the University of Virginia, and gave the principal gift for a new building at UVA’s school of commerce. The latter came with naming rights; Griffin chose to call it Robertson Hall. “Julian and Josie have touched so many lives in so many profound ways,” he said. “Julian is the ‘professor emeritus’ of hedge-fund investing, and his selfless teaching continues to this day. Likewise, his and Josie’s passion for philanthropy has not only had an extraordinary influence on the organizations they have supported, but has served as a remarkable example of altruism to all of us.”

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Villano Photo LLC Photos by Noah Zinsmeister

Bruce and Suzie Kovner give to schoolchildren, music students, and policymaking.

Here’s how and why.

Villano Photo LLC Photos by Noah Zinsmeister

B

ruce Kovner met William Simon once.

He thinks it was probably when Simon was Treasury Secretary, under President Ford. “The impression he left on me was the same as he left on the public. I remember his grasp and defense of principle, which struck me as unusual and powerful.”

Also, “his post-Treasury life was fascinating. He was a great businessman and did thoughtful philanthropy.”

With his wife, Suzie, Kovner is the 2016 winner

of the William E. Simon Prize for Philanthropic Leadership. The Kovners concentrate their giving on three areas: First, ideas, particularly conservative or libertarian ideas that show promise of improving American public policy.

Second, one specific, shining idea—that low-income families, like other families, should have high-quality choices in the schools they send their children to. And third, excellent music, particularly the intensive training of young prodigies that goes

into sustaining classical music into the future.

Bruce and Suzie married in 2007. Their main home is in Florida, and they also have a home in Manhattan. Despite giving away hundreds of millions of dollars, the Kovner name is on very little. In 2005, New York magazine described Bruce as “the most powerful New Yorker you’ve never heard of.” He is resolutely private, and naturally self-effacing.

You get a hint of the lack of pretension in Bruce’s clan from a family story about pronouncing his surname.

Bruce and his father always said “Kahv-ner,” but other relatives used “Kohv-ner” or “Kuv-ner.” Bruce recalls that “once, several of us who used different versions went to our grandmother, who didn’t speak English. Sitting at her feet, we said, ‘Tell us, once and for all, how do you say it?’ After she had spoken, each of us exclaimed, ‘See? I’m right!’”

By the editors of Philanthropy with reporting by Jay Nordlinger.

SUMMER FALL 2016 2016

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this and that,” says Suzie. “So it was perfectly normal for me, when I turned 22, to volunteer at Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.” Chipping in like that “was just part of the air that we breathed, which was so lucky and wonderful for us.” Suzie serves at Sloan Kettering to this day.

Her family life, like Bruce’s, included regular political conversation, but the Fairchilds were Republicans and strong advocates of free enterprise. Suzie confesses that in 1992 she voted for the “Man from Hope.” “My mother was so disappointed in me,” she says. “The day after the election, she called me and said, ‘See what you’ve done?’” Suzie did not vote to re-elect Bill Clinton.

In 1981, when Suzie was 13, her mother took her to see a famous eight-and-a-half-hour-long theater production of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens. There were dinner breaks, but Suzie was reluctant to leave. “It set my world on fire,” she says, and began her lasting passion for plays. She now raises funds for the National Theatre in London and serves on the drama council of the Juilliard School (which has a theater program along with its well-known academy for training musicians).

“If I have a chance to explain how markets work, I take it. If I have an opportunity to explain the nature of innovation, competition, creative destruction—the principles that power intellectual and economic progress— I do so.” memories of who won what at the Knowledge Bowl.”

Bruce eventually decided he wanted to go to Harvard. Why? “First, my brother had gone to Stanford, and I wanted to outdo him. Second, I was tremendously enamored of Harvard grad John F. Kennedy.” Off he went, on a scholarship. More from Harvard Yard in a moment, after we get to know Suzie.

Another American story “I have never been called ‘Suzanne’ except by my mother when I was in trouble,” explains Suzie Kovner. “I much prefer ‘Suzie,’ because then I know I’m not in hot water.” She was born into a prominent business family—her great-grandfather co-founded Fairchild Publications, which eventually published Women’s Wear Daily, among other magazines. Her grandfather didn’t go to college, jumping straight to work to help build up the company. A few friendships, though, made him an admirer of Colgate University in upstate New York, and he became a benefactor. That’s what got Suzie interested in attending.

Suzie and her three sisters grew up with charitable activity. “My parents served on boards and volunteered for PHILANTHROPY

Campus politics Bruce entered Harvard in 1962. As part of his scholarship he worked various campus jobs. For instance, he got up early in the morning to make breakfast for the law students, learning to crack eggs two at a time, one in each hand. Asked if he can still do that, Suzie chimes in before he can answer: “We crack his eggs for him now.”

He was a Young Democrat, and early in his freshman year took a trip to Washington with other Young Democrats. They did not meet their hero from Camelot, but some members of his Cabinet talked to them, including the President’s brother, the Attorney General.

“I had a certain amount of chutzpah,” says Kovner, and he asked Bobby

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An American story All four of Bruce’s grandparents were immigrants from Russia or Poland who came to America with nothing.

Three were religiously conventional Jews. Bruce’s paternal grandfather was a militant communist atheist. “I sometimes wonder how these values get transmitted,” says Bruce—whose own politics could not be more different from his grandfather’s.

One thing Bruce does share with that grandfather is a love of books. When he founded his own company in 1983, he named it after William Caxton, one of the first book printers in fifteenth-century England. Kovner has always inhaled books. He collects rare ones, too. In the library of his Manhattan home he pulls out first editions of the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493), whose cover is in pigskin and wood, of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776). Kovner has even commissioned his own collectible book: the monumental Pennyroyal Caxton Bible—the twentieth century’s only complete Bible from Genesis to Revelation that is newly illustrated by one artist (Barry Moser).

Kovner’s mother was a homemaker and his father did a variety of jobs, working in construction for a time, becoming head of the sheet-metal workers’ union, then training himself to be a mechanical engineer. “He was a clever guy and we debated politics all the time,” says Bruce. Izzy Kovner was basically an FDR Democrat.

The family moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles when Bruce was eight. He went to Van Nuys High, and became student-body president and a good athlete. His best sport was basketball, but he was even better on the Knowledge Bowl team.

At the Knowledge Bowl he had an adversary named Michael Tilson Thomas—who is now one of America’s most famous orchestra conductors.

“He has been a lifelong friend,” says Kovner. “But we have slightly different

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In the “Fab Lab” at Success Academy, where the lauded charter school teaches students 3-D printing.

Kennedy how the Justice Department could support I. G. Farben, the German chemical giant which had collaborated with the Third Reich.

The Holocaust made a big impression on Kovner. When he was a kid in Brooklyn he went to Hebrew school, and his teacher had a labor-camp tattoo on his arm. He’d also had an eye burned out, and refused to wear a patch over the empty socket.

“I remember sitting there thinking it was beyond comprehension. It has never left me.”

That’s one of the reasons Kovner wanted to study international politics. In his freshman year he had a class with Henry Kissinger. “He is a very deep thinker and a wonderful teacher, and he exposed me to a world of thinking that was extremely helpful,” says Bruce. There were other important teachers. One was James Q. Wilson, who would turn into an influential

political scientist. He and Kovner became lifelong friends. Foremost was Edward Banfield, a seminal political scientist a generation older who became a mentor to Bruce, indeed a kind of foster father.

Bruce majored in government but took a lot of economics. Classical economics and the classical political theories of liberty bowled him over. Owing to his leftist family background, “I had zero appreciation as a kid for the nature of markets, or the political philosophy that underpins the American experience.”

Hungry to learn more, he entered a Ph.D. program at Harvard in government.

One of his professors was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was recruited into the Nixon White House after the election of 1968. He did some recruiting himself among his students, inviting Bruce to come along. “Banfield and Wilson said to me, ‘No, finish your Ph.D. You can always go into government later.’” Kovner never did FALL 2016

finish his Ph.D., deciding in the early 1970s to head in other directions. “Poor Bruce, he never got to be an assistant professor somewhere,” Wilson liked to quip.

Seeing the numbers Kovner knocked around a bit after leaving graduate school. This included some time working on political campaigns. It included some taxi-driving.

In 1973, Bruce was in New York City while his fiancée Sarah Peter (with whom he eventually had three children before they divorced in 1998) was off in Germany, studying. He wanted to join her abroad for a few months, but needed money to make that happen. So he wrote reports for a Congressman on tariffs and trade. He sold memberships in a singles club that his brother had started. Then he started driving a cab during the graveyard shift from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.

“There were often sagas in the back seat. Some were hilarious. Some 17

The Kovners aren’t generally interested in naming their gifts. One big exception: the $60 million merit-based fellowship they created at Juilliard, where their desire to build personal relationships with the students convinced them to

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put their name on the program.

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unrepeatable. And the places you wound up…”

While hacking, Kovner learned two serious things that helped edge him toward his ultimate career. First, he appreciated the concrete accumulation of money. “I loved starting every evening with about $20 in change, then having three or four hundred dollars at the end of my shift.” A nice wad.

Bruce also appreciated what he calls the “autonomy” of driving a cab.

That got him thinking about how he wanted to make his living in the long run. “I’m not an organization guy. I’ve never worked long for a big organization. One of the things I loved about the financial markets is that they grant you total autonomy. I felt very comfortable in the marketplace, because, if you do it well, it gives you autonomy in life.”

Then in the mid-1970s Kovner turned his studious instincts toward a new field: financial markets. “I immediately found an affinity for them.

I just got it. It was like everything clicked. I’m very comfortable with mathematical relationships, and I could see the numbers. I could literally see the arbitrages. I don’t mean this in a metaphorical way. I could see them as a matrix. I could see what was out of place. It was a moment of self-revelation.”

Eventually, the theorizer began to put his money where his mouth was (or where his brain was). With $3,000 borrowed on his credit card, he made his first trades in February 1977. One of his three trades resulted in a small loss.

The second produced a small immediate gain. The third trade—a Jewish kid from Brooklyn buying soybeans—exploded. In two months it was worth $50,000. But Bruce didn’t sell until his stake had fallen back to $25,000.

For a couple days he didn’t feel like eating. It wasn’t so much that he had $25,000 in the bank instead of the $50,000 he might have captured. “It

another reminder of the pleasure that comes from helping another person.

Public-policy philanthropy When Bruce accumulated big money, he gave. He started with what he calls “minor civic giving.”

Donations to various local institutions. “I wanted to be a good citizen.”

Soon, though, he dove into major national philanthropy.

College classmate Christopher DeMuth had become president of the American Enterprise Institute, a leading think tank in Washington, D.C. He called Kovner and asked whether he would like to play a part in AEI. The answer was yes.

AEI was a natural fit for Kovner.

It defended free enterprise, individual rights, and personal accountability. It advocated for a strong military and a was the feeling that I had lost control tough-minded foreign policy. Kovner of the process. I realized that I had joined the AEI board in 1989, became attempted to play this game without its chairman from 2002 to 2008, and a full toolkit. I did not understand continues on the board today. how to manage risk.” Finding trades is Another object of the Kovners’ one important skill. Managing risk is public-policy philanthropy has been another. He began to school himself. the Institute for Justice, a D.C.-based In a hurry, Bruce Kovner got good. law firm that litigates—with a very By the end of his first year of trading he high success rate—to limit intrusions had a million dollars in the bank. Wanting of government power on individual to give up his amateur status and go pro, liberties. “They do so much to defend as he puts it, Kovner joined an established the least empowered and least well off commodities trading firm, then left after a in our country,” says Suzie. “There are few years to found his own company. He so many barriers to small business, for ran Caxton Associates until 2011. instance. Shouldn’t American citizens What did his former Ph.D. adviser who pay taxes have the right to run their Ed Banfield think of all this? “He own hair-braiding operation, or sell hot was originally perplexed about why I dogs on the street, or start a bus line?” gave up academic life,” says Kovner, The Kovners first began supporting “because he was a pure soul and didn’t the Institute for Justice after Bruce understand why anybody would choose noticed “that they were the principal to do anything but read books, write, defenders of school choice in the and teach. But when I started to succeed courts. And they did a great job of it.” in the financial world, he was pleased.”

Both Kovners are on fire for One day, Banfield asked Kovner if he school choice right now. They have could come into the office and just been tremendously impressed by the watch. Kovner said, “There’s nothing results at “no-excuses” schools that to see, really—it’s like watching paint offer low-income and underprivileged dry—but sure.” Around then, Kovner children excellent, demanding education opened a trading account for his old outside the bureaucratic encumbrances of mentor. It made the academic’s life conventional public schools. “Education easier in his final years, and gave Kovner is the fundamental tool of empowerment

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“I’m not an organization guy. I’ve never worked long for a big organization. I felt very comfortable in the marketplace, because, if you do it well, it gives you autonomy in life.”

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“The power of ideas is the greatest power,” Bruce Kovner likes to say. But investing in ideas can offer uncertain returns. Ideas germinate and travel from one mind to the next, inspire new thoughts in new places, link to other insights and change in response, sometimes find a wide audience quickly, sometimes languish for years before reaching the right destination, sometimes die on the vine. These things make the value of idea-dissemination impossible to measure with consistency.

When an idea methodically grows from brainstorm to practical proposal to worldchanging reality, however, it is easy to see how explosive a fresh thought can be.

One of the most successful instances of idea-­nurturance the Kovners have been involved with is the expansion of school choice.

In the 1970s and ’80s, a core group of donors interested in new social reforms then being generated by conservative intellectuals began to overlap frequently in ­Manhattan. Bruce Kovner, Peter Flanigan, Roger Hertog, Richard Gilder, Robert Wilson, and others gathered to hash out solutions to problems then very visible in New York City. One place they gravitated was school choice as a fix for their city’s dismal public schools.

They pushed new ideas on several fronts: a scholarship fund to send children to Catholic and other low-cost/high-impact private schools. A research partnership with Harvard’s Paul Peterson to explore vouchers that would allow funding to follow students wherever their parents placed them. Exploration of the new concept of charter schools.

Their little group’s membership grew, and took on a more activist role. In addition to the direct charity of scholarships and the tablesetting academic research they funded, they found it necessary to launch public education, advocacy, and politicalaction efforts and organizations. Their heavy investments of time and energy, and steady donations of resources, were crucial in preparing and promoting the legislation that finally passed in a nail-biting vote in the last hours of 1998—authorizing an initial trial of 100 charter schools in New York State.

Almost as soon as they opened, public demand for charter schools surged. There were creative experiments in school structure, culture, and curriculum. Before long, charter schools were producing dramatic successes with students who had been badly let down by conventional public schools. Today, there are about 200 charter schools in New York, serving more than 100,000 students. Kovner has been personally and financially involved in supporting many of them, including spectacularly impressive school chains like the Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, and Success Academy networks. In the process he’s learned a lot about working out the kinks as an idea progresses from theory to reality. “You actually have to learn to teach better, and we had a process of trial and error.” After laborious inventing, erring, adapting, and learning as they went (which is what the mechanisms of competition and choice spurred), charter supporters have not only dramatically brightened the futures of hundreds of thousands of local children, but also refined a social reform with demonstrated power to change any locale it spreads to.

As charter legislation began to be adopted in other states, beginning with Minnesota, the M ­ anhattan donor activists resolved to bring it to New York.

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Moskowitz in 2006 has produced some of the best test scores in the city with children living in some of the poorest neighborhoods. Moskowitz says the Kovners are bold givers and participants, and points out that Bruce was a very early supporter of the nascent school-choice movement. His example has encouraged

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PUTTING IDEAS INTO PRACTICE

for all of us, and especially for those who don’t have other advantages,” says Bruce. “And we know how to fix the education system in the United States.

Break the Post Office-style monopoly.

It’s awful that so much of the education establishment resists this.”

The Kovners are major backers of Success Academy Charter Schools, among others. Suzie is a Success director. This New York City network founded by Eva

other givers, she says, because “they know he is a serious person. So his influence goes beyond his gifts. He is a leader.”

Asked why people aren’t more impressed and grateful with the astonishing successes of the school-choice movement in just a couple decades, Suzie says, “These are still early days. I can’t look for thank-you notes at this point. Yet when you shake the hand of one of those kids and you look into his eyes and he tells you that he loves

how he reacts when people doubt or criticize his public-policy giving, he answers, “I never fight back.” However, “I do sometimes find an opportunity to explain why certain principles are effective. If I have a chance to explain how markets work, I take it. If I have an opportunity to explain the nature of innovation, competition, creative destruction—all of the principles that power not just economic markets but the

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With a student from Juilliard, Bruce and Suzie Kovner look over a manuscript in Beethoven’s own hand.

reading or loves science or loves to write code—it’s exciting.”

“Don’t look for gratitude,” is Bruce’s simple answer. It is hard to imagine him rattled or fiery. He is always circumspect and low-key. Asked more generally

entire intellectual progress of modern enlightenment—I do so.”

Mozart, Beethoven, and other close friends It’s not possible to talk to Bruce and Suzie FALL 2016

Kovner for long without music popping into view. Suzie is steeped in music, and a trustee of Carnegie Hall. Bruce is an amateur musician and music scholar, 15-year board chairman of the Juilliard School, and a member of the Metropolitan Opera and Lincoln Center boards.

At age 15, Bruce was in the car with his mother when something mesmerizing came on the radio. “What in the world is that?” he wondered. It was actually

something otherworldly: the movement “Mars” from of Gustav Holst’s piece for orchestra The Planets. It set him searching for more classical music, and on a path to an engrossing avocation.

The first record Kovner ever bought was Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. He collected many more records after that.

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choice evolve from pretty picture and long-range vision to thriving reality.

In college, he taught himself to play the piano. After reading Paul Lang’s book on Handel, he became very interested in Baroque music. He poked around a musical storage room at Harvard that contained clavichords and harpsichords and found “I was the only one interested in playing them.” When he settled in New York in the early 1970s he took a few classes at the Juilliard School— one was on the theory of harmony, for example. He also wrote some articles about music for Commentary magazine.

Bruce Kovner’s passionate self-education in music has reached its peak at Juilliard, whose board he joined in 1995. He has contributed much money there. And many ideas. Not to mention lots of precious manuscripts.

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For about a decade, Bruce collected rare musical documents of high importance: hand-written scores, sketchbooks, first-editions, all linked to pieces or people important to the evolution of classical music. Then in 2006 he donated his collection to Juilliard. It includes treasures from Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and other greats, and has deepened musical scholarship in New York.

PHILANTHROPY

Among the documents is the printer’s proof of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with the composer’s hundreds of final corrections and changes scratched across its surface in his own pen. This is the music Beethoven had before him while conducting the symphony’s premiere. Totally deaf by that time, Beethoven had to be nudged by one of the musicians at the end of the performance to see that the audience was standing, weeping, and thundering an ovation at him.

In 2009, Kovner decided to make his devotion to Baroque music concrete by providing a $20 million endowment to Juilliard’s new effort in historically accurate music performance. Thanks to this gift, all of the students in this very specialized graduate program are now on full-tuition scholarship.

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The Kovners have watched school

To maximize the chances that their gifts will be informed and successful, the Kovners often volunteer for leadership positions in the organizations they fund.

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Gratified by their contact with brilliant students committed to this high art despite its long labors, obscurity, and low pay, Bruce and Suzie made an even larger gift four years later. They donated $60 million to create a merit-based fellowship program that allows talented students at Juilliard to have their entire musical education paid for. In addition to tuition and living expenses there are funds for travel, auditioning, instruments, and so forth. This allows nonpareil artists to begin their performing careers debt-free, opening opportunities and choices that might otherwise have to be foregone for economic reasons.

Contrary to their usual practice, the Kovners allowed their name to be put on this program—because they want to develop personal relationships with these students. When Bruce or Suzie get hold of them outside their studies, the Kovner Fellows get taken out to lunch or dinner. They go apple-picking in the country.

They join Bruce and Suzie at plays and concerts. The donors treasure these interactions—like the time they took a student to a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and he ended up speechless, overwhelmed, and red-eyed.

the organizational level,” Bruce suggests. Recognizing that there is no substitute for personal involvement, he usually also gives lots of time and perspective to the places he sends his charitable money.

At the American Enterprise Institute, Bruce promoted the idea of independent review: outsiders who tell you how your organization is doing. Too often, says Bruce, organizations lapse into self-congratulation.

Periodic outside assessments can be important to maintaining the health of a nonprofit, he believes.

Bruce and Suzie’s foundation will not exist in perpetuity. It will be spent down during their lifetimes. They want to oversee the expenditures themselves, rather than leaving the job to others.

They know that successors sometimes do funny things with other people’s money.

Excellence in education “A key to understanding Bruce Kovner,” states his old friend Chris DeMuth, “is that his first principle has always been excellence.” Whatever he supports, in whichever field, he aims for it to be done as well as The business of philanthropy From among the almost infinite possibilities out there, possible. There is no substitute for mastery, and no excuse for shortcuts. how do the Kovners choose where to put their gifts?

Bruce says his philanthropy is personal; he supports Succeeding DeMuth as president of AEI is Arthur what he is interested in. And when a ripe opportunity Brooks, a scholar whose expertise includes charity. arises in a field he cares about, he acts with the aim of Moreover, he once made his living as a musician making a significant difference.

(French horn). He and Bruce have a lot in common.

The Kovners have given themselves a philanthropic Brooks notes that policy and great art “are different budget, and they stick to it, but allocating their gifts things, to be sure. But Bruce understands that there is requires many judgments. They like to act in force, a moral dimension to each.” (For more, see Brooks’s and helping some excellent organization fulfill a interview with Kovner in the Fall 2015 issue.) major institutional objective is one favorite mode of Editor Bill Kristol, who has received Kovner donating. To maximize the chances that their gifts will backing for some of his projects, says that “Bruce be informed and successful, the Kovners often assume is a man who thinks for himself. He is not a camp leadership positions in the organizations they fund. follower, of any group. I think he was really shaped by Bruce has a long history of immersing himself deeply on his teachers, especially Ed Banfield, who was such an volunteer boards at the organizations he supports. original thinker, a strict thinker, without any sloppiness Donors who can’t or won’t invest time along with in him. Bruce reflects that.” their money sometimes attach strings and requirements Kristol puts his finger on one other unusual to their checks in an alternate effort to influence the Kovner characteristic. “While Bruce is well educated, charitable outcomes. Though Bruce has done that at he continues to educate himself, which is not the times, he generally avoids it. Binding organizations case with all of us. We tend to coast on our previous and trying to set rules without getting involved in learning.” Kovner is perpetually informing and leadership is risky, he says. Conditions may change and retraining himself, along with others. your strictures become counterproductive. Beneficiaries Joseph Polisi, president of the Juilliard School, makes may give you only the news you want to hear. The similar points. The Kovners, he says, do “deep research.” talent necessary to execute a particular requirement They figure out all the angles. And “they don’t have their may be absent at the recipient group. All of these own agenda. What they do is understand the agenda of the institution that they support. And then figure out how risks can be minimized by “inserting yourself into they can help make that agenda sustainable.” P leadership and taking responsibility to fight it out at FALL 2016

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A loyal funder and a visionary took on tenement squalor, and won

by Susan Hertog

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PHILANTHROPY

Lillian Wald

istockphoto.com / nicoolay

Jacob Schiff

A

istockphoto.com / nicoolay

century ago, when philanthropy was a private affair, and gentlemen did not join forces with women, an extraordinary collaboration between one of America’s most successful financiers and an unknown woman just out of nursing school changed the course of thousands of American lives. The financier was the great Jewish philanthropist Jacob Schiff. His visionary partner was Lillian Wald. She had been introduced to Schiff by his mother-in-law with portentous words: “Either she is a genius, or a madwoman.”

Together, this duo nursed, educated, Americanized, and defended a great tide of poor immigrants as they flooded into New York City.

Trouble in the tenements Between 1892 and 1924, a surge of over 12 million immigrants passed through the port of New York.

Millions of them settled within blocks of the gangplanks they descended. They were aliens in a country whose language they could not speak and whose culture they did not understand.

A typical family with multiple children would occupy one poorly ventilated and ill-lit room measuring about 12 by 10 feet—which often served as a workshop as well as a home.

Two dark closets would serve as sleeping areas.

Running water was neither clean nor reliable, and the only toilets were in the courtyard, making modesty impossible and sanitation abysmal. The immigrants who crammed into Manhattan’s lower east side totaled twice as many people as resided on the whole rest of the island.

It was social reformers and sympathetic philanthropists who took charge of ameliorating the illness, poverty, crime, and injustice that floated in with the new arrivals. Women working in squalid tenements did much of the work on the ground—acculturating displaced peasants to an urban life radically different from anything they had known. Lillian Wald was among these dedicated public servants.

A debutante from Rochester, New York, Wald was an idealist with big dreams and an instinct for organization. Defying her parents’ more genteel expectations, she insisted on studying nursing amid the human bedlam of 1890 New York City. At age 22 she was too young to meet the enrollment requirements of the New York Hospital Training School for Nurses, so she lied about her age, then battled her way through the dehumanizing two-year course, often working alone in wards where most of the patients came to die.

Then as now, New York was a city of vast contrasts. The downtown poor carved out a living working in factories or hawking wares from pushcarts on mucky streets. Uptown, there were barons of industry and finance gliding in carriages to and from lavish family mansions.

Jacob Schiff was also an immigrant, but of the uptown variety. He had been born in Germany as the son of a financier. Well educated, and eager to succeed in America’s burgeoning economy, he quickly realized that the growth of railroads would overtake other forms of transportation. Immersing himself in all aspects of the industry, from engineering breakthroughs and the costs of constructing rail cars and laying tracks, to the scheduling and frequency of stops in cities that would yield the greatest profits, Schiff used his European banking connections to advantage, amassing capital to invest in the railroads and other American industries integral to this nascent national economy. Locking horns with his powerful competitor, J. P. Morgan and Company, he wasn’t averse to manipulating market prices in his favor, sometimes to his own detriment, Morgan’s, and the industry at large. Nonetheless, during the 1880s, Schiff made tens of millions of dollars for Kuhn, Loeb & Company, in effect pushing aside his change-resistant father-in-law, Solomon Loeb, and ascending to the company’s helm at age 38.

Schiff ’s mother-in-law, Betty Loeb, an admirer of the brilliant and philanthropic husband of her daughter, Therese, arranged the meeting between Schiff and Wald. As serendipitous as it was fortuitous, Mrs. Loeb had funded a hygiene class for female Jewish immigrants that Lillian Wald was chosen to teach. When the two women met in the drawing room of Loeb’s Fifth Avenue mansion, Wald described a visit to the tenement flat of one of her students, the filth and poverty of which shocked Wald into her resolve to establish a home nursing service—the first in New York City. Instinctively, Betty Loeb suggested that Wald meet with Jacob Schiff.

So in the spring of 1893, Wald donned her best satin blouse, fixed a beribboned bonnet on her upswept hair, and took a trolley to the Kuhn, Loeb & Company headquarters. As she was escorted into Schiff ’s mahogany-paneled chamber, Wald would later remember, “I was nervous, feeling like an inexperienced

Susan Hertog is the author of Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life and Dangerous Ambition: Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson. For more on Jacob Schiff and Lillian Wald, please see the Web version of this article.

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and instruct families on hygiene and nutrition—seemed to get to the heart of the problem of acculturating new immigrants.

Impressed with her intelligence and drive, Schiff immediately agreed to follow her into a world about which he had only read: the dark underbelly of tenement life.

One can imagine the dapper Schiff arriving in his elegant carriage for a first visit on Hester Street, stepping out onto the muddy street jammed with peddlers loudly selling their wares, awash with the aroma of garbage and unwashed pedestrians. He followed Wald up the broken treads of a wooden stairway, into unlit halls filled with the cries of hungry children. In a two-room flat occupied by a family of seven, a woman whom Wald had visited two days earlier lay on the plank that served as her bed. Her children needed to be washed and fed, and

Schiff asked for monthly reports of Wald’s work, along with an accounting of expenditures, and a balanced budget. the sobriquet, “King of the Jews.” (For more on his Jewish philanthropy, see the following article.) Priding himself on his hands-on approach toward institutions he valued, Schiff visited patients most Sundays during the many years he was president of Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx.

Schiff ’s interest in aiding the poor and indigent Jews from Eastern Europe grew partly out of a desire to protect the reputation of the Jewish community at large. Fearing that new arrivals might taint the hard-won social status of his more educated co-religionists, Schiff hoped that many of the arrivals then crowding into Manhattan could be spread more broadly across new communities. Schiff and other German Jews had started a movement to resettle Russian Jews in the Pacific Northwest, Minnesota, and even Argentina. But these endeavors had failed by the time Schiff met Wald, and thousands of new refugees were arriving each day.

Wald’s vision of home nursing—an intimate local effort to aid the sick, 26

since her husband was out pushing his cart full of fish, the duty fell to Wald.

Moved by what he saw, Schiff offered her and her nursing colleague $60 per month each (the equivalent of $1,525 today) to start their home-nursing effort.

In addition, Wald was permitted to request extra funding for emergencies. In return, Schiff asked for monthly reports of their work, along with an accounting of expenditures, and a balanced budget. He recommended that the nursing service tend to people of all races and creeds, and further agreed to supply names and addresses of his colleagues who might offer their own financial aid. However, in accord with his policy of not being the sole supporter of any philanthropic cause, and his intention to remain anonymous, Wald was expected to secure their support on her own. (Because of Schiff ’s anonymity, inspired by the teachings of Maimonides, their partnership was unknown until decades after their deaths, when Wald’s papers were donated to the New York Public Library.)

PHILANTHROPY

A broad attack on poverty The Visiting Nurses Service could not have begun at a worse time in the economic life of the city or the nation.

The depression of 1893 was then the worst in U.S. history. Thousands of banks, businesses, and farms went bust.

The unemployment rate in New York was 35 percent. Facing starvation, men chopped wood or broke rocks, and women turned to prostitution. Despite the immense demands this economic disaster made on Schiff ’s attention, however, he never missed a meeting with Wald or her staff.

Wald and her colleagues were involved in every aspect of immigrant life: nursing children and parents back to health, finding children places in schools, teaching the blind and paralyzed to care for themselves, and raising funds for those too ill to work.

But after two years of providing services, they, in accord with Schiff, came to believe that their efforts would be futile unless they could prepare immigrants to care for themselves instead of relying on others.

This required training in practical skills, beginning with the women in the family.

The Mother’s Club they began grew into the core of a larger enterprise that included courses in English literacy and citizenship.

The nurses had quickly learned that isolating one factor of poverty—physical health—was impossible. Their operation was fast becoming full-service care. The settlement house movement offered a model. Settlement houses were Christian community organizations intent on simultaneously aiding the poor and giving concerned members of the middle class opportunities to serve, and understand, the indigent. Settlement houses became involved in all facets of communal life, from language training, to housekeeping and child-care instruction, to budgeting, to job assistance, to moral instruction.

In 1895, Schiff authorized the nurses to look for a building to house their growing staff and burgeoning school. Their eventual new headquarters on Henry Street became a center for learning in the immigrant community.

By then Lillian Wald was 29 years old and well into spinsterhood. Her personal life since entering nursing school had been brushed aside—her work was

Jacob Riis

young girl.” The steel-eyed, white-bearded, and impeccably dressed Schiff cut a striking figure at age 46. Yet, when Wald, 20 years his junior, began to speak of her plan for helping families who had risked everything to come to America, her nerves settled and her passion flowed.

Born into a family of German-Jewish entrepreneurs, Wald understood the landscape of Schiff ’s mind. She knew he was an investor with his eye on the bottom line, and that this attitude permeated his philanthropic endeavors as well as his business life.

As a strictly observant Jew, Schiff believed it was his duty to give away at least 10 percent of his income to meet his obligations to Jewish charities and institutions, and to express his gratitude to America for his economic success. Using his financial skills and personal connections to serve the public good, he had earned

In addition to her hands-on work, Wald encouraged parents, businessmen, and elected officials to get poor children off the street and out of factories, and into schools and healthier environs—with help from

Jacob Riis

Schiff’s friends in business and public life.

everything. She never married or had children. But she brought maternal warmth as well as competence to her mission. Always delighting in the laughter and song of children, Wald encouraged tenement street urchins to hang around, play and sing, and put on skits, many of whom, such as Eddie Cantor, went on to careers in show business.

By 1906, the Henry Street Settlement House was a hub for nurses, teachers, and social workers. Schiff funded the purchase of an adjoining building, and eventually two others. He simultaneously financed the acquisition of a farm in upstate New York to enable impoverished children and ill adults to leave the heat and pollution of the city during the summer months. Schiff, Wald, and her staff constantly reevaluated their methods, and the effectiveness of their efforts.

While funding her expanding operation, Schiff was mentoring Wald. He tutored her on how to buy real estate, on limiting the use of coal to heat buildings, on using and storing foodstuffs to reduce waste and budget pressure, and managing what was, in effect, a large nonprofit corporation. Schiff and his other philanthropist friends saw to it that Wald’s nurses had access to the staffs of Bellevue, Mt. Sinai, and Montefiore hospitals for training, consulting, and referral of patients.

Schiff marshaled his connections in business, law, and government to take an interest in the activities at Henry Street, and encouraged them to join the Henry Street board. This turned the facility into a high-powered salon for new thinking on public policies, in addition to its role as a school and nursing facility. Wald readily

used Schiff ’s access to city, state, and national leaders to encourage awareness and action on crucial social problems, including child labor. At that time, one out of every six children under the age of 14 in New York City worked in a factory or peddled on the streets, preventing them from attending school. She called for various reforms in public schools, including the hiring of nurses capable of handling contagious disease and instituting ungraded classes for the learning disabled. Wald also worked with city landlords and officials to allocate land for playgrounds and parks, believing that play spaces for children were essential to good health. Furthermore, she initiated a lecture program at Columbia University Teachers College, which led to the establishment of a nursing school.

By 1915, Henry Street offered rich programming at three branches. In addition, Wald oversaw seven summer camps in the countryside, three storefront milk stations and health clinics, and a roving battalion of 100 nurses who made more than 227,000 home visits a year. Her centers served tens of thousands of members, students, and patients. And 18 years later when Wald retired, the nurses out of Henry Street were attending to more than 100,000 patients and making 550,000 home visits annually.

A deep partnership Much of Schiff ’s support was, by design, anonymous and behind the scenes, but the work he made possible was admired across the country. And, with him, Wald FALL 2016

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which they gradually became equals.

Schiff came to use Wald as a sounding board for his philanthropic and social investments, beyond their partnership in the immigrant community.

The Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918 mobilized Wald’s tireless attention.

She recruited nurses and volunteers and rallied support for treatment centers throughout the city. Worldwide, up to 50 million people would succumb to this virulent flu, more people than had died in the World War. Afraid that his protégée was sacrificing her health, Schiff encouraged her to reduce the intensity of her work, and offered a lifetime pension to make it possible for her to delegate some of her daily responsibilities while expanding her vision to a wider set of issues. This was the first substantial personal gift Wald accepted from him or from anyone else.

When Jacob Schiff passed away in 1920, 1,500 friends and representatives of organizations attended the funeral, and thousands more flowed from the Lower East Side to his home to pay their respects.

Asked to comment on his contribution to her institution and its work, Wald wrote that Schiff represented “the

Together, Wald and Schiff battled to make the crowded quarters of immigrants more sanitary and conducive to health.

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PHILANTHROPY

best, I think, of the men who take their eleemosynary and communal interest with the same seriousness that they give to their family relationships. I had over 25 years of good fellowship with Mr. Schiff and though great financial crises occurred during that time and there were political disturbances—local, national, and international, he was always the public-spirited citizen. I had many occasions to request his interest and his action, and in all that time he never once said or implied, ‘I am too busy.’ …

The commissions and services for which I from time to time asked his attention had a wide range, meeting people from many lands with different points of view and different experiences from his own, participating in labor disputes, accompanying me to the White House to insure a quick hearing on urgent matters, getting a newsstand for some special case, discussing the best means for getting help for a crippled child.”

Neither Wald nor Schiff alone could have accomplished all they had done together. Their 25-year partnership was a union of complementary personalities—he the hard-nosed, analytical investor, she the empathetic, visionary humanitarian. Both had organizational skills and indomitable energy and drive. Their mutual esteem and unflagging commitment to rescue the immigrant poor of New York City from destitution, illness, and abuse, undergirded

by Schiff ’s money, experience, and connections to other donors and officials, fueled their achievements.

Dedication plus clarity of purpose, constancy of oversight, innovative measurement, and continual self-correction lay at the heart of the model Lillian Wald and Jacob Schiff created. These principles are still central to philanthropic efficacy.

Effective philanthropy requires money, but also an investment of time and energy and insight. In addition to setting standards and monitoring progress, a donor must commit his skills, knowledge, and experience. The collaboration between the visionary Lillian Wald and the seasoned Jacob Schiff is timeless in its simplicity. Cutting through the complex social and political diversity of twenty-first-century endeavors, their partnership remains an enduring paradigm for effective private philanthropy. P

Jacob Riis

was held in broad esteem. Jacob Riis, the muckraking photojournalist who helped expose the dire poverty and filth of the tenements, wrote of Wald that “the poor trust her absolutely, trust her head, her judgment, and her friendship. She arbitrates…and the men listen…. She will tell the mayor the truth, for she knows.”

Sixteen years after the inception of their partnership, in acknowledgment of Schiff ’s growing trust and admiration for Wald’s wisdom and vision, he wrote a letter to absolve her of the burden of writing monthly reports. “You and the ladies associated with you,” he explained, “are constant living accounts of your great value, not only to the community, but to mankind in general.” Schiff saw himself as a committed friend of the Henry Street “family,” assuming the role of monitoring operations when Wald was out of town. Schiff promised that he and his wife would “watch the shop.”

During her trip to Japan, Schiff wrote: “We were down there to supper Sunday a week ago, and while we greatly missed the ‘soul’ of the family, we were much pleased with the hospitality.”

The arc of correspondence between Schiff and Wald reveals a fertile partnership in

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on donations from overseas—plus their own devoted labor—to build a stable and prosperous new nation. Here, new immigrants water a vegetable patch in 1949 in their settlement of Ein-Hod.

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PHILANTHROPY

Kluger Zoltan

Israel’s pioneer settlers came to a desperately poor land devoid of resources, and relied heavily

How American philanthropy built a Jewish homeland

Kluger Zoltan

By Karl Zinsmeister t times, philanthropy produces something bigger than just an institution or a program.

In the case you are about to read, voluntary givers can be said to have created an actual nation. At its crucial stages of birth, growth, and survival under stress, Israel has depended utterly on foreign philanthropy.

Even now, as a stable and flourishing country, Israel continues to receive upwards of $3 billion every year in donations from Jews scattered around the globe. The lion’s share of this support comes from A ­ mericans. In a normal year, one out of every three Jewish adults in the U.S. will contribute money to some cause in Israel. In terms of dollars, around 8-15 percent of Jewish-­American charity goes to the Promised Land. And during periods when the J­ ewish state was in crisis, contribution levels have soared much higher than that.

Giving by U.S. Jews has become much more individualized over the last generation. In the first few FALL 2016

decades after Israel’s 1948 founding, most donations were collected through central funds run by regional Jewish federations that turned annual appeals into an art form. In the 1960s and 1970s, 80 percent of ­Jewish giving to Israel was going through the centralized federation system, says Brandeis researcher ­Theodore Sasson. Today it ’s about 15 percent or less, as ­Americans have learned to donate directly to favorite Israeli groups.

In the pages following, I summarize some of the major achievements of this determined flow of contributions. The composite picture makes one thing clear: Without voluntary giving from Americans, the modern state of Israel wouldn’t be thriving as it currently is. And it might not exist at all.

Karl Zinsmeister is a vice president at The Philanthropy Roundtable and creator of The Almanac of American Philanthropy. David Isaac contributed research for this article.

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In 1917, Britain’s Balfour Declaration opened the possibility of a re-established Jewish state in Palestine. Major donors like Jacob Schiff, Felix Warburg, and Julius Rosenwald generally preferred that their funds be used to help besieged Jews find improved perches within their existing countries, rather than for emigration to Israel. But popular giving for Zionist purposes began in some U.S. synagogues and Jewish neighborhoods. The Kristallnacht rampages of 1938 brought new urgency to the cause of saving endangered Jews, and much more openness to the idea that resettling them in Israel might be the safest course. Spurred by the Nazi menace, about $125 million was raised in the U.S. from 1939 to 1945. That money was split between helping Jews in Palestine and assisting European Jews, including smuggling supplies into prison camps.

PHILANTHROPY

philanthropists in the decades following. When the Soviet Union crumbled, U.S. donors provided more than a billion dollars to whisk a million Russian Jews to the Jewish state. Even U.S., Canadian, and U.K. Jews (including occupational specialists like doctors) are now offered easy paths to emigrate to Israel, thanks to a charity called Nefesh B’Nefesh that was created in 2001 and boosted by an $8 million endowment from Houston natural-gas tycoon and philanthropist Guma Aguiar in 2009.

The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which organized much of the original exodus to Israel, is still a thriving philanthropy today. In 2014 it spent $369 million to aid poor and threatened Jews overseas.

Fully $119 million of that was spent in Israel. Jews in Russia or one of six other former Soviet republics received $153 million.

Eran Levi / Israeli Air Force

hen World War I broke out in 1914, there were about 60,000 Jews living in Palestine. Many were recent immigrants from Europe, and nearly all were destitute and dependent upon charity from other countries. During the war, the Turks who ruled over them cut off this outside aid.

When the U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire realized that Jews in the Holy Land were facing a life-and-death crisis, his urgent telegram was not to Washington but to Jewish philanthropist Jacob Schiff in New York.

American Jews quickly set up a committee to raise funds and deliver help to their co-religionists. When pogroms flared in Russia and other parts of Europe, the geographic scope of the aid was widened.

Between 1914 and 1925 about $60 million in U.S. private donations were collected to rescue Jews in distress.

After World War II, American Jews sent a flood of donations to sustain their surviving brethren, relocate many of them to Palestine, and begin erecting the skeleton of a society that could sustain them.

In the last few years of the 1940s, the United Jewish Appeal raised more than half a billion dollars. Its 1947 drive was called the Year of Survival, 1948 was the Year of Destiny, and 1949 had a Year of Deliverance theme. The $150 million donated by American Jews in 1948—when the state of Israel was founded—was ­­four times the total raised by the American Red Cross that same year.

With continuing assistance from American philanthropy, a million refugees were brought to Israel in the first decade after its founding. These people became the core of the new nation’s population. Nearly all of them arrived penniless and utterly dependent on outside charity.

Resettling displaced Jews in Israel continued to be a priority for American

Kkl-Jnf Photo Archive / CC-BY-SA

RESETTLING JEWS TO A SAFE HOMELAND

The 1948 photo on the left shows children of Kibbutz Dorot gathered in front of an improvised armored vehicle built by early Israeli fighters during the War of Independence. The truck had just delivered crucial supplies, and later evacuated the children before an Egyptian Army attack. Above is an image of some of Israel’s very latest homegrown military technology—a Heron drone. Israel is now one of the world’s most advanced producers of unmanned aerial vehicles.

Eran Levi / Israeli Air Force

Kkl-Jnf Photo Archive / CC-BY-SA

CREATING A MILITARY CAPABLE OF DEFENDING JEWS n July 1, 1945, two months after Hitler committed suicide and Germany surrendered, 18 wealthy American Jews congregated in Manhattan in the apartment of Rudolf Sonneborn. He was a Baltimore-born oilman and Zionist who later married a granddaughter of Jacob Schiff.

This group came together to meet with David Ben-Gurion, ­de facto leader of the Jews living in Palestine. British oversight of the region was in its last years, and it was clear there would be a struggle for control of the land. Ben-Gurion asked the Americans to start arming the Jewish militias

in Palestine. Thus was the Sonneborn Institute created— functioning as a crucial American supply branch of the underground Jewish defense force, the Haganah.

Officially, the institute shipped materials like boots, beans, buses, and binoculars to pioneer settlers. The Exodus, the most famous of the ships that transported holocaust refugees to the Middle East, was purchased with Sonneborn money. In secret, the institute also scooped up surplus rifles, machine guns, half-tracks, and even three Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bombers and smuggled them, through numerous embargoes, into the

Promised Land. This allowed Jewish settlers to defend themselves when the 1947 U.N. plan to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states sparked Arab marauding. The violence ratcheted up after Israel declared its independence in 1948, and Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq sent military forces to crush the upstart state.

Fierce initial fighting led to a series of stalemates, and as the war continued, the number of Jewish fighters, and the quality and quantity of their equipment, began to surpass the Arab forces.

American volunteers, many of them combat-hardened World War II veterans, also played important roles, for instance as pilots. By m ­ id1949, after the loss of 6,373 Israelis (about 1 percent of the Jewish population) and at

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least that many on the Arab side, an armistice was in place.

The new Jewish state ended up controlling even more land than the U.N. Partition Plan had countenanced.

This peace, of course, did not endure. The Six-Day War in 1967 again matched Israel against Egypt (whose president said “our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel”) plus Syria and Jordan. As the clash unfolded, American Jews spontaneously donated more than $100 million in a little over two weeks—and three times that much by the time the emergency was over.

Six years later, when the Yom Kippur War opened with serious initial losses by the Israeli army, U.S. givers were even more generous, contributing $700 million in emergency aid. Seeing Israel in peril caused American Jews to respond “as though their own lives, their own families and their own homes, were immediately and imminently at stake,” commented the New York Times.

Today, Jewish Americans provide crucial material support that keeps the Israeli Defense Forces among the most formidable fighting units on the planet. Friends of the IDF, the American fundraising group for Israel’s military, raised $109 million in donated funds in 2015. Prominent U.S. supporters include Seth Klarman, Haim Saban, Larry Ellison, Sheldon Adelson, Michael Dell, Dan Gilbert, and others. Jews “were not defended for centuries,” notes Gilbert, the founder of Quicken Loans, and today “the only reason Israel exists is because of the IDF.” 33

The Hadassah Ein Kerem hospital on the outskirts of Jerusalem is one of several important medical facilities in Israel

altimorean Henrietta Szold visited Palestine with her mother in 1909, and found her life’s calling. The sight of sick children and flyblown patients convinced her that she should take up charitable work to improve the health of local residents—Jews, Muslims, and Christians alike. Back home, she and a few other American women founded Hadassah as a women’s group focused on bringing modern medical care to the Holy Land. The organization would grow into one of the largest women’s organizations in America, and a fundraising powerhouse.

It founded six hospitals in Palestine, and established the region’s first nursing school, first public-health programs, first tuberculosis clinic, first medical school, and first 34

training regimens in social work, nutrition, and home economics, in addition to leading a massive orphan-adoption effort after World War II. Nathan Straus, co-owner of Macy’s Department Store and a legendary American philanthropist with a special interest in medical charity, made his first visit to Palestine in 1912. Staggered by the disease he encountered, he funded a number of health programs and began to visit the country regularly. In 1929 he and Hadassah jointly opened the Nathan and Lina Straus Health Center in Jerusalem, which, after historic service, still serves patients today.

Straus also funded a similar center in Tel Aviv, a Pasteur Institute, a bureau to battle chronic afflictions like malaria

and trachoma, and a string of clinics for children. Hadassah eventually created Israel’s first dental school in Straus’s Jerusalem health center.

Other medical firsts in Israel funded by America’s Hadassah included the country’s first cancer institute, first trauma center, first intensive care unit for premature babies, first ambulatory surgery center, and first children’s hospice.

Hadassah’s hospitals pioneered in Israel the combining of patient care with medical research. The organization continues to raise more than $100 million every year from U.S. donors, supporting two major Israeli hospitals with those funds and offering other assistance.

Many Israeli medical institutions have their own U.S. fundraising arms. The American Committee for Shaare Zedek, for instance, solicits broadly for donations that support one of the other major Jerusalem hospitals.

PHILANTHROPY

Important contributions to the health of the Jewish state have also been made by large individual donors. Michael Bloomberg, for instance, created a mother and child center at Hadassah’s main hospital. He also donated millions of dollars to build up the emergency medical service in Jerusalem. Haim Saban helped fund a children’s hospital in southern Israel. In 2016, Bernie Marcus pledged $25 million toward a bloodservices center that will partner with medical facilities across Israel.

Israeli nonprofits providing health care and social services to populations like the elderly, disabled, and at-risk children have been generously funded for decades by the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation. The Baltimore donor consistently grants about $20 million per year to charities in Israel, for everything from building construction to emergency assistance.

Technion Israel Institute of Technology

BRINGING GOOD MEDICAL CARE TO A DESERT

Duby Tal / Albatross / Alamy Stock Photo

created and funded to this day by donors to the American charity Hadassah.

Students at the Technion, now one of the world’s great science and engineering universities, compete in a robotics competition for which they created machines that can accurately fling frisbees at targets.

Technion Israel Institute of Technology

Duby Tal / Albatross / Alamy Stock Photo

CREATING A TECH POWERHOUSE he favorite cause of U.S. donors to Israel is education—which attracts one out of every five dollars given away. Universities get the biggest gifts. Charitable support for higher-ed has been crucial in transforming Israel from a dusty, low-income, agricultural economy into a high-tech powerhouse. Israel is known today as the “Startup Nation”— and for good cause. Israeli companies—many of them spun out of universities—are leaders in important corners of software development, communications, robotics, cybersecurity, biotech, avionics, nanotech, and other emerging fields. Fully 46 percent of Israel’s exports are from hightech industries. The economy is the most research-intensive in the world, with Israeli businesses spending a world-leading 3.5 percent of GDP on R&D. The university whose R&D has incubated the most companies is the Israel Institute of Technology, known as the Technion. Created by a donation from New York philanthropist

Jacob Schiff fully 36 years before the state of Israel even existed, the campus is home to powerful science, math, and engineering departments. The Technion is, for instance, one of just a few universities in the world where there is a student program to build and launch satellites. More than 70 percent of founders and top managers in Israel’s high-tech industry today are Technion graduates.

The American Technion Society is a major reason for the university’s pre-eminence.

The society raises $70 to $100 million in the U.S. every year, and since its inception has transferred more than $2 billion to the Haifa-based institution to strengthen its faculty, facilities, and student body. Individual donors have made important contributions to the Technion, like the $26 million bequeathed

by New York businessman Russell Berrie to launch its nanotechnology institute.

Recent gifts from donors like Andrew Viterbi, Irwin Jacobs, Alfred Mann, Henry Taub, Isaac

Perlmutter, and Stephen Grand have soared into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Other Israeli universities have also benefited greatly from American largesse. In June of 2016, Howard and Lottie Marcus bequeathed approximately $400 million to Israel’s youngest major university, Ben-Gurion.

This appears to be the largest private donation ever made to benefit any institution in the state of Israel. It will double Ben-Gurion’s endowment and intensify its research on water use—in a land where that is a crucial matter, with Israel already having the world’s highest rate of water recycling, top technologies for agricultural irrigation, and one of the biggest capacities on the planet for desalination of sea water.

Health sciences were the beneficiary of Sheldon Adelson’s 2014 donation of $25 million to Ariel University. That will establish a regional medical center for treating Jews and Arabs in the West Bank. The same year, Adelson granted more than $16 million to SpaceIl, an organization seeking to land the first Israeli craft on the moon.

Len Blavatnik gifted $20 million to Tel Aviv University

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in 2014. Morton Mandel and Daniel Abraham have both endowed business schools at Israeli universities, and the Mandel Foundation has made many large grants to Hebrew University and BenGurion University. American philanthropy delivered over decades has been crucial in turning the Weizmann Institute for Science into one of the world’s top research organizations. And the funding and impetus to create Israel’s first U.S.-style liberal-arts campus—Shalem College, which was accredited in 2013—came from Zalman Bernstein, the Tikvah Fund, Sheldon Adelson, David Messer, Seth Klarman, and other American philanthropists.

At the other end of the innovation pipeline, U.S. donor Paul Singer has put up more than $20 million to create Start-Up Nation Central, a nonprofit based in Tel Aviv.

It connects international businesses looking for technical expertise to possible partners from among 4,500 Israel companies in its database. Singer’s goal is to weave Israeli businesses deeply into global commerce.

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The Great Isaiah Scroll, discovered in a cave near Qumran in 1947, is one of the treasures of mankind. It was created around 125 B.C.— making it a thousand years older than any version of the Hebrew Bible known before its discovery. It and other Dead Sea Scrolls are in the collection of the Israel Museum. Displayed here in the right column is Chapter 14 of Isaiah, which opens: The Lord will have compassion on Jacob; once again he will choose Israel and will settle them in their own land.

Foreigners will join them and unite with the descendants of Jacob.

Nations will take them

fter the first decades when American donors focused on military survival, basic infrastructure, making the desert bloom, and otherwise assuring that Israel would survive as a viable nation, a favorite new arena for U.S. philanthropy to Israel became culture and art.

Nearly all major Israeli cultural institutions—the Israel Museum, Tel Aviv Museum, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Yad Vashem Holocaust 36

memorial—have American charitable arms. The major art and archaeology museum in Jerusalem has a deep roster of loyal U.S. backers who raise tens of millions of dollars for the institution every year through the organization American Friends of the Israel Museum. Overseas donations now cover more than half of the museum’s operating costs, and have allowed it to build up an endowment of over $200 million. The similar American

Society for Yad Vashem is chaired by philanthropist Leonard Wilf, whose family has been supportive for years. The largest contributors ever to Yad Vashem are Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, with a pair of $25 million gifts.

Cleveland businessman Morton Mandel gave $25 million to build a Jerusalem headquarters for the Bezalel Academy, and also $12 million for a new wing at the Israel Museum. And gifts from New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft include millions to create Jerusalem’s Kraft Family Stadium for sporting events.

Archaeology is an understandably strong interest of many donors to Israel. A massive dig at Ashkelon—­­one

PHILANTHROPY

of the most important ancient seaports on the Mediterranean— has been supported by the late U.S. financier Leon Levy and his wife Shelby White every year since 1985. White also funds scholarship to interpret the dig’s findings. The Schottenstein family behind the American Eagle retail chain have endowed important archaeological work in Jerusalem. New York philanthropist Roger Hertog funded an excavation by archaeologist Eilat Mazar of what is thought to be King David’s palace, and provided resources for multi-volume scholarship to interpret and publish the Temple Mount Excavation.

Getty Images / New York Post Archives / Contributor

ELEVATING ISRAELI CULTURE, ART, AND ARCHAEOLOGY

Shrine of the Book; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, by Ardon Bar-Hama

and bring them to their own place.

Getty Images / New York Post Archives / Contributor

Shrine of the Book; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, by Ardon Bar-Hama

TUGGING AT HEARTS AND MINDS hough it takes many different forms, about a quarter of all Israelrelated giving can be loosely categorized as “advocacy.” The most successful example of the past generation is Birthright—a program that sends young Jews from the U.S. and other Western countries to Israel on a ten-day fully paid trip so they can explore Judaism and their personal connection to the Jewish homeland. The brainchild of Charles Bronfman and Michael Steinhardt, who got things started by putting up $8 million apiece and recruiting 15 other donors, the program allows 50,000 young souls to experience Israel every year. More than half a million young Jews have so far made the pilgrimage.

Birthright’s biggest supporter has been Sheldon Adelson, who has bestowed nearly $200 million on the group. He adopted the cause in 2007 with a donation that eliminated the program’s waiting list, and continues to make large regular donations.

The Jim Joseph Foundation, Seth Klarman, Leon Cooperman, Lynn Schusterman, Leslie Wexner, Roger Hertog, and others have also been important contributors. The program now has an extraordinarily wide base of 25,000 individual donors.

Birthright’s enormous success has inspired a similar program for students and recent graduates of Christian colleges in the U.S. In 2015, Covenant Journey began offering subsidized ten-day study

trips to Israel, funded by the International Museum of the Bible and the Green family, and the Philos Project, an advocacy group backed by Paul Singer.

There are many other efforts to improve understanding of and sympathy for Israel. American donors like Haim Saban and Ronald Lauder have supported think tanks and advocacy groups toward this end. The foundation of retailer Leslie Wexner runs programs to connect policymakers in Israel and the U.S., and make Israeli officials more effective managers by offering them a Harvard master’s degree in public administration.

In 2015, California homebuilder John Boruchin left a $100 million bequest for a new center to run exchanges between Israel and the U.S. involving students and faculty, young professionals, public speakers, and others.

Sheldon Adelson gives money to inform and influence

public policy in Israel. He supports a core of scholars at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He donates to the Middle East Media Research Institute, which monitors and analyzes Arab journalism. And he launched, and reportedly sustains with tens of millions of dollars of annual subsidies, Israel Hayom—the largest-circulation newspaper in the country.

In 2012, Seth Klarman started a newspaper of his own in Jerusalem—the online Times of Israel. He and other U.S. donors like Paul Singer have provided substantial support to the Israel Project, which provides information to journalists and policymakers.

The Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies has also garnered American funding for its respected studies of public opinion and of the economy.

The think tank argues for less state intervention, in a land where the government controls 51 percent of the economy and the average citizen pays 58 percent of his income in taxes.

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Perhaps the most respected and influential philanthropic effort to improve the quality of public policy in Israel is the Israel Democracy Institute, created by Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus. His founding gift built the institute’s headquarters, and continuing annual contributions cover much of the think tank’s annual budget of around $8 million. The Israel Democracy Institute has had many salutary effects on national life: improving public information, discouraging corruption, refining media criticism, creating Israel’s most important annual forum for discussing economic policy, and so forth.

The group’s deepest aim is to lay the intellectual foundation for an eventual Israeli constitution. “I’m a great believer in the rule of law, and until Israel has a constitution and a bill of rights, the rule of law is murky,” says Marcus. “No civilized nation doesn’t have a constitution,” he argues, saying his top philanthropic priority in Israel is to help the country become “a real, true democracy.” P

37

s en donor t d n a r e d ising lea v o r peoples p d m e i h n c a a e r How ible to un B e h t t h broug te y Why

By Liz Essle

t onc e ania. Bu usual lv y s n n e un ok, P u rc h , a n h rc u s H o ges c a t M is t p in ngle villa 954 ir Ba ju e 1 h in t in f d y o e a s k nd or rand ew inar y S u to the p t, who w r y, sketched a g d r in in o a d S n li l a s e a ay ch le into t was mission ernie M hem. R a the Bib g t B e in e t d r k la n o a s f a e n m y b tNa n c ould tra himmer ist and alphabe eagues w gan to s ll u e o o g b c n li d m e a a t e dr people t e vo a as ked for ber of d Amer ic s a m h t u e u n h o s ll , S of sma . Instead ecretar y. he and a ld. r m one y o f a das turn vision. S age in the wor le p pilot an ith a e c e n t re u r a w g a d n d e n la ly d e n e y as a n’t ne do e ve r Bernie w d tor y did mil y, an all y, she t a ic f u if a B c . r e s o p e f S aint ’s s .S typ ns y ha e jungle eks, the sionar y jobs, pla h e t is e w g m in a s in r w e e h it selv d le join h wn all tar y. W able mid ’t consider them had k no , an d s a s e c re y a e W ith st g h n t in id n d in w s ra to lands the M ay c y had t lef t the foreign r e ve r o o p to faith, l pilot, and Nan ent lives. They e y had n en in h r t d s r il a e e h c n f c la if io p d re c re a t ing their hr ist to on ve r y to take ea of rais the words of C d id e e id h c t e d o rk e r s ted br inging ission w s, acce p o e m t v ed), s 0 li 0 ie ir g ,0 e r 7 th s combin ds 12 ie eir ene r n h t e t s n . u d e o .S t c U . Na n c y commit sending ies (the eir work six topissionar rd . h t t a ds x m e t e a r h n e d n h e e e t be ss o as th m all kin , ucce s o le y r t o f n n t a n u r e o m e r c d s ild e re or ta Like d her ch g planes anywh skills in r—abou e a u w e c e y s n e y r r y e d v an in inner, an ching and land a b ro a d e a d t o m a s t e r m . als for d n h u s an once im y la h n a t t a a e r M r ays t e o p h e c m the t d g u a to b ept the M er ame ashin k c r w t e c o a b , h s th r ie d s e e n d r iv er eliv fun learn rters to d broad, crapes. B way s to surging ided the s o v p r o p r o u p o s . d t it .S a of ou dir t r un in the U would vis . After 16 years o-shor t e churches me they r o d tu h n ally a k fu tu c s e r n a f ro m t o e o b l don nt, ev ughs s for th a e e lo u p r m o e id fu g h iv a d ic ir n In red ma g period , and the ernie ente liffe USA. ld. Durin , their family life e B fi d e n a th d in ork goo Wyc erhouse n their w to the States for o w o ts p r o g p n e r ack -translati s went b the Bible f o the May n he t n e ala whe presid m g e t in a m u o c G . They be in S panish rs ser ving d o n s o a a n d t w s e r d e g nd ilable. I gua nsen didn’t u was ava on Tow h new lan r e it r e g u w m t in a a g n r C e Op orkin d lite med nar y na he was w other de velope r A missio that the people o no Bible ed discover in which l, e ik h c aq sp oke K

I

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PHILANTHROPY

istockphoto.com / Fly_dragonfly / pepifoto

s r a l l o d n o i l l i m 2 s l u o s n o i l l i 1b

istockphoto.com / Fly_dragonfly / pepifoto

1942 he founded Wycliffe to solve that problem. The group sends linguists to remote lands where people isolated by language live without communication links to the wider world. The translators are supported by pilots, mechanics, teachers, public-health specialists, nurses, and others, all of whom live as missionaries among the world’s most forgotten individuals. They codify language systems, teach literacy, set down portions of the Scriptures in understandable text, bring water systems and health care, and transform lives both spiritually and physically.

“One of the great Christian events of the century. A turning point symbolizing the movement of Christianity from the northern hemisphere to the southern.”

That’s how Notre Dame professor

Mark Noll describes the creation of this philanthropic campaign for translating the Bible into minor languages.

Of the 6,900 languages currently in use across the globe, only a few hundred have a complete version of the Scriptures.

A few thousand have a partial text, and there are 2,300 languages into which the Bible is currently being translated. That leaves about 1,800 tongues for which no Bible translation exists; these have around 180 million native speakers.

Many of these dialects are spoken only, or lack documented rules. So translators must first create alphabets and grammars, introduce written language, and work through laborious steps. As a result, translations of the Bible into entirely new languages were being

Liz Essley Whyte is a contributing editor to Philanthropy. Research for this story was provided

by Philanthropy managing editor Ashley May—who is Bernie May’s granddaughter.

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New rules for a new era A century ago, the vast majority of Christians lived in the industrialized world. Today that proportion is inverted, with many more of the globe’s Christians living outside of developed nations.

Nancy and Bernie witnessed this global shift in person. “During the past half century the critical centers of the Christian world have moved decisively to Africa, to Latin America, and to Asia,” writes historian Philip Jenkins, author of The Next Christendom. “The balance will never shift back.”

Bernie May and the Wycliffe board could see the writing on the wall.

They realized the prevailing model of sending missionaries from the U.S. for culture and language acquisition and then having them teach in unreached villages had drawbacks. It was difficult work. There was potential for cultural misunderstanding. And it was slow.

New methods of operating, and new kinds of missionaries, would be needed if there was going to be significant progress in making Christianity and modernity available to all peoples. Wycliffe’s leaders began to think differently. Perhaps instead of sending Western missionaries as linguists, they could find, train, and support indigenous Christians capable of doing better and faster work in language translation.

From that insight sprang a new affiliate of Wycliffe Bible Translators, and a new job for Bernie May. The Seed Company was set up by May and tasked with radically speeding language translation and the sharing of the Bible. They would do this by giving indigenous speakers of small, rare, and isolated languages the tools necessary to bring Christian texts and other previously inaccessible information to 40

truncating the timetable for bringing the Bible to all people. So May approached ten Christian businessmen fellow members of their societies. Hire fewer professional linguists, more locals. he knew and asked them to support this new venture. All of them agreed. “The “Recruiting and training those who already know the language in their heart, first ten people I asked said yes. That’s when I realized this is a God thing,” and then consulting with and training May says. “In fundraising you never go them to do translation, is the most ten for ten.” effective means of bringing the Bible

Bernie May was a missionary pilot in South America before transitioning into management at Wycliffe Bible Translators.

to new people,” says former Wycliffe employee Ron Williams. “Paired with theological consultants and translation helpers, they become very efficient.”

In addition to new methods, Bernie May had to find entirely new ways of financing the work of the Seed Company. The old model of traveling the United States to raise support wasn’t going to work for indigenous farmers and artisans. He reasoned that if he could find ten people willing to give $10,000 per year for two decades, he could launch this new effort and prove the concept for radically PHILANTHROPY

Ten for ten The first of these donors to commit was Peter Ochs. He agreed with May that the traditional supporters of overseas mission work—local churches—were less likely to back the Seed Company than individuals who had run businesses. Businesspeople would understand the need for greater efficiency and speed, and for innovation in techniques in order to break down a centurylong backlog of work.

Instead of the traditional method of pairing supporters with specific missionaries, May decided instead to

istockphoto.com / savcoco

launched at a rate of only about two dozen per year as late as 2000—a pace that would take generations to reach all remaining populations. With Christianity’s center of gravity shifting rapidly to the developing world, this wasn’t fast enough.

istockphoto.com / savcoco

make particular untranslated languages the focus, with clear timelines for finishing them, and use those concrete goals to motivate donations. “He would say to a potential donor, ‘This language is spoken by hundreds of thousands of people in such-and-such a place. I’ve got somebody else who I think might fund it. But if you’d like to take the lead I’ll give it to you,” Ochs remembers.

Ochs himself contributed to the Seed Company’s first Bible in Aramaic (the language whose ancient form Jesus spoke). This was done to help burgeoning Aramaic-speaking communities (including immigrants to Chicago and Detroit). In this case, there was already an Aramaic translation, but it was centuries old and used archaic language that made it hard to bring Christian understanding to new generations. “It had never been updated,” Ochs says.

That translation took about five years, and Aramaic Christians celebrated the arrival of a new gospel they could easily understand and take to heart.

New message, new ways of living Another of the original ten donors was former State Farm Insurance executive Roger Tompkins. He agreed to support a translation project for the Thakara people in central Kenya. Numbering around 112,000, the Thakara grow cotton and herd sheep and cattle. Though Christian churches dotted their communities when the project started, they had heard of Christ only in a neighboring dialect. They had no Bible in their own language.

The translation flourished and was finished in just seven years. The Thakara people received both their first written alphabet and a New Testament.

“It was one of the best investments I ever made,” Tompkins says. At a dedication ceremony, indigenous translator Stephen Kindiki held the Scripture aloft and declared: “We are the richest people on earth!”

May, Ochs, and Tompkins emphasize that the Bible brings not just spiritual good, but general societal benefit. The Thakara translation united local denominations that had previously distrusted each other. It spurred local women to study the Bible and acquire education. After the translation was distributed and read, the Seed Company reports, many of the Thakara gave up polygamy and started to follow the national law that bans female circumcision.

The Seed Company is now working on an Old Testament for the Thakara, believing the Thakara will identify with the struggles of the Jewish people—whose faith was deepened by famine, drought, and other calamities familiar to rural communities.

Frank Batten Jr. , a longtime donor to Wycliffe Bible Translators, the worldwide leader in translating the Bible into previously unaccessed languages.

Once the initial donors proved the value of the new methods for accelerating translation, many others, large and small, joined in. The Chattanooga-based Maclellan Foundation, a significant giver to groups like the American Bible Society since the 1940s, has granted nearly $2 million to Wycliffe and the Seed Company in the past two decades. It funded a language training center in Hyderabad, India, that has since dispatched missionary linguists across the subcontinent. The rapid growth of Christianity in India is credited in part to this accomplishment.

One longtime Wycliffe donor was transformed by an encounter with this work in action. Mart Green, of the Oklahoma Hobby Lobby Green family, had been in the Christian bookstore business since he was 19. And as a donor to Wycliffe he had a particular niche: paying for the printing of first-edition Bibles. In 1998, he went to Guatemala to witness the dedication of a translation his family had been supporting since 1958—“40 years!” says Green. “I was born in 1961. I’ve never waited 40 years for anything in my life.” Upon arrival at what Green calls the “ends of the earth,” he heard that the number of believers who could read in that particular language numbered 400. “Being a business guy, three words went right across my head—return on investment.” As the FALL 2016

41

A native translator using technology to speed his work.

celebration progressed, Green was torn, wondering if the money or time could be better spent elsewhere. Watching a Guatamalan weep over the new translation, a perverse thought crossed his mind: “Why don’t you go tell him he’s not a good return on investment?”

Of course, Green didn’t do that, but retreated to his tin-roof hotel that night. Serenaded by the drunks outside, he was unable to sleep and took to thinking about a person weeping to receive a Bible, while he had shelves and shelves of Bibles in his stores and at home going unread. He asked himself, “What kind of return on investment is Mart Green?

I’ve got a huge amount invested in me. What kind of return do I have for my life?”

From that moment forward, “I became passionate about Scripture access,” Green says. And he went to work, lending his financial support and personal energies to the cause of producing a Bible for every language, even in digital form. In 2010 he started gathering the Bible translation bigfoots—Seed Company, Wycliffe, Biblica, the American Bible Society, and others to come together and talk about a collaborative strategy to “eradicate Bible poverty.”

Under the alliance name of Every Tribe Every Nation, the group holds annual fundraising and

Since 1993, the Seed Company has completed more than 1,000 translations in over 90 countries. More than a billion people have gained fresh access to the Bible.

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PHILANTHROPY

Pricing out progress with precision Since its beginnings in 1993, the Seed Company has completed more than 1,000 translations in over 90 countries. More than a billion—that’s right, a billion—people have gained fresh access to the Bible thanks to its work, and it expects to reach hundreds of millions more in the years ahead. On current timetables, it looks like translations for the last unreached people will at least be started within about a decade.

To fuel this progress, the group received $36 million in donations in 2015. Crisp goals and timelines are central to its fundraising success. The Seed Company’s website details exactly which translators need money and for how long. “The genius of the Seed Company idea is that you turn a translation into a project that has a beginning and an end. Progress can be measured and reported. An investor can keep track of where his or her money is going,” Tompkins says.

The nonprofit uses many little devices to keep fresh thinking and innovation alive. For instance, it has a rule (instituted from the beginning by May) that the average age of all board members should be no more than 50. “I call the Seed Company one of the first twenty-first-century charities, because it’s organized differently and thinks differently than most traditional nonprofits,” Ochs says.

With increasing use of technology, the Seed Company can now do translations faster than ever.

A linguistic consultant or Biblical scholar will often video chat with a native translator oceans away to offer advice on precise content. “The new approach includes digital technologies, crowdsourcing, using a Wiki approach to translation, anything that allows them to accomplish the task more efficiently and effectively,” reports Williams.

Donor Frank Batten Jr. notes the impact of the Internet: “It used to be that the missionary doing translation in the village would have to go somewhere else to meet with consultants to check it.

That might require a week’s trek through the jungle, up a river, down a river. But now if the translator has satellite Internet, he or she can send whatever portion gets done every day to a checker, who can

Stephen Payne

encouragement gatherings called Illuminations.

The first, which only had participation from the Seed Company, brought in $21 million. “A nice little event,” says Green. But given the event’s success, Green notes that “the Seed Company miraculously said ‘Let’s not raise money for the Seed Company, let’s raise money for the movement.” Ever since then, the funds have been distributed among the participating organizations, along with speedier techniques and technological prowess.

Stephen Payne

be anywhere in the world: Papua New Guinea, Dallas, Singapore.”

For a project in India, crowdsourcing platforms were used to involve more than 3,000 people in translating the Bible from Hindi to their local dialect. With no formal training, participants went online to choose words they thought were the best equivalents. They voted on the best translations of particular sections.

The resulting translation may not have been academically brilliant, states Seed Company vice president Henry Huang, but it unified and energized the community in surprisingly powerful ways. “The identity and pride in their own language was so great that even some nonbelievers began to participate.

Interest in what was going on in the church grew dramatically.”

working together cooperatively, sharing resources and techniques.

“The biggest change has been in the much wider involvement of local people in the translation process,” Batten is quick to note. “The workforce is much more local, with expatriates in a supporting role rather than a leading role.”

The leading is being done by people like Uche Aaron. “It was in 1979,” he recounts over Skype, “when I was studying at Lawrence Technical University.” From a poor family in Amadaka, Nigeria, he had arrived in the U.S. on scholarship to train to become a construction engineer.

He remembers sitting in an auditorium balcony while a Wycliffe missionary explained that there were thousands of tongues without a Bible. “I heard a voice speaking behind me,” he says. “‘Uche! Your language is one of them, what are you The beauty of regeneration going to do about it?’ I was asking God, There is inspiration for other ‘Why would you give me a scholarship philanthropic growth and and bring me to the United States only experimentation in this work. The to make me drop engineering?’” But reason May set up the Seed Company the next Sunday he heard another as a spinoff outside of Wycliffe two missionary—Bernie May. May talked decades ago was to overcome inertia about trusting God, comparing it to and institutional resistance that had following the guidance of air-traffic prevented the mother organization, controllers, and describing events in enormously successful as she’d been, his own life. from producing necessary fresh “As soon as he gave that solutions to the vexing problem of testimony I had a great peace backlogged languages and centurylong in my heart,” says Aaron. “All waits for niche translations. Once the of the battles just went away.”

Seed Company’s various tricks for Aaron approached May, and trimming the workload and getting went on to become a translator new presentations of the Scriptures into in his own homeland. He circulation turned out to be a smashing produced a New Testament success, decisions were made to fold translation in 1992, and back into the mother organization finished the entire Obolo many of the experimental techniques Bible in 2014. Since of the spinoff. Wycliffe itself picked up 1999 he has served as a the pace. consultant for the Seed In 2008, Wycliffe made a dramatic Company across Nigeria, commitment to what it called its Last and has had a hand in a Languages Campaign. It promised to dozen other translation raise $1 billion from donors and launch projects in his country. new translations at an annual rate in The Obolo Bible the triple digits, so that there would be has had a profound a version of the Scriptures available or effect on his people, Aaron in development in every language under reports. “They were always looked the sun within 17 years of the campaign’s down upon by the neighboring tribes. launch. To accomplish this ambitious The development of their language goal, Wycliffe and the Seed Company are was felt by nearly everyone to be a big FALL 2016

promotion. And the translation project was a very strong uniting factor.”

The majority of the project’s cost was covered by donations from the Obolo people themselves, through local churches, community organizations, and individual donors.

When May discusses unreached people reading the Bible in their native languages for the first time, he can still become almost giddy. “I feel like we’re still living in the Book of Acts. It’s a very exciting time to be a Christian,” he says. “Even relatively small-scale donors are able to spark transformations.”

His excitement is even more palpable on the side of the individuals benefiting from the new energy and effort. “People who had no hope suddenly have something to live for.

People who didn’t have anybody loving them realize they’re loved by God, and learn to love each other. People lacking purpose now have an anchor, a strong foundation for their life. That’s what it’s all about.” P

Donor Mart Green is leading an alliance, Every Tribe Every Nation, to accelerate translation of the Bible into every remaining language.

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With the valuable pro bono hours they volunteer, lawyers can change lives, or change the country

Silver Screen Collection / Getty Images

By Justin Torres

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PHILANTHROPY

Silver Screen Collection / Getty Images

t’s called pro bono publico—literally, “for the public good.”

This legal work that firms and some individual attorneys donate is imagined by most people to be something like what Atticus Finch did for a hard-pressed defendant in To Kill a Mockingbird. An advocate, in a personal act of generosity, puts his or her lawyering skills behind a powerless party who otherwise might not get a fair shake in the courts. Pro bono legal assistance of this sort doesn’t seek to transform our system of law, but helps it live up to its highest ideals.

That image now needs some updating. Since the “rights revolution” of the 1960s and ’70s, pro bono legal work has often been focused less on individuals in need than on policy and politics. Changing America, rather than aiding the vulnerable, is often the goal.

Some critics charge that much contemporary pro bono practice is just a means of enacting left-leaning policies via the courts, avoiding the bother of convincing voters and winning elections. Whether or not that is accurate when applied to all of today’s pro bono efforts, it is certainly true about the way pro bono law is now carried out by many of the nation’s elite law firms. Is this desirable? Is there a different model that can bring the charitable impulse of directly helping people in need back into pro bono practice?

A judge’s indictment Today’s most trenchant critic of pro bono law may be federal judge Dennis Jacobs, who serves on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York. Jacobs has long decried so-called “impact” pro bono litigation, which seeks increased funding for government programs, ties up public works projects in interminable environmental review, or restrains effective law enforcement techniques. In a famous 2009 speech at Cornell Law School, Jacobs compared lawyers’ interest in litigating on behalf of terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay to their lack of interest in hands-on advocacy on behalf of U.S. military veterans. “Many inmates of the facility at Guantanamo Bay find themselves well-lawyered,” said Jacobs, while “in some family courts, parents are found to be unfit because they are soldiers or sailors deployed abroad. They look in vain for high-power legal assistance.”

In 2011, Jacobs went further in a published dissent in Amnesty International v. Clapper, a case involving the constitutionality of U.S. surveillance of international communications. He argued that that litigation was not animated by pursuit of the public good, but by a desire by the pro bono lawyers to “claim a role in policymaking for which they were not appointed or elected, for which they are not fitted by experience, and for which they are not accountable.” ( Jacobs’s dissent, if not necessarily his critique of the lawyers donating their time to Amnesty International, Justin Torres is a lawyer in Washington, D.C., and a contributing editor of Philanthropy.

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Maryland, seeking the installation of videophones and expanded interpretive services •A successful challenge to a Texas voter-identification law, on the ground that it discriminates against minorities • A settlement with New York City confirming a “right to shelter” for the homeless, which a 2015 NYC Department of Investigations report says costs the city more than $1 billion a year to “warehouse” the homeless in “conditions of squalor” •W inning an injunction on behalf of two abortionists who were denied admitting privileges at a Texas hospital • Negotiating a $1 billion settlement on behalf of Social Security recipients who had their benefits revoked for outstanding probate or arrest warrants Many of these cases are undertaken in conjunction with advocacy groups that connect potential clients with the expensive law firms willing to offer free services. Then the advocacy groups file “friend of the court” briefs supporting the effort. Judge Jacobs once described this process as the “reciprocating motor of political activism that ties together policy research and lobbying, litigation and briefs amicus, and the arousing of politically targeted demographics in which lawyers go shopping for useful clients.”

The result is “impact litigation.”

And among its other effects are real costs to taxpayers. There are payouts Pro bono at the top to litigants. There is increased To get a clearer sense of the precise spending on government benefits. content of today’s pro bono work, I There are often payments to the law researched over a period of months what is going on at the locale where the firms themselves, under “fee-shifting” provisions in state and federal labor, most, and most influential, pro bono discrimination, and housing laws. work is taking place today—elite law Not every pro bono case that firms. A review of recent press releases from the top 100 law firms in America comes out of a large law firm seeks to reveals a predilection for pro bono cases wrench open taxpayers’ wallets or layer new regulations onto welfare agencies, like the following: prisons, and schools. Elite lawyers sometimes also represent indigent •F iling class action suits on individuals in local housing disputes behalf of deaf prison inmates in Massachusetts, Florida, Kentucky, and and custody battles, provide advice to 46

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nonprofits, or stand up for the accused in criminal cases. These efforts can have great influence on the lives of struggling individuals.

But the cases that grab the headlines in firms’ annual reports are large-scale “impact” cases against government at all levels. That’s where squadrons of young associates are mobilized. Not for nothing did famed appeals court judge Laurence Silberman once remark that “lawyers really see pro bono as the penance they pay for serving in a capitalist system.”

School for the Supreme Court The place where young lawyers are taught to use the law as a tool for policy change, of course, is in law school— especially in the hands-on “legal clinics” that have emerged at nearly every law school in America. These clinics were originally created during the 1960s in a multimillion-dollar initiative of the Ford Foundation that aimed to “reinforce the social consciousness” of law students and law professors and fight “political tyranny,” as founding documents put it.

Today, elite law schools such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, NYU, and Virginia have specialized Supreme Court clinics that train their charges to bring big cases before the nation’s highest court.

The cases these clinics take on are a regular menagerie of the types of pro bono litigation that Judge Jacobs described. Recent briefs include one from the Stanford clinic urging the Supreme Court to require public employees to pay fees to unions in the Friedrichs v.

California Teachers Association case, which the Court did; a successful request backed by Yale students that the Court hear Birchfield v. North Dakota, which challenges a state law making it a crime for motorists suspected of drunk driving to refuse to take a breathalyzer or blood test; and an NYU amicus brief in Riccu v. DiStefano, opposing a group of white and Hispanic firefighter applicants whose passing test scores were thrown out when no African-American test-takers passed.

One newer Supreme Court clinic has taken a different path. The law school at George Mason University (recently renamed for deceased

Mark Wilson / Getty Images

was vindicated the next year by the Supreme Court.)

The practice of law by America’s 1.2 million lawyers is governed by state bars and supreme courts, so there is no standard approach to pro bono legal work. The American Bar Association’s model rules of conduct urge every lawyer to provide at least 50 pro bono hours per year to “persons of limited means” or groups that “address the needs of persons of limited means.”

This is not binding.

In a 2012 ABA survey, 2,800 lawyers said they put in approximately 56 hours of pro bono services each, annually. But that average is uneven. About 20 percent of lawyers do no pro bono work at all in a typical year. Another 18 percent put in less than 20 hours. About 36 percent exceed 50 hours annually. Two groups—lawyers in large firms, and solo practitioners—do most pro bono work. Members of big firms average 77 hours per year; self-employed lawyers put in 62.

Collectively, these donations of very expensive hourly time and expertise add up to a huge amount of in-kind philanthropy.

So where is it all going? To what causes?

The ABA report took a stab at trying to characterize the kinds of pro bono work lawyers actually did. Its categories, though, are too general to tell us much.

Criminal law, for instance, which absorbed 7 percent of pro bono work in 2012, can encompass anything from negotiating with local prosecutors for a reduced sentence on a guilty plea to jousting at the aforementioned Guantanamo Bay tribunals. Can we go deeper?

Mark Wilson / Getty Images

Justice Antonin Scalia) operates an exceedingly rare law-school clinic not focused on left-leaning activism. It has carved out an “underserved niche in Supreme Court practice,” as attorney Thomas McCarthy puts it: representing states in cases before the Supreme Court, often when criminal convictions under state law are challenged. McCarthy “godsend” to Carla Sigler, an assistant district attorney in Louisiana who had to defend a murder oversees students participating in the clinic along conviction. In 2002, Bradlee Marsh stopped to pick with William Consovoy, his partner in a boutique up two hitchhikers. Once he and his brother were appellate firm that has its own active Supreme Court practice for paying clients. Both men are graduates of in Marsh’s truck, Jonathan Boyer pulled a gun and demanded money. When Marsh refused, Boyer shot the Mason law school. him in the head three times and helped himself to Mason students monitor cases percolating through some cash and a silver chain. Marsh died, and the the federal appellate courts to identify ones that the evidence of Boyer’s guilt was overwhelming: he Supreme Court may be interested in reviewing. If the confessed to police and to several family members, clinic is asked to write a pro bono brief for the Court, his fingerprints were in the truck, and his brother the goal is “to give students the exact experience they’d testified against him as an eyewitness. have if they were a junior associate at a law firm,” says The state Consovoy. Professors announced it would also give students seek the death penalty general feedback as and appointed they work through the an experienced record and case law capital-crimes defense to develop ideas for attorney to defend arguments. The goal of Boyer. Boyer’s counsel the clinic is teaching asked for several students, but the output continuances, then on has to be professional. the eve of the hearing “Because this is for Hurricane Rita closed real clients (albeit the courthouse. nonpaying), the work Eventually, to get the has to be Supreme delayed case moving, Court-quality,” the state agreed to says McCarthy. drop the death-penalty States come to charge. By the time Mason for assistance Protestors chant outside the Supreme Court in support of publicBoyer was convicted, because defending employee unions, which were also supported by a brief from the Stanford however, more than a state law or criminal legal clinic. Many law-school legal clinics, as well as pro bono arms five years had elapsed, conviction in the high of elite law firms, focus their energies on such high-impact cases for and on appeal he court is an entirely progressive causes. argued that the delay different task from their violated his Constitutional right to a speedy trial. standard work of winning a conviction before a jury, or Sigler had prosecuted Boyer, and when the defending it in a state appellate court. Few states have Supreme Court decided in 2012 to review his a lawyer in the attorney general’s office with experience case she felt “a sense of dread…. As a prosecutor, practicing before the U.S. Supreme Court. It is an “area your worst fear is for a murder conviction to be where there were opportunities to help, and where help overturned. I knew that family. What was I going to was needed,” says McCarthy. This latest Supreme Court tell them?” Sigler had no Supreme Court experience, term, the upstart Mason clinic went up against Yale’s and “I was terrified, I’ll be quite frank about that.” clinic in Birchfield—with Mason defending and Yale She turned to the Mason clinic for help in attacking the North Dakota law. In its July ruling, the writing the merits brief and in prepping for oral Court split the difference, upholding the breathalyzer argument. Though Sigler is an experienced legal portion of the law. writer, she credits the brief with “giving us an edge before oral argument…. They did an amazing job Saving conviction coming up with great cases and in presenting the Having this philanthropically supported expertise facts the best way possible.” available on a pro bono basis proved to be a FALL 2016

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Even more important was the clinic’s help in getting Sigler ready for oral argument before the Court—which one advocate has likened to being chased by a swarm of bees. The clinic took her to observe a day of argument at the Court, and arranged mock panels to simulate the dizzying pace of an appearance before the Supremes. As a busy prosecutor, with little time to prep and none of the resources that are at the disposal of well-heeled advocates in large firms, Sigler found the help invaluable: “More than anyone,” she says, “they saved that conviction…. I’m just so grateful to the people at the clinic for seeing that this was an important legal issue.”

Low bono litigation Of course, getting students to work pro bono on Supreme Court litigation is not hard. Most “young lawyers will crawl over broken glass” to get a chance to work on a Supreme Court brief, notes Consovoy.

But what about pro bono work for clients whose cases are less glamorous,

real-estate developers. They help family businesses with paperwork, permits, zoning regulations, and real-estate transactions. By providing students a broader range of clinical options, Lawton believes she is helping her students to develop their own sense of what is just and helpful to people, free of professorial School in Chicago. She oversees a clinic imposition, while simultaneously where DePaul students offer real estate, providing a richer educational experience. business, and community development Another promising new model help. Lawton recently caused a stir is the rise of so-called “low bono” when she published a law-review article warning that many of today’s clinics don’t lawyers: mission-driven firms that use philanthropic support to provide low-cost focus enough on student educational legal services to persons of moderate needs or student interests, but rather income—who often fall between the on the political and philosophical cracks of no-cost pro bono offerings commitments of professors. and a commercial firm’s high fees. One While Lawton is a left-leaning such effort is the Court Square Law independent who sees “undeniable need Project in New York City. Court Square for social justice in this country,” she was founded with the help of 19 major warns that legal educators in pro bono clinics are less conscious than they should New York law firms. They each provided be about whether they are imposing their $100,000 in seed money, and their lawyers regularly volunteer time and view of “justice” on students. More than expertise to the project.

40 law schools now require students to For fees that are substantially engage in clinical work. In effect, these less than market rates, Court Square helps small businesses and nonprofits incorporate, negotiates with vendors, and writes employment contracts.

It settles divorces, works out custody arrangements, and moves to modify or enforce child-support decrees. It provides trust and estate advice to protect families of modest means whose main asset is a life-insurance policy. These are routine matters, but when families and schools are now forcing students to pay small businesses are unable to navigate (in the form of tuition dollars, often debt-financed) to perform free legal work them, the result can be the difference between self-support and living on on behalf of causes that primarily reflect the dole, between homeownership and their professors’ political commitments. homelessness, between a happy family life In her own clinic, Lawton has and a calamitous one. consciously sought to provide what she That’s just the kind of modulated calls “a more diverse set” of hands-on intervention that intelligent charity opportunities, which she feels is both has always aimed to make. Sheltering a moral and a pedagogical necessity. someone as she weathers a storm.

Students in her clinic work with local Helping a man help himself. Providing community development groups and a citizen with an essential tool. Making affordable housing advocates, much sure that everyday people are treated like housing clinics at any law school. fairly by large agencies. Guarding the But they also work with condo boards principles of equal opportunity, individual and market-rate housing co-ops. liberty, and humanitarian sympathy.

They help small- and medium-sized real-estate developers who want to bring Lawyers helping members of the public live a good life. commercial developments to struggling Atticus Finch, we still need you. P neighborhoods, as well as large for-profit

Middle-income people needing help often fall between the cracks of no-cost pro bono offerings and commercial firms’ high fees. New “low bono” mission-driven law firms with modest costs are being created to help this group. whose legal needs are humdrum? There are many worthy clients who need just a few hours of a lawyer’s time to sort out a custody dispute, review a business contract, navigate the bureaucracy of legal immigration, or write a will that can protect their assets for their children.

Settling these issues can mean the difference between misery and peace, between permanent failure and personal flourishing. Yet people of modest means often stagger along for years, or even a lifetime, because of the cost or difficulty of finding good lawyers to do routine legal work.

One insider who urges that today’s hundreds of law school clinics should provide more of this kind of hands-on legal assistance is Julie Lawton, a professor at DePaul University Law 48

PHILANTHROPY

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ideas Seven Results of the Charter-School Revolution The most consequential developments after 25 years of charter schools

BY CHESTER FINN, BRUNO MANNO, AND BRANDON WRIGHT

A quarter century has gone by since Minnesota passed America’s first ­c harter-school law in 1991. Today, 43 states and the District of Columbia have charter laws and together contain some 6,800 charter schools, serving nearly 3 million students. Charter schools constitute the fastest-growing school-choice option in the land, and are the most significant innovation that K-12 education has seen in decades. Yet such schools have only begun to fulfill their potential as an engine of change for American education. Here, we look at seven chartering achievements that have been attained in a relative blink of history’s eye.

Focusing on at-risk kids U.S. charter schools primarily serve poor and minority children. Several forces drive this concentration. About half of state laws declare that a specific purpose of chartering is to boost options for targeted students, especially those at risk.

Some states have statutorily restricted charters to urban areas (and, sometimes, to low-achieving districts or pupils).

And families in underserved neighborhoods are more apt to seek out charters when given the opportunity.

The focus of most charters up to this point on urban, minority kids has been good for those kids, as achievement data show. It has also been a positive force in calling attention to the needs and potential of these children in the K-12 system as a whole. At the same time, the emphasis on at-risk kids has limited the potential of charters to serve more and different students.

Because of their emphasis on inner-city children, many charters aren’t very integrated. But then n ­ either are 50

c­ onventional schools in similar neighborhoods. In fact, University of Arkansas analysts observe that “the majority of students in the central cities of metropolitan areas, in both charter and traditional public schools, attend school in intensely segregated settings.” Arguments over racial isolation will continue.

For now, we simply note that charters mostly serve children who need a boost.

Revealing public demand Charters have come to play a major role in the education ecosystems of some cities. In 2014-15, 14 communities saw 30 percent or more of their students enroll in charter schools; 45 districts had at least a fifth of their students in charters; and more than 160 had at least a tenth. If the 151,000 charter pupils in Los Angeles were a separate district, it would rank among the 20 largest in the land.

Bellwether Education Partners estimates that at least 1 million more children were languishing on waiting lists in 2013. Many parents don’t even sign up, because they know there are already long backlogs. In the fall of 2014, Boston had nearly three times as many children on wait lists as were enrolled in that city’s charters. In New York City, the Success Academy network reports that for the 2016-17 school year, it had 20,000 applicants for 3,000 places.

The tribulations that can result were poignantly portrayed in Waiting for Superman, the 2010 documentary in which children and parents agonize as names are drawn during an admission lottery. It’s clear that many more families would use the charter option if they could. This reflects both the strong demand for charter schools, and the PHILANTHROPY

extent of dissatisfaction with traditional public-school offerings.

Fostering innovation The promise that charters would innovate within public education, devising and piloting strategies and models that the traditional system could then adopt, was indisputably part of this reform’s original appeal to educators, policymakers, and philanthropists. And innovation has indeed happened, although few district bureaucracies have been eager to adopt and expand charter-crafted advances.

Har vard Business School professor Clayton Christensen made a useful distinction between ­d isruptive ­i nnovation—a tr ul y novel change that displaces something that existed before—and incremental change that refines and boosts an extant product or service. Chartering has accomplished some of both. To varying degrees, charters have generally done well at such things as blended learning, personalized technology-assisted instruction, character education, empowering principals, attracting talented and passionate teachThis is adapted from Charter Schools at the Crossroads: Predicaments, Paradoxes, Possibilities by Chester Finn, Bruno Manno, and Brandon Wright, just released by Harvard Education Press. Finn is a distinguished senior fellow and president emeritus at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Manno is a senior adviser for K-12 education at the Walton Family Foundation. Wright is the editorial director of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

The views expressed here are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect the views of their respective organizations.

ers, establishing order in classrooms, creating new curricula, and extending the number of hours that children devote to academics. Charters have essentially eclipsed the district arrangement in one major city (New Orleans), and are headed that way in several more.

We would never suggest that every charter school has invented something original. A 2015 report from the Mind Trust and Public Impact complained that too many charters resemble—in structure, curriculum, pedagogy, uses of time, and so forth—the district schools to which they’re meant to be alternatives. Chartering certainly creates opportunities to innovate, but not all such opportunities are seized.

Still, from a child’s or family’s perspective, a school that does something better

inner-city students. Other features typically include a clear and rigorously enforced discipline code, longer school days and years, a curriculum geared toward college entry, and a strong focus on ­building a comprehensive school culture.

They accept no excuses for failure, either by children (provided that they strive and behave), teachers, or schools.

To be sure, some conventional district schools impressively boost outcomes for poor and minority students. No-excuses charter schools, however, have shown that they can replicate their model successfully and that they are able to systematically expand and succeed wherever they are allowed. Chartering’s signal accomplishment to date is the remarkably reliable track record of prominent “brands” like KIPP, YES Prep, Success Academy, Achievement First, Uncommon

Over the last two decades, new foundations like Walton, Dell, ­R obertson, Broad, Fisher, Daniels, and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation displaced more established foundations like ­Annenberg, Wallace, and Joyce from the top tier of education donors. (The Gates Foundation remained the largest K-12 donor over that entire period, though, and remains so today.) The funding patterns of the newer foundations were different, including much support for “jurisdictional challengers” like charter schools and organizations such as Teach For America and New Leaders for New Schools.

A study by Sarah Reckhow and J­ effrey Snyder of Michigan State ­U niversity found that the top 15 ­ e ducation ­philanthropies reduced the fraction of their total funding going to conventional

No-excuses charter schools have shown that they can expand and succeed wherever they are allowed, pulling poor kids from tough neighborhoods toward ivy gates. than another school—even when there’s no fundamental change in concept or practice—is a gain. And a decent number of charters and networks have tried, and continue to try, instructional models and strategies that have little precedent, at least in their own communities.

Realizing the power of no excuses Charter schools have considerable freedom to vary in philosophy, pedagogy, and organization. Thus we find Montessori charters, Waldorf-style charters, STEM charters, outdoor-education charters, virtual charters, language-immersion charters, and special-education charters.

There are teacher-governed schools, business-operated schools, startup schools, and conversion schools. The variety is impressive.

Perhaps the most notable model to emerge is the “no-excuses” school that places high behavioral and academic expectations on low-income and minority

Schools, and others. These “proof points” take poor kids from faltering schools and tough neighborhoods and tread the path toward the ivy gates.

Proof is one thing, of course, acceptance quite another. Successful though it may be, this school model is not universally admired. A 2014 Washington Post article evoked the main criticism in its headline: “Why ‘No Excuses’ Charter Schools Mold ‘ Very Submissive’ Students—Starting in Kindergarten.”

Critics grate against the structure and order of these schools.

Energizing (and redirecting) donors Charters have inspired a surge of ­education-linked philanthropy, ­drawing hundreds of millions of dollars of venture funding into K-12 reform. It’s hard to imagine that much of this money would have appeared absent the tantalizing and non-bureaucratic instrument of the charter school.

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district schools from about 16 percent of grant dollars in 2000 to 8 percent in 2010, while funding for charters rose from 3 to 16 percent. Also visible over this period was greater convergence in grantmaking, as new and old foundations did more bundling of support for kindred activities and programs. For instance, in 2010, the Charter School Growth Fund, Teach For ­America, KIPP, DC Public Education Fund, and ­NewSchools Venture Fund together received more than $150 million from the top 15 foundations—a sum that amounted to 18 percent of their total giving. Cities like Washington, N ­ ewark, and New Orleans emerged both as centers of reform and as philanthropy magnets.

In short, new funders have entered the field and devoted themselves to outside-the-system strategies like ­chartering, particularly the creation and replication of no-excuses schools. Predictably, however, the engagement of these deep-pocketed donors (and others 51

ideas

such as Mark Zuckerberg) with ­grantees that challenge the traditional K-12 system has provoked pushback. The narrative coming from teacher unions and other critics is that plutocrats are distorting American public education.

Mobilizing talent and support structures Creating new schools requires new school leaders, instructors, and support personnel. The charter sector has benefited from—and catalyzed—much enterprise on this front. Charter successes and professional opportunities have energized young people to join its ambitious endeavor. And donors have built and expanded alternative routes and mecha-

charter schools to pull impressive new talent into education. And some charters, frustrated by the slipshod quality, iffy content, long timelines, low stature, and high cost of conventional t­ eacher-college programs, have launched their own alternatives. Match Education in Boston created the Charles Sposato Graduate School of Education to prepare teachers for “the intensity and rigor” of teaching, primarily in no-excuses charters, and has been accredited in ­M assachusetts.

New York Cit y ’s Relay Graduate School of Education was launched by Uncommon Schools in partnership with ­Achievement First and KIPP NYC and has been approved by the New York Regents as the first standalone gradu-

positions in districts, state agencies, and more—all the way up to John King, who cut his education teeth in the charter sector as co-founder of Boston’s Roxbury Prep Charter School and then as managing director of Uncommon Schools, and is now U.S. Secretary of Education.

Hundreds of nonprofit and forprofit organizations have emerged to help charter schools with staff development, leadership training, financial services, facility financing, special education, and more. Groups such as Building Hope, Pacific Charter School D ­ evelopment, and Civic Builders aid ­c harters with facility financing, sometimes using program-­related investment funds from foundations. On the R&D front, the

The freedom of charters to staff themselves with people not ­conventionally credentialed has fostered much creativity, both at the building level and at organizations like Teach For ­America that have drawn in talent that would not likely have considered this career stop. nisms for training leaders and teachers.

The freedom of charters to staff themselves with people who have not been conventionally credentialed has fostered much creativity, both at the building level and at umbrella organizations like Teach For America that have drawn in talent that would otherwise not likely have considered this career stop.

From 2010 to 2014, one third of TFA corps members—slightly more than 1,700 annually—were placed in charter schools. And over that same period, the number of TFA alums teaching within the charter sector jumped from 5,900 to 11,200. TFA grads heading charter schools and charter networks jumped even more ­d ramatically—from 1,900 to 4,300.

Groups like T NT P (former l y The New Teacher Project), Leading ­Educators, Educators 4 Excellence, 4.0 Schools, Teach Plus, and the National A c a d e m y o f A d v a n c e d Te a c h e r ­E ducation have likewise worked with 52

ate school of education in the Empire State in more than eight decades. Relay now trains more than 2,000 teachers and principals annually. California’s High Tech High likewise has created its own state-recognized graduate school of education and education leadership.

Charter principals typically wield authority across many elements of their schools and most charter teachers enjoy considerable freedom in curriculum, pedagogy, and instructional materials, though they often work long hours so as to be accessible to students and to shoulder more responsibility not just for children’s cognitive growth but also for their development as upstanding, motivated people. Without the lure and flexibility of these opportunities at charter schools, it’s hard to imagine that today’s much richer preparation programs for educators would ever have emerged.

Nor are charters the only destination for those trained in these new programs.

Lots of terrific people who entered K-12 education via charters now occupy key PHILANTHROPY

charter sector has spawned entities like Tulane University’s Education Research Alliance, whose purpose is to understand how the new era of New Orleans school reform has influenced teaching and learning in the Big Easy and what this may mean for the future of school reform.

Although some such enterprises existed in pre-charter days, the sector’s growth has caused them to proliferate, innovate, and compete with one another.

Because charters are also a marketplace for service providers, the schools can choose from among a range of vendors and partners. And when extant providers can’t meet their needs, charters often catalyze the creation of new ones.

Building new governance mechanisms The charter mechanism is not just a source of new schools but also a ­s tructural reform of public education’s governance and delivery systems. Chartering explodes the district’s exclusive

franchise to operate public schools, and offers families a chance at potentially better schools without having to pay tuition. This is a breakthrough in the provision of education services by ­American society.

The management organizations that operate charter chains across different cities and states represent another governance innovation. They run schools in multiple locations, create new schools, brand their educational product, enforce standards across their networks, troubleshoot problems in particular schools, and provide efficient back-office services to their member schools. They’ve become a key way to expand charters within and across states. Although the majority of charters continue to be freestanding—a sector full of startups—these networks have built the organizational, managerial, and financial capacities that also allow fast expansion while keeping ­quality high.

Another charter-linked governance innovation is the “recovery school ­district”—a state-controlled entity that takes over poorly performing schools, in effect extracting them from their local districts, and reboots them as charter or charter-like schools. The most visible examples are Louisiana’s Recovery School District, ­Tennessee’s ­Achievement School District, and Michigan’s Education Achievement Authority. At least half a dozen other states are creating or heading toward similar entities.

Within traditional districts, too, chartering has sometimes paved the way for rethinking central-office and school relationships, and some districts have incorporated chartering into their own improvement efforts. The Center on ­Reinventing Public Education has a network of more than 45 cities working on so-called “portfolio management” ­strategies. Under this arrangement, the central office remains in charge but

c­ onfers considerably greater autonomy than in the past upon its schools, some of which become charters authorized by the district itself.

None of the developments described here is finished. Yet charters have already shown their ability to boost the life chances of at-risk kids, to foster innovation in governance, to catalyze philanthropic assistance, and to widen crucial training pipelines. All of this has advanced public education as a whole.

While disruption in this realm has mostly caused heartburn in established K-12 systems, and while not every charter school is an educational success, after 25 years it’s time to acknowledge that chartering is no firefly. It mostly works. It ’s here to stay. And anyone whose top priority is the education of children would do well to help improve and expand its successes, address its shortcomings, and amplify the good that charters do for kids. P

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Minor Characters The NEA and NEH have minimal roles in U.S. arts and letters

BY MON ICA KL EM

In September 1965, when establishment of the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities was under debate, a Democratic congressman lamented that the U.S. was “the last civilized nation on the earth to recognize that the arts and the humanities have a place in our national life.” The true facts were different.

Our nation had established thousands of symphonies, dance troupes, and performance festivals; imported millions of pieces of art; established museums, libraries, and cultural events; funded publishing projects to make the classics more accessible; and founded renowned programs for training indigenous artists and studying creative processes. American art and literature zoomed from nonexistence to world leadership in less time than it took to build Notre Dame Cathedral. Private citizens, support associations, and donors had—and continue to possess—a tremendously successful record of elevating the arts and humanities in American life.

What set some critics bellowing was simply that the federal government didn’t pour public dollars into the field, as in Europe.

The evolution of this argument is catalogued

by James Bennett in Subsidizing Culture: Taxpayer Enrichment of the Creative Classes. He shows that by the mid-1960s, the idea that the federal government should sponsor cultural achievement gained enough momentum to create apparently permanent public underwriting. The National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities would have many positive effects for society, but they set up new expectations about who should support art, and what audiences art should address—shifting some of the funding burden from private and specialized entities to taxpayers, and reducing market tests that required artists to win supporters who admired their work enough to pay for it.

Not every artist embraced this shift. Bennett describes “Beat poets, agrarian novelists, anarchist artists, upper-crust patrons of symphony orchestras, and just plain old ordinary painters and fiddlers and story-tellers” who opposed government subsidization.

They raised concerns over the quality of public-funded art, over the effects of government preferences for particular styles or ideologies, and over the potentially totalitarian tinge that state influence over high culture could create. But this cacophony of anti-subsidy voices 54

Subsidizing Culture: Taxpayer Enrichment of the Creative Class

By James Bennett

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had no particular unity of philosophy or consistent driving principle, and so was pushed aside.

Bennett examines government efforts through the decades. The Public Works of Art Project was an early New Deal program that aimed at “putting artists to work” and promised to avoid “trying to make artists out of bums.” It was our first large-scale government-funded art program. It functioned largely without controversy, aside from the temporary adornment of San Francisco’s Coit Tower with a hammer and sickle.

The programs that followed were less humble. The director of the Federal Theatre Project, for instance, proclaimed her work “a new frontier in America, a frontier against disease, dirt, poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, despair, and at the same time against selfishness, special privilege, and social apathy.” When complaints arose that many of the shows sponsored by the project contained blatant propaganda, the defense offered was that democracy and clean water were worthy subjects.

As the Cold War developed, government money was put into sponsorship of cultural organizations, art exhibitions, and literary magazines to extol Western values and challenge communism—usually secretly.

Thomas Braden, head of the CIA’s International Organizations Division, explained that the projects he funded “would have been turned down if it had been put to a vote in a democracy. In order to encourage openness we had to be secret.” When the New York Times and others made these activities known, Brandeis sociologist Lewis Coser spoke for many when he wondered aloud at “the unedifying spectacle of American intellectuals waxing indignant about the kept intellectuals of the Soviet Union while being subsidized by secret or not so secret American government funds.”

But as the federal government grew rapidly during the 1960s John Kennedy decided it was “important for the President of the United States to lend his prestige to distinction of creation and performance,” as Arthur Schlesinger awkwardly put it. The ­Johnson administration, too, stated a desire to “throw its prestige behind the recognition and encouragement of an elite of talent in the United States.” And so the footprint of government in the arts grew.

In 2015, $1.3 billion was set aside by federal, state, and local governments for the arts. Yet that same year, private entities donated $17 billion to the arts—13 times more than all levels of U.S. government appropriated.

Kickstarter alone (which, being a business, doesn’t appear in the charitable numbers) surpassed the NEA in 2012 with the amount it disburses to creators.

Even advocates of government funding of the arts concede that private giving is the lifeblood of American culture. “The primacy of private, as opposed to public, support for the arts and culture in the U.S. largely relates

to American social and cultural traditions,” explained a 2012 NEA publication rather wistfully.

The normalization of federal subsidies for the arts and humanities is not a trivial thing. But government is only a minor influence in the field, and if government funding of artists and intellectuals should reverse, no calamity will result. “The cause of death” for public arts funding would be, says Bennett, “irrelevance instead of irreverence.”

Monica Klem was a contributor to The Almanac of American Philanthropy.

Improving Political Diversity on Campus Can philanthropy help mend our one-party universities?

BY J ACQUE LINE PFEFFER M ER R I L L

A furtive rendezvous in an out-of-the-way park. An urgent, edgy conversation in sotto voce, suspended when footsteps draw near and resumed only when no interloper can overhear. This could be a le Carré plot point. Instead it is a meeting of conservative professors on campus.

American universities like to think of themselves as bastions of open inquiry and free speech. In truth, they are among the most politically homogeneous and ideologically intolerant locales in America. Conservative professors—especially young, untenured ones— must hide their political identities if they are to succeed at American universities, report Jon Shields and Joshua Dunn in their new book Passing on the Right.

It is well known that conservatives are scarce on college faculties—most studies put their percentage in the humanities and social science faculties at below 10 percent. In a democracy where nearly 40 percent of the population describes itself as conservative, this imbalance among the professoriate is striking. It would be less problematic if it were the consequence of young conservatives not wanting to be tweedy professors. But Shields and Dunn marshal impressive evidence that the source of the imbalance is pervasive bias.

Shields is an associate professor of government at ­Claremont McKenna College; Dunn is an associate professor of political science at the University of C ­ olorado Colorado Springs. Through interviews with 153 conservative professors in the humanities and social sciences at 84 colleges and universities, they document many obstacles placed to block conservative faculty. Their study shows that conservatives end up at less prestigious universities than progressives with similar résumés. Professors told the authors that

Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University

By Jon Shields and Joshua Dunn

FALL 2016

being a conservative was a mark against a candidate when peers review articles for publication or decide whether to award tenure. Certain fields of study such as ­American history, said their informants, are “no-go zones” where hostility to conservative interpretations will kill the career of anyone with such views.

To contend with left-wing biases on campus, Shields and Dunn report, conservatives who aspire to be professors attempt coping strategies. Some remain closet conservatives and try to “pass” as progressives.

This has become almost the norm among younger professors. A few candidates openly display their conservative colors, but generally pay a price for their brazenness.

Some of these open conservatives face stiff challenges in bids for promotion. Some are paid less than colleagues, receive fewer grants, and get thinner opportunities. One professor who defended the war on terror after 9/11 described having to pull his children out of his town’s public schools to protect them from hostility.

Amid the evidence they collect about how conservatives are increasingly shut out on campus, it comes as a surprise that later in the book Shields and Dunn conclude optimistically that “the right-wing critique of the university is overdrawn.” They point out that many conservatives do succeed in academic careers, and some conservatives even said the fact that they knew their work would receive extra scrutiny drove them to be even more scrupulous.

But if it were shown that being a woman or member of a racial or ethnic minority is a mark against a job candidate, or that members of a minority group are less likely to have their articles published, or that they are placed at less prestigious institutions than merited by their professional accomplishments, there would be appropriate outrage. There would be a national commission and ­universitywide study groups and marching on campuses.

The underrepresentation of conservatives on campus should be cause for concern. While unfair treatment of a few thousand conservative scholars is regrettable, the greatest cost of this campus bias is failure to expose the 20 million students enrolled in college today to alternative viewpoints and a competitive array of intellectual explanations for the unfolding of events. Perhaps one reason that Shields and Dunn underplay the consequences of the problem they help document is their understanding of conservatism as a negative tradition, a “coalition against liberalism,” rather than a rich and varied positive tradition that has profoundly shaped American civic life.

The American conservative intellectual tradition encompasses decentralists, traditionalists, constitutionalists, libertarians, neoconservatives, and more. These strands of thought have continuing relevance to today’s 55

books most urgent questions on every topic from national policy to personal happiness. If one goal of a college education is to prepare students for engaged citizenship, surely exposure to professors representing the American conservative tradition must be part of any real understanding and lasting intellectual problem-solving. Tolerating more such views on campuses would bolster that professed top goal of so many college leaders today, “diversity.”

Even if conservatism is merely a tradition of opposition, college students should be exposed to arguments that counter popular and conventional views. As John Stuart Mill argued in his classic defense of freedom of speech, “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.” To fully understand counter­ arguments to your own position, Mill notes, you must hear “from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest.”

Even if we grant Shields and Dunn their premise that progressive professors do not set out to indoctrinate students but just present the world as they see it, adding conservatives to the mix would make for yeastier study and better understanding.

President Obama has expressed concern about colleges “where they don’t want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative,” and worried aloud that students are “coddled and protected from different points of view.” Amidst frequent student calls for “safe spaces” on campuses and “trigger warnings” against readings that might offend, disinvitations of non-left speakers, and violent protests against spoken “microaggressions,” there can be no doubt that restoring a free exchange of ideas is one of today’s greatest challenges on college campuses.

Relying on colleges and universities to recognize their own blind spots and reverse their own biases is not likely to bring much change. Donors, however, might be able to spark bits of healthy change. Over the past two decades philanthropists have made headway in improving the teaching of classic literature, ­liberty-based politics, American constitutionalism, religion, and market economics. Special donor-funded programs are found at colleges large and small, public and private—including the James Madison Program at Princeton University, the Institute for the Study of Western Civilization at Texas Tech University, and the Alexander Hamilton Institute that serves Hamilton College students. These philanthropic initiatives have institutionalized small footholds for intellectual traditions other than the dominant liberal approaches, and opened opportunities for including conservative faculty and students in the mix of campus learning. There is room for much more to be done.

If young people don’t learn to respect a wide range of views while they are students, and learn from conservative as well as liberal wisdoms, there is reason to be concerned about the future of our republic. The timely documentation of bias against conservative scholars and ideas put together by Shields and Dunn is a public service to any American thinker who believes that the free exchange of truly different ideas is central to understanding and progress.

Jacqueline Pfeffer Merrill is a contributor to PhilanthropyDaily.com and a former college professor.

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PHILANTHROPY

Sir John Templeton.

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Charles Koch.

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John Walton.

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To recommend a donor, e-mail esmethurst@ philanthropyroundtable.org between now and February 17, 2017.

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B

n years

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This November, The Philanthropy Roundtable celebrates the silver anniversary of its acclaimed annual meeting.

These gatherings for vigorous discussion in an intimate setting have fostered philanthropic excellence and helped promising new ideas spread across America.

Skim this sampling of past presentations to get a sense of what is said and done at these productive soirees‌

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PHILANTHROPY

Roman Muradov

co n v e r sat io n

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Leading thinkers have

Roman Muradov

brought us their best insights. The Roundtable handed the microphone to biographers like Ron Chernow and Stephen Ambrose so they could describe the Hamiltonian titans and bands of brothers profiled in their books. We brought you culture critics like George Will, David Brooks, Paul Gigot, Charles Murray, and the Three Kristols (Irving, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and Bill). Pastor Rick Warren and economist Hernando de Soto presented visions of overseas renewal.

Christopher Buckley and P. J. O’Rourke kept things light.

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Philanthropic innovators sketched new paths to economic success before full houses. Sal Khan and Daphne Koller came online when they were still in their startup phases. Andrew Yang and Vince Bertram talked business with Roundtable audiences. Tom Vander Ark and Peter Diamandis gave our attendees prizes, and Tom Tierney and Bob Woodson dissected nonprofit success.

Education reformers bushwhacking new paths through bureaucracy and mediocrity have been some of our favorite guests. Name the K-12 breakthrough— from Teach For America to the charter-school revolution—and you’ll find that the bell was being rung very early on at our conferences. We’ve brought you inventors like Wendy Kopp, John Walton, Eva Moskowitz, and Jeff Sandefer.

Public officials capable of bringing civil society to bear on our toughest problems—from Jeb Bush to Cory Booker—are always in our sights. We put podiums before New York and Los Angeles police chief Bill Bratton, judge Robert Bork, NIH director Francis Collins, National Endowment for the Arts head Dana Gioia, and Leon Kass of the President’s Council for Bioethics.

FALL 2016

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Donors like you who set an example through their generosity and effectiveness have always gotten our spotlight. Think Bernie Marcus, Suzie and Bruce Kovner, Philip and Nancy Anschutz, Peter Thiel, Ramona Bass, Steve Forbes, and many more.

And we love one-of-a-kind personalities like dinosaur discoverer Jack Horner, actor Gary Sinise, surgeon Ben Carson, and combat veterans Jake Woods and Eric Greitens. The ghosts of Andrew Carnegie, Ben Franklin, Oseola McCarty, and John Rockefeller have even haunted Roundtable annual meetings.

Thanks to everyone for your contributions, and here’s to the next 25 years!

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Celebrating American History ’s Greatest Donors The Philanthropy Hall of Fame The Philanthropy Hall of Fame celebrates great men and women of the past who changed the nation and the world through their charitable giving. View historical images and read brisk biographical profiles that capture the essence of each man and woman, the sources of their fortunes, and the tactics and results of their philanthropy.

To browse the Hall of Fame, please visit GreatPhilanthropists.org

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