Philanthropy Spring 2016

EVA MOSKOWITZ • CHANGING THE POLITICS OF SCHOOL REFORM • GORDON GUND A PUBLICATION OF THE

S P R I N G

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Sports Philanthropy!

Is supporting athletics charitable?

Are donations to college teams out of control?

Can sports be educational?

John Feinstein & others look at giving by

Boone Pickens, Kevin Plank, Phil Knight, Jim Kimsey, Bob Muzikowski, Richard & Ginny Gilder, Leonard Wilf, Joel Smilow, Peter Cooper, Ed Snider

I came to this country with $3,000 and turned it into a business.

Then the IRS seized my entire bank account using civil forfeiture.

I fought back and I won.

I am IJ.

Ken Quran Greenville, North Carolina

www.IJ.org

Institute for Justice National Law Firm for Liberty

Philanthropic freedom is essential to a free society.

A vibrant private sector generates the wealth that makes philanthropy possible.

Voluntary private action offers powerful solutions for many of society’s most pressing challenges.

Excellence in philanthropy is measured by results, not by good intentions.

The integrity and diversity of philanthropy is built on respect for donor intent.

If you agree . . . become a member of the

Publisher of Philanthropy magazine, the Roundtable is America’s leading network of charitable donors.

We work to strengthen our free society and protect the freedom to give.

Our members include individual philanthropists and foundations of all sorts.

We offer clear publications, powerful conferences, customized consulting, breakthrough groups where peer donors work together, and effective representation to legislators through our Alliance for Charitable Reform project.

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table of contents

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PHILANTHROPY

features

departments

18 T he Passion and Pitfalls of Giving to College Sports

4 Briefly Noted

Boone Pickens, Phil Knight, Kevin Plank, and many other donors are putting big bucks into college athletics. What are they getting in return?

By John Feinstein

De Blasio’s funding fantasy. A billion

for charters. Newspaper nonprofit?

Tough teacher ratings work. Smart brain philanthropy. Inner-city chess, a book prize, and Superman in a workhouse.

10 N onprofit Spotlight Turning urban squash into food for academic success.

32 S ports vs. Breakdown

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We profile four grassroots ventures that attack community demons with play 11 I nterviews and discipline—using sports to draw Eva Moskowitz young people into more wholesome How this hard-charging leader of and productive lives. school reform accomplishes miracles.

By Marques Chavez, Ashley May, Andrea Scott, Gordon Gund and Karl Zinsmeister He’s been blind since 1970, but is lighting a path to prevention and C all of the Wild cures for fellow sufferers.

A marriage of market-based conservation and treetop acrobatics helps kids succeed 56 Books in school.

Are College Sports Out of Control?

By Naomi Schaefer Riley Campus athletics are growing, but not exploding.

By Leslie Lenkowsky

46 A Different Kind of Television Network

Redefining Usury How a self-interested banker helped millions of people prosper.

By John Steele Gordon

In search of virtuous entertainment.

By Jarom McDonald

51 T he Art of Public-Policy Philanthropy: Fighting for School Reform Featuring Chester Finn, John Kirtley, Fred Klipsch, Betsy DeVos, and Thomas Carroll.

Books in Brief The poor Guggenheim.

60 P resident’s Note

We like to hear from you.

By Adam Meyerson

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

Adam Meyerson PRE SI D E N T

Karl Zinsmeister

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

Caitrin Nicol Keiper E D I TOR

Ashley May

MA NAG IN G E D ITO R

Andrea Scott

A SSOCIAT E E D IT O R

Taryn Wolf

A RT D IR E CT O R

Ifeoluwa Olagunju I NTE R N

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 NT R IBU T IN G E D IT O R S Philanthropy is published quarterly by The Philanthropy Roundtable. The mission of the Roundtable, a 501(c)(3) 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 1730 M Street NW, Suite 601 Washington, DC 20036 (202) 822-8333 Copyright © 2016 The Philanthropy Roundtable All rights reserved Cover: gettyimages/David Madison

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New York’s Central Park was recovered by private management, not just private money.

Donor Gerry Lenfest hopes that nonprofit status might save the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News.

PHILANTHROPY

Newspaper Nonprofits Gerry Lenfest is a leading American philanthropist, and also owner of two Philadelphia newspapers—the Inquirer and Daily News. At the beginning of this year he combined his occupations and donated the newspapers, plus their companion website, ­­­Philly.com, to the P ­ hiladelphia F ­ oundation. “Of all the things I’ve done, this is the most important,” stated Lenfest, who made his money with a sale of his cable company for $2.2 billion in 1999.

L enfest ’s hope is that nonprofit status and continuing philanthropic support for an ­o verarching entity he endowed with $20 million of starting capital will help the papers continue to produce civically important local journalism in an era when the Internet has destroyed the business model of newspapers. The Inquirer is America’s

istockphoto.com / Christopher Futcher

It’s the Governance, Stupid In February, New York City’s Bill de Blasio administration announced a goal of raising $200 million in charitable contributions from companies, individuals, and foundations to subsidize the city’s 328 public-housing projects. Wherever government is the landlord, you will usually find crime, rundown facilities, joblessness, and financial shortfalls—and all of that is present in New York. The proposed donated money would go toward backlogged maintenance and chronic operating deficits at the housing authority, which is in deep fiscal crisis after years of annual losses.

W hat was perhaps even more plucky than de Blasio asking donors to bail out a dysfunctional government agency was the supportive rationale offered by the New York Times in its story ­announcing the initiative. The Times reporter chirped that “there are certainly precedents for private donations to public entities: The private, nonprofit Central Park Conservancy was founded in 1980, when the city’s maintenance budget fell woefully short…. In more recent years, charter schools have turned to philanthropists to raise money.”

W hat this curious bit of history-spinning ignores is that both of those infusions of private

money into public sectors were accompanied by simultaneous transfers of decision-making, management, and control to private actors. In return for financial support, the Central Park Conservancy got a long-term contract with the city giving it authority to run the facility in its own, completely different, way. And the public responded—­attendance has increased from 12 million annual visitors when the city was in charge to more than 40 million per year now.

Charter schools are an even stronger example of this same transition. They are privately managed, generally acquire their own buildings, choose their own staff and curricula, and set all of their own operating procedures—free of district nostrums.

The crucial insight of both school chartering and the widely copied deal that shifted Central Park to a nonprofit operator was that you don’t just throw private money at a problem the government has fumbled, you inject private management.

If the de Blasio administration really wants to solve the financial and quality-of-life disasters of housing projects, it need only study the bold governance reforms that transformed two previous state-run messes, schools and parks, into smashing successes.

But of course, it’s doing the opposite—­trying to undo both charter-school independence and the integrity of the private conservancies operating city parks. So good luck with that $200 million.

istockphoto.com / espiegle; Medvedenko

briefly noted

istockphoto.com / Christopher Futcher

istockphoto.com / espiegle; Medvedenko

third-oldest newspaper and has won 20 Pulitzer Prizes; collectively the two papers and companion website reach more than 8 million readers each month in our fifth largest city. But in the face of declining circulation, their publisher saw its value drop from $515 million in 2006 to $50 million in 2012. Repeated cutbacks and bankruptcy threats climaxed in a newsroom consolidation late in 2015, and a layoff of 46 journalists.

Given the beaten-down state of newspapers today, experiments in charitably supported journalism are sure to continue. The for-profit Tampa Bay Times has operated under the umbrella of the nonprofit Poynter Institute since 1978.

ProPublica is a small philanthropically funded investigative newsroom that produces stories for newspapers across the country, sustained by tens of millions of dollars from donor Herb Sandler.

The Ford Foundation recently made grants to the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times to expand certain kinds of reporting. (For more on developments in nonprofit journalism see our Spring 2014 edition “Can Philanthropy Save Journalism?”)

Josh Benton of Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab argues that in spite of the reorganization, these newspapers are going to continue “to have every single problem that every newspaper in America has.” Philly.com writer Jeff Gammage agrees that “this new structure offers no quick fix.” Nonprofit ownership at the top may help keep the papers operating in the near term. But they will ultimately fail or succeed on their “journalistic merits and financial performance.”

Walton Doubles Down on Charters The Walton Family Foundation was founded in the same year, 1991, that charter schools were first born.

And over the past couple decades, Walton has been one of the stalwarts of charter schooling (perhaps the most important social movement of our era). From 1996 to 2015, the foundation put a billion dollars into charters, supporting fully one out of every four school startups, and boosting up organizations that improve the quality of charter schools, help them find buildings, train their staff, and so forth.

In early 2016, the Walton Foundation announced it would pour an additional $1 billion into charters over the next five years. As with its previous investment, this money will be particularly focused on giving better educational choices to families in poor communities with

­ ysfunctional public schools. Walton long ago d focused on particular states with charter-friendly laws where it felt it could do the most good without obstruction from opponents of school reform, and it announced it would direct most of its new spending to places where it already has ties. Top priorities will be creating new schools (to accommodate fast-rising public demand), and training new teachers and principals for the distinctively entrepreneurial, child-centered operating style of successful c­ harter schools.

Teacher rating systems are rewarding great teachers, clearing out low performers, and increasing student achievement.

Tough Teacher Ratings Are a Gift to Children One of philanthropy’s gifts to American education this decade was the teacher rating and accountability system set up in D.C. by former school chancellor Michelle Rhee—with heavy funding from donors like the Gates, Walton, R ­ obertson, Arnold, and Broad foundations. Instead of the perfunctory annual evaluations that had previously rated almost all of D.C.’s woebegone teachers as above average, the new IMPACT program bases half of a teacher’s assessment on changes in students’ test scores after they spend a year in the teacher’s classroom.

The other half of the rating comes from similarly concrete real-life measures.

I nstructors who substantially pull up the achievement of their charges (whatever their ­starting point) are rated “highly effective” and get a cash bonus up to $25,000, plus increases in their

8 out of 10 In 1950, eight out of ten persons on the Forbes list of richest Americans had inherited their wealth.

In 2015, eight out of ten persons on the Forbes list of richest Americans had self-made their wealth.

1950: “Entrepreneurship and Philanthropy in American Capitalism,”

Acs and Phillips, Small Business Economics. 2015: Editor’s tally of persons whose “inherited vs. self-made” score was five or higher on Forbes’s scale.

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briefly noted

The late donor Ted Stanley created an archive of brains to speed research on psychiatric disorders.

3%

Portion of college fundraising tied to athletics Total amount raised by colleges in 2015: $40.3 billion Amount raised by colleges for sports in 2015: $1.2 billion Council for Aid to Education 6

PHILANTHROPY

Big Payoff on Brain Philanthropy Brain research has been one of the ­best-funded, and most interesting, priorities of medical philanthropists in recent decades. Paul Allen created an institute for basic brain science with half a billion dollars in gifts. Patrick and Lore M ­ cGovern established a brain research center at MIT with a $350 million investment. Inventor Fred Kavli funded brain centers at Columbia, Yale, Johns Hopkins, R ­ ockefeller University, and the ­U niversity of ­C alifornia, San Diego. Property developer Mortimer ­Zuckerman endowed a neuroscience institute at Columbia with $200 million. Donors created new Texas brain centers at the ­University of Texas Southwestern ­M edical C ­ enter and ­D allas campus. Financier Steven Cohen is ­funding a search at NYU for biological markers that would aid diagnosis of brain injuries. Atlanta donors including Bernie Marcus set up a center that has become a leader in rehabilitating and investigating brain, stroke, spinal, and neurological injuries. The philanthropically funded Brain & Behavior Research Foundation has channeled more than $340 million to researchers around the country.

T he pioneer in this area was Ted Stanley, who, after concluding that diseases like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia were “massively under-researched” by government health agencies, personally poured more than a billion dollars into attacking psychiatric disorders. His support first created an archive of hundreds of brains from persons afflicted with various mental disorders, from which the Stanley Institute shipped thousands of tissue samples requested by researchers. He supported new drug trials for psychiatric treatment.

He donated $825 million to the Broad Institute to create the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research and launch important work on uncovering the genetic roots of mental illness.

These private gifts have begun to bear e­ nticing fruit. Most recently, scientists at the Stanley C ­ enter announced dramatic discoveries on the genetic roots of schizophrenia. A single aberrant gene variation may cause the brain to destroy its own synapses,

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base salary. On the flip side, D.C. teachers whose students regress are rated “ineffective” and subject to dismissal. (Hundreds have been let go.) Teachers who produce mediocre student progress are offered extra training, then targeted for dismissal if they still don’t improve.

I n January, careful research by Stanford and University of Virginia investigators found that this hard-headed teacher-assessment program is having powerfully positive effects on children: 1. The district is retaining 92 percent of its top teachers. 2. About half of all ­low-performing teachers leave annually (mostly on their own after getting signals from the system that their students are not prospering). 3. D.C. is replacing those low-performing teachers with ­h igher-caliber educators. 4. Systemwide, D.C. teachers are becoming much more effective, as the program drives up overall performance.

Bottom line: The exit of a teacher rated as low-­performing by this system yielded an average

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increase of ­student achievement equivalent to four months of extra learning in both math and reading.

For more on D.C.’s IMPACT system and the broader field of “value-added teaching,” see the ­R oundtable guidebooks Excellent Educators and From Promising to Proven.

they reported. Schizophrenia devastates 3.5 million Americans and is one of the leading paths to ­disability, costing our society tens of billions of dollars every year in addition to the human suffering.

After decades of stagnation in this field, experts describe the new finding as “amazingly consequential.” The director of the center created by Ted Stanley (who passed away in January, just as this breakthrough was being published) calls it watershed research that could produce detection and treatment methods that were undreamed-of just a year ago.

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Donor with a Long Memory Hans-Peter Wild was a boy in Germany during World War II, and was struck by the generosity and kindness of American GIs who flooded his country after Hitler’s defeat. Later, he came to the conclusion that “the American military saved Germany.” Elites in his country “forget so quickly what the A ­ mericans have done for us,” he says.

Wild himself did not forget.

Thanks to the food-processing firm he built up in Heidelberg, Wild is now a billionaire, and a philanthropist. In January, this German gave $16.5 million to the U.S. Marine Corps S ­ cholarship Foundation. Over the next ten years, his gift will provide tuition and living assistance to more than 3,000 children of Marines.

Historical Imagination David Bruce Smith was listening to a radio story about a group hoping to build a Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia. (His ears perked up because the group was a tenant of ­the company his late father Robert Smith built into one of the major real-estate developers in D.C.) A national survey conducted by the museum backers found that 83 percent of Americans failed a basic test of knowledge on the Revolution and America’s founding documents.

S mith was surprised that an American ­R evolution museum didn’t already exist. (The campaign then launching was eventually successful,

German billionaire Hans-Peter Wild gave $16.5 million to thank the American military.

and the museum will open in 2017.) And he was irked that so many citizens were i­gnorant of their national story.

Smith had been drawn to history since childhood, prompted in part by his father’s keen interest in preserving and restoring properties like ­Washington’s Mount Vernon, Madison’s M ­ ontpelier, the Benjamin Franklin House in London, and A ­ braham Lincoln’s summer cottage. “My father always referred to himself as a grateful American,” explains Smith. So in 2013 “I started the Grateful American ­Foundation with the purpose of restoring enthusiasm for ­American history among kids and adults.”

He began with a series of podcasts featuring historical experts, curators, and educators. Former chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts Bruce Cole encouraged Smith to add a book prize to his efforts. He now offers a cash reward of $13,000 (to represent the 13 colonies) to authors who write compelling books bringing America’s story (in fiction or non-fiction form) to middle-schoolers. “Of the 85 prizes given to children’s literature,” notes Smith, “it is the only one on that topic.”

The prize was first offered in 2015, and Smith was told that if he received 30 to 50 submissions to launch, it would be a success. He received 140.

The winner, Like a River, follows two teenage Union soldiers through the Civil War in detailed historical fiction, including photography. The foundation is now seeking submissions for the 2016 prize. “I’ve committed to five years,” says Smith, “but really and truly I would say the prize will be available indefinitely, because it’s important.”

$6.5 billion

The amount of money distributed to charities in 2015 by the five biggest donor-advised funds. These were the three top commercial funds (Fidelity, Schwab, and Vanguard) plus the National Christian Foundation and the National Philanthropic Trust.

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briefly noted

Chess as life teacher.

PhilAphorism

“Community is a consequence.

It results when people come together to accomplish things that are important to them and succeed. People who are uninvolved cannot feel this connection.”

—RICHARD CORNUELLE (from The Almanac of American Philanthropy) 8

PHILANTHROPY

Chess in the Inner City Richard England loved playing chess with his children and grandchildren. So when the businessman and philanthropist wanted to create an after-school program for inner-city kids, the 2,000-year-old game seemed like the perfect teaching tool for confidence, self-­discipline, and strategic thinking. In 2008 he helped found Chess Challenge in D.C. It began as a five-week pilot program for 50 children at two public middle schools. Although he passed away five years later, England’s dream lives on. Today, CCinDC offers year-long ­programs to 1,750 students at ten locations, focused on schools with large concentrations of low-income students.

“Not every child wants to engage in physical activity,” says director Suzanne Hirsch, “and chess is often described as the Olympics of the mind.” Anyone can play chess—the board and pieces are inexpensive, and players don’t even have to speak the same language.

Research shows that chess improves a student’s ability to focus, visualize, think ahead, weigh options, and think abstractly. It can simultaneously challenge gifted children, while helping lower-performing students learn how to study and pursue excellence.

CCinDC has a curriculum that aims “to help students transfer fundamental chess principles to their lives, such as good decision-making, goal setting, and accountability for one’s actions.” Coaches meet with elementary and middle-school students during two 90-minute sessions each week, usually after school or on weekends. Using lesson plans that mix chess skills with journal writing and ­reading, open play and reflection, the coaches link

Zach Weinersmith, smbc-comics.com

Lighting the Darkness What would you do if your nonprofit unexpectedly received a gift more than 15 times its annual budget? For Bryan Bashin of LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, this is no hypothetical question. Last year, he received word that a deceased Seattle businessman named D ­ onald Sirkin had bequeathed $125 million and a private residence in San ­Francisco to his organization. Sirkin had never donated to L ­ ightHouse before, and left no explanation for the gift.

LightHouse offers programs, classes, and clinics to help the visually impaired. Sirkin’s gift will go toward a new headquarters with a dormitory for clients receiving training in cane navigation, technology for the blind, and other coping skills.

Bashin also hopes to establish awards for blind people who do extraordinary things.

Bashin had many questions about the mysterious man behind the huge donation, so he traveled to Seattle. He discovered that the donor was born in New York City and had opened several ­businesses over his lifetime. Friends described him

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as charismatic and idiosyncratic, yet a recluse in his later years, estranged from his family.

It was inside Sirkin’s house that Bashin and a colleague found the hints he was looking for. The rundown building contained “all these gadgets: giant light boxes, magnifiers, enormous plasma TVs.” As a blind man who once tried to hide his own visual impairment, Bashin realized that Sirkin had lost his sight and kept it a secret from everyone he knew, retreating into his home.

Now LightHouse will do its best to make sure that Sirkin’s gift helps blind people face the r­ ealities of their situation, so they can gain ­p ractical skills that allow them to achieve their dreams nonetheless. —Jen Para

the game to life successes. Donors provide a home chess board for every participant, and the nonprofit hosts an annual citywide chess tournament.

Hirsch hopes to expand the program. She’s pursuing the idea of integrating chess classes into public-school curricula and training teachers to use the game in lesson plans. Success Academies, a chain of 34 charter schools in New York City whose students test in the top 1 percent in math and the top 3 percent in English among all New York state schools, despite coming from poverty households in 76 percent of all cases, hires dedicated chess instructors that teach the game starting in kindergarten, run tournaments, set up family chess nights, and otherwise use the game to educate. See our interview with Eva Moskowitz later in this issue, and stories about chess pedagogy at successacademies.org/tag/chess —Jen Para

Tell it to Peter Singer It is irresponsible for philanthropists to follow their passions or local priorities, argues

Zach Weinersmith, smbc-comics.com

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the “effective altruism”

Reversing the Tithe When LaSalle Street Church in Chicago sold some of its property for $1.6 million, leaders made an unusual decision to return 10 percent of the total to church members to distribute for good works. In all, 320 checks of $500 were handed out. Recipients brainstormed on whiteboards in the church basement and plotted a wide range of beneficiaries.

Jonas Ganz sent his money to Jordan to support a skate-park construction project. Randy and Erika Dills split their money between buying winter clothes for needy children and a local nonprofit that helps the unemployed gain work skills. Kristin Hu gave her $500 to an organization that helps young immigrants pay for college. Rosemary and Erik Baker handed their checks to friends in tough financial situations. Several members pooled their money to start a small credit union that provides loans to struggling entrepreneurs at low or no interest rates. Other donations went to a school in the Himalayas, a Uganda health clinic, and an irrigation project in Tanzania.

LaSalle already operated the first faith-based legal-aid clinic in the country, as well as a t­ utoring program for children in a distressed housing project. “Once you start living creatively and generously,” says church member Paul Hettinga, “it’s contagious. If you do a little of it, you’ll be looking to do more.” —Jen Para

movement promoted

by Peter Singer and others. The ethical way to conduct philanthropy is to banish personal choices and put all money into causes where experts calculate a dollar will save the most lives. Here’s Zach Weinersmith’s take on how Superman would fare in this utilitarian universe.

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nonprofit spotlight SQUASHBUSTERS

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Urban squash. It’s about sports, not gardening, and has become a successful way to help low-income children succeed in school, college, and work.

skilled instructors, doing homework, and ­attending academic-enrichment classes.

Failures on the academic or discipline side will result in less court time—which for many students becomes a pearl of great price. Two students explain to me how exciting squash is, because of its fast pace.

The three goals behind ­SquashBusters are character, health, and college. The program monitors how students are f­ aring in school, tracks and rewards good behavior, and tests physical fitness. So far, over 25 participants have gone on to play competitive squash at colleges like Bates, Bucknell, Hamilton, Harvard, Smith, Tufts, and Wesleyan. Fifty-eight alumni are currently enrolled as students, in competitive schools like Brown, Colby, Purdue, ­Trinity, and UPenn, where they are receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars of annual tuition aid. Other graduates are currently employed at the Cambridge Police ­D epartment, Massachusetts ­G eneral ­Hospital, banks, and hotels.

“It’s the biggest thing that’s ever happened to squash in the United States,” says Zaff. There are now 20 other ­similar urban squash and education programs around the U.S. An umbrella organization, the National Urban Squash + ­Education Association, helps new cities launch PHILANTHROPY

urban-squash ­programs and share ideas, and coordinates camps and tournaments around the country. “It’s helped a lot of kids get into great colleges and learn about what they can achieve in the world,” summarizes Zaff. And it’s “made a lot of people very proud of the sport.”

The program recently added a branch in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and is ­looking next at Providence, Rhode Island. It takes about $400,000 per year to run a new program for 75 students. The greater-Boston chapter currently has a budget of $1 million a year to serve 139 students and 58 alumni in college.

“Urban kids really love this,” states Zaff, “not because there’s some special zing to squash but because we are there for them all the time. It’s a very positive, supportive place that helps them set goals and become successful, make great friends, and see the world.”

The mother of one participant tells me that “they care for the parents, too. Last year I lost my twin to a hit-and-run accident. The whole crew came to support me.

What they say they stand for is what they do. Any child who walks in here and says he wants to improve his life, change, and be responsible—they are here to teach them the way.” —Ashley May

Marilyn Humphries

There’s enough nip in the Boston air to make the prospect of slipping into a hot gym enticing. A student several yards ahead is dressed in athletic gear, and as he enters he holds the door for me. I step into SquashBusters, the first charity in the world to offer squash training to poor urban kids.

An endless tattoo echoes through the three-story complex: “ta, ta, tee ta,” punctuated by the soprano squeak of athletic shoes bearing twisting lunges. Teenagers are signing in at the security desk. One group is from Timilty Middle School, only 31 percent of whose pupils tested proficient in the state-standard English test last year. Half of the first floor is taken up by staff cubicles with prominently open doors. The program is powered by more than 100 volunteers and 27 full- or part-time employees.

This whole scene sprang from a Harvard paper. The vision was to democratize a door-opening sport while providing character development and academic help to kids. Northeastern University offered SquashBusters a free 50-year lease if they could raise the private funds to build courts ($6 million), and with help from Paul Tudor Jones and other donors they did. The program receives no government funding.

W ith eight cour ts (and four ­c lassrooms) this is actually the largest squash facility in the city. Recruiters visit area schools, bringing racquets with them, to interest kids in the sport. The pitch is simple: if you’d like to learn, we have an opportunity for you, but you’ll have to be committed. For six weeks, kids must show up on time for practices as long as three hours. “Putting words into action and not making excuses is a very real concept here,” says founder Greg Zaff.

Once accepted, students rotate among learning squash from highly

interview

Education-reform leader Eva Moskowitz goes to work in one of the high-performing schools she created. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio campaigned on the mantra that Moskowitz should stop being “tolerated, enabled, supported.” Turns out, even the mayor can’t stop her.

gettyimages/Benjamin Lowy/Contributor

EVA MOSKOWITZ In less than a decade, Eva Moskowitz has built up the largest charter-school network in New York City—34 campuses ­serving 11,000 children, with many more on the way. And her S ­ uccess Academies are ­producing astounding results.

Take a look at the New York state schools with the highest proficiency scores, and you’ll find that five of the top ten in math are from Success Academy, as are three of the top twenty

in English. This despite the fact that nearly all Success students come from struggling families and neighborhoods, and start their education with several strikes against them.

Raised by two professors and educated in ­Harlem public schools before she completed a Ph.D., Moskowitz ran for New York City Council determined to improve ineffective public schools. She earned a reputation as a hard-nosed, fearless advocate for accountability and higher standards. Eventually, fed up with the status quo and determined to demonstrate a better alternative, she used philanthropic money to found her first charter school in Harlem in 2006.

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Her striking successes with poor and minority children embarrassed the educational establishment. She became “Teachers Union Enemy No. 1” according to the Wall Street Journal. Bill de Blasio campaigned for mayor on the mantra that Moskowitz must “stop being tolerated, enabled, supported.”

Moskowitz has so far defended her work against these backlashes, and continues to expand the accomplishments of Success ­Academy. How does she do it? Philanthropy spent time with Moskowitz to learn the secrets of her ­donor-­supported triumphs.

Philanthropy: Tell us about the beginnings of Success Academies.

Moskowitz: Well, I ran for city council in New York City to put a spotlight on education. At the time I had a lot more 11

interview faith in government than I do now. I am from an FDR liberal-Democratic family.

With proximity to government, I have become more libertarian.

I was elected, and ended up chairing the education committee. I thought we could fix the system, and spent a lot of time and energy trying to do just that from within the public-school establishment. I did about 125 hearings as a city-council member before I took on the third rail. Everybody advised me that if I looked at the union contracts with the teachers, the principals, the staff, it would be the end of my political career.

I felt—how else can we understand what needs to be changed? Those contracts are public documents that elected officials sign. It seemed completely fair game to look under the hood at what they actually say. I realized there was a possibility it would end my political career, but I wasn’t the kind of person who always wanted to be an elected official. I got involved in politics specifically to fix this problem, and didn’t aspire to make a career of it.

So I held hearings on the contracts.

It was the first time in my life that I kind of felt like I was living a Godfather movie. I had witnesses who insisted on disguising their voices. I had a witness who came with a paper bag on her head.

There is a fair amount of thuggery in that world.

No fair-minded person who looks through the 800 pages of the teacher-union contract in New York City would say this was designed with the interests of ­teaching and learning in mind. This is a document designed backward from the political power of the union.

this personally. You got involved in creating schools designed around children’s real needs.

Moskowitz: I didn’t start by trying to create schools for poor kids. I wanted to provide a great education to children who, because of a lack of broad parental choice, would otherwise not have access to it.

When I began in 2006 at our first school in Harlem with 165 children, I was interested in building schools as good as any in the world. I wanted kids to be excellent readers, writers, and mathematicians, of course, but I also wanted them to do ­discovery-oriented science five days a week.

I wanted them to have high moral character and be self-­reflective about their emotions.

All of our children take chess, which we treat as an academic subject. What I love about chess is it takes language off the table. It’s pure strategic thinking.

We also love debate. Many kids like to argue, and love competitions. If you channel that into an academic exercise kids learn incredibly useful skills of preparation, of public speaking, of ­thinking on their feet, of arguing and counterarguing. It’s an intellectual sport, if you will. We have hundreds of kids participating in debate competitions, not only locally but nationally.

Lest you think we don’t do any sort of sports and visual arts and dancing—we do those things as well. But we emphasize academics. Our math teams are quite good. Just like a sports team, they get paraphernalia, and have fun. When you have 30 percent of your kids on the math team—and for us, that is several thousand children because we now have 11,000 students—you can create a whole math culture.

of the charter sector, you know, they were not parents themselves. I was the mother of three children when I opened my first school. I just kept asking myself, what would I want this environment to look like? So, just being pragmatic. Educators can be very abstract about things.

I’m a big believer in recess, for instance. I don’t really see how squirmy five-year-olds can go without multiple recesses a day. They need to run around.

In all my heart and soul, I believe in recess, and the younger the children are the more frequent it needs to be. We do recess through eighth grade.

Teachers often like to take recess away from children when they misbehave, when they’re not getting their math. We don’t believe at Success Academies that losing recess should be a punishment. You wouldn’t take math away from a kid if they misbehaved.

Boredom is actually a tremendous pain point in education. Many children are bored out of their minds in school.

Part of the reason is because there isn’t a premium on engagement, and another big part is because the curriculum is ­lacking in rigor. If you compare mathematics teaching in America with the rest of the world you find that what other advanced countries are doing in second grade we’re doing in fifth grade.

Our children are not dumber. It’s a product of intellectual underestimation of our young. If we want to engage American students, we’re going to have to stop underestimating their intellect.

We’re going to have to start testing the ceiling and really seeing what kids are capable of.

Philanthropy: What do you think influThat starts with basic skills. You’re Philanthropy: You reached a tipping enced ­­these choices? not going to be able to write well without point, left political office behind, and Moskowitz: I think being a mother really a foundation in grammar. We believe in decided you had to do something about influenced me. A lot of the early founders diagramming sentences. We believe in the red pen, which was basically outlawed in the 1970s in New York City. We find it very helpful for students to know where they went wrong. These basic skills are not a goal in and of themselves, they are a means towards an end. In order to think precisely and imaginatively, you need them.

No fair-minded person who looks through the 800 pages of the teacher-union contract in New York City would say this was designed with the interests of learning in mind.

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PHILANTHROPY

While school is supposed to be for children, in big government-run school systems, schooling is often shaped for the convenience of adults. If you want good student outcomes, adults have to work very hard to develop both content and pedagogy skills. Unfortunately, teacher training and principal training around the country is not being done at a high level. Content training of teachers is a missing link in our K-12 education system, so at Success Academies we provide 13 weeks every single year of teacher and principal training.

Philanthropy: But your early years were very hard.

Moskowitz: There were a lot of things that didn’t go well. We had every kind of rodent and bug you could possibly imagine. We had the water main break. The uniform company I ended up taking over because it was terrible.

Teachers quit. My principal quit, so I took over as principal. Every imaginable thing that could go wrong, went wrong.

I think what we had going for us is that I had created a culture of continuous improvement. I would meet with my faculty literally every single day after school.

We’d make long lists of things that didn’t go well. And then we’d make a plan. Which things can we fix tomorrow, and which are going to take us longer? And we just kept making the thing better and better.

Philanthropy: In the latest New York state assessments, 93 percent of your students tested as proficient on the math exam—a remarkable 58 points higher than the city average. And your network ranked in the top three percent of all schools statewide in English, despite enrolling mostly ­low-income minority children.

Moskowitz: It’s important to understand that on the math exam, for instance, 68 percent of those 93 percent got the very highest score of four. On our science exam, we had 99 percent of kids in fourth grade getting the highest score of four. You can’t get those results by test prep. It just doesn’t happen. The only way you can get those results is to teach children well and treasure the quality of student learning.

So, we do a variety of things. One of the things we do that’s fairly unique is our kids read a poem every single day, starting in kindergarten. That gets kids pretty comfortable with dissecting on the fly the meaning and language of any text.

One of the things we’ve done wrong in American education is to think hard is bad.

Without intellectual struggle, kids don’t learn. Now, you don’t obviously want to give kids calculus in kindergarten because that would be too hard, but hard is important. You’ve got to find a problem that is a stretch for the kids where they really have to puzzle over it.

When we teach chess, one of the things we teach the kids is to use all their time on the clock. Poorer players tend to go fast and fail to use all their time to think through options for moves they can make and their opponent could make. You can’t impulsively grab your piece and move it or you will make a mistake. We have to give kids more time to think and puzzle.

Philanthropy: Your formula seems to work.

Moskowitz: We now serve 11,000 students at 34 schools. We’re working to get to a hundred schools. But we recently ran into a small obstacle called the mayor of New York City.

It’s a little strange to have opposition to great schooling in the midst of a massive educational crisis. In New York City, we spend nearly $30 billion every year miseducating 80 to 90 percent of the students. It’s a lot of money for unbelievably poor outcomes.

When we fail to teach a child to read by third grade it becomes very, very difficult and very, very expensive to make that up.

Getting things right from the get-go is hard, but not nuclear physics. In New York City we have a big government-run monopoly that is not delivering.

The Berlin Wall is not going to come down easy. It’s going to require a lot of sledgehammers. So we recently organized 18,500 parents to demand their right to educational excellence. The governor listened, and the mayor got a hard rebuff.

Philanthropy: When you tell donors that in addition to investing in specific school improvements they also need to invest in politics and policy reform so SPRING 2016

that better rules shape public education, what kind of reactions do you get?

Moskowitz: Politics and policy are a little intimidating for some; it feels like gamesmanship and a little bit foreign.

Sometimes it even feels icky, right?

But I think there’s an increasingly positive reaction from a return-on-investment perspective. You have to look at the cost of creating an alternative-school program versus fixing the regular school that is not providing the education kids need. There’s increasing sophistication among donors in recognizing that changing public policy is high-impact work.

Philanthropy: How do you track progress in public policy, given its non-linear nature?

Moskowitz: When opportunities fall from the sky you have to take advantage of them. When there was an opportunity in 1998, a small group of donors in New York got our state’s charter-school law passed. It was a ridiculously small group of donors and small amount of money, yet they created choice on the public-school side for the first time. Now 11,000 students at Success Academies and 100,000 across the city of New York are benefiting. The fits-and-starts nature of policy reform can be discouraging, but there are many opportunities that suddenly arise where you could actually change important rules. The important thing is knowing what you want to change, and being ready to spring when the chance comes.

Philanthropy: How do your organize parents to advocate in the state capital?

Moskowitz: Many of our parents are very sophisticated consumers because they have an older child in the district school and a younger child in a charter. So they see the differences right within their household. I always say parents don’t need to be prepared for these meetings with elected officials, because it’s telling their life story. They know why they believe what they believe.

It takes money to rent buses and hire lawyers and buy ads, though, and those funds can’t come from the educational side. So the engagement of parents in policy advocacy has to run through the donor community.

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There is a lot of public-information work to do, partly because teacher unions promote a lot of myths—that charters are selective, that they don’t have a random lottery. A lot of our parents of special-ed children go up to Albany because there are all these myths around charters not serving that constituency.

Philanthropy: How much traction do these various negative myths now have among the public at large?

Moskowitz: Well, we do have to admit that plenty of charters are not excellent. It’s not automatic. I always say the ­charter-school structure gives you the freedom to get things right, but doesn’t guarantee you necessarily will. But even when charters are less high-performing than, say, Success Academies, they’re often better than the district alternative. In New York, average charters tend to be significantly better than the district alternative.

The media also often distorts things.

They mix up children’s scholarships and charter reimbursements, private schools and ­public-charter schools, tax credits versus vouchers, and so forth. If you randomly walked up to a person on the streets of New York and asked, “What’s a public-charter school?” many couldn’t give you a simple answer. It’s hard to be educated on this topic.

What parents do know is they want choices and want to be in control of where they send their child to be educated. And that’s not the case for most parents in America; they have only one option.

Philanthropy: W hy are donors so important to what you’re doing?

Moskowitz: Donors are catalyzers of change. They’re not constrained by existing boundaries, boundaries that often don’t serve children well. They have the freedom to ask, “Is there a better way?

A different way? A faster way?” Philanthropy is inherently pioneering, and that’s why it’s so important.

could use in private or religious or online schools. Why? Moskowitz: This year we had about 22,000 parents apply for open slots at Success ­Academy. It’s heartbreaking, because we could serve only 2,300 of them. The rest we had to turn away, and we knew where those children were going—to public schools where children do not learn to read, do not do math at a high level, do not get to debate on foreign policy, do not get to play chess.

Fully 800,000 kids in the state of New York are trapped in schools that aren’t educating them. There are children not even learning to read and do math. We have to ask, “what is the fastest way to give parents the power to make educational choices that will be better for their kids?” So I was very disappointed

In 2015, 22,000 parents applied to Success Academy. The school had only 2,300 open slots. that the tax credit for school fees didn’t pass in New York state this year, though it came close. That is a tool that should be in the toolkit of parents.

Philanthropy: How much shared purpose or collaboration is there among schools in New York City that are linked only by the fact that they’re alternatives to the conventional public institutions?

Moskowitz: All of us are aware of the educational suffering that’s going on, and unified in the view that there is a crisis in schooling today that can’t be swept under the rug.

Those of us who are providing alternatives have obviously become convinced that there is virtue in a new way of doing things. Who students are as people also matters to many of us. Obviously they need to be good readers, writers, and mathematicians, but they also need to be people of high moral character.

Moskowitz: Oh, I was very young. I went to pretty bad district schools in Harlem, and my parents taught my brother and me how to read when we got home, because the school did not. Many of the kids I went to school with were smart and interesting but didn’t have parents who were able to do that for them. So I saw at a young age that there were two paths. And I remember it upsetting me during elementary school. I felt it was wrong.

I don’t know what the term “educational suffering” sounds like to someone who’s not in schools every day, but kids are like a ball of human potential, and then they run headlong into a school system that doesn’t treat them very well.

It’s hard to walk through a dysfunctional school and not cry, because these ­five-year-olds in a different environment would be given a profoundly different experience, one that could yield success instead of suffering.

People are treating the kids as if there’s no hope. How, for a five-year-old, could there be no hope? There’s all the hope in the world. Yet you look into the kids’ eyes and you see that the system is messaging to them that they’re not one of the chosen.

It’s not intentional. The system is just broken, really broken. But it’s unconscionable to be spending precious resources on a system that’s failing kids, so we have to change it. The good news is that A ­ merica’s a country of change and new ideas. We can work our way out of this. And I think the philanthropic community’s going to be a key to that, because they encourage innovation, because they’re not tied to the ­existing system.

Philanthropy: You’re known as a hardcharging leader. What keeps you going?

Moskowitz: Well, coffee. But as I’ve said, I’ve got three children of my own.

That’s motivation. And our principals and teachers are an incredible group who are so dedicated to kids, and so caring and creative and willing to do whatever it takes. That revs me up.

And I would say New York keeps me going. There’s just a willingness to Philanthropy: Though your charter change here because it’s a city on the schools are publicly funded, you support Philanthropy: When did you start caring go. There are big obstacles, but also vouchers and tax credits that parents about what you call “educational suffering?” groups of people who are not willing to 14

PHILANTHROPY

Cleveland Cavaliers

interview

put up with bad results. They step up to the plate, and that’s very inspiring.

Our donor community could do anything with their funds, but they’re choosing to focus on what I would argue is the ­civil-rights issue of our era.

GORDON GUND The Gunds have been called “the renaissance family” by Forbes, and not without reason.

Since the 1920s they have been masters of numerous businesses—including cereal,

beer, banking, glass, real estate, and sports teams—and important patrons to scores of philanthropic causes like Kenyon College and the Cleveland Institute of Art. So as Gordon Gund came of age he intended to be an energetic donor as well as an active contributor to his Cleveland family’s billion-dollar businesses. What he didn’t know was that he would go blind as a young man.

Cleveland Cavaliers

Philanthropy: How do you combine rapid growth with sustained high quality?

Moskowitz: We centralize the curriculum and set that at the home office. Not that we don’t get teacher and leader input.

We have lots of committees revising, and teachers all the time come and say we need more of this and less of that. But if you make the curriculum and the assessments standard at a high level, you’re part of the way there in terms of replicability.

Getting people to stick to the curriculum, and to be committed to the pacing, is really important in teaching. It takes enormous training to be faithful to the model. And we have a lot of time built into our schedule for teacher planning and collaboration. Our teachers get about three hours of planning and collaboration time per day. In exchange, we expect them to be exceptionally well-prepared.

And we’ve found that in order to educate kids we have to be in the business of educating adults. The schools of education in this country are not getting the job done. I had to hire 446 teachers in one ­three-month period; the next year, I had to find 906 teachers. In order to do that, we essentially had to become a school of education. So we are building an ed institute, with lots of philanthropic support.

Philanthropy: What are your thoughts on the New Orleans recovery school district going to 100 percent charter schools?

Moskowitz: I’m not a student of New ­Orleans, but I know a lot of educators who are there, and compared to the old system it is certainly way more successful. The level of educational suffering in New Orleans was very intense. Does that mean that as a city they are where they need to be? I doubt it.

The whole country needs a lot more great operators. We all, everywhere, need to increase standards of what it means to educate a kid excellently. P

Gordon Gund went blind in 1970, but it hasn’t stopped him from leading an adventurous, productive life. Above he’s pictured with LeBron James of the Cleveland Cavaliers, the NBA basketball team the Gund family owned from 1983 to 2005.

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interview In 1971 he created the Foundation Fighting Blindness to help others deal with vision loss, donating more than $150 million himself and raising over $450 million more. In 2014, he and his wife, Llura, promised to match, without limit, gifts made to the charity during a one-year period.

Philanthropy spoke with Gund about what it’s like to grow up in wealth, his own blindness, his philanthropy for fellow sufferers, medical research, and more.

Philanthropy: When did you go blind?

What was that experience like?

Gund: Retinal degenerative diseases are inherited. That means my parents each had a recessive gene, and it turns out none of my five siblings had it, I’m the only one who does. There weren’t any other family members who had any sign of it. So I didn’t know till my early 20s.

I had been an officer in the Navy out on a destroyer in the western Pacific with a home port in Japan. I loved it, but I probably was losing my peripheral vision all that time. I got back and went to New York to start a business career and started having difficulty seeing at night. I was diagnosed as having retinitis pigmentosa, which is a retinal degenerative disease. Altogether, retinal degenerative diseases affect about 10 million Americans. I was told I’d probably have useful vision until my 60s. When you’re 25 that seems like forever.

But I started having further difficulty seeing at night, and then my day vision went very rapidly, atypically. It was gone by 1970. Back then there was no research going on to speak of, and very little understanding about these diseases or what causes them. So my wife, Lulie, and I decided we would commit

o­ urselves to finding treatments and cures so that in the future people with this diagnosis wouldn’t have to face the same frustrating experience.

Philanthropy: How did you begin to fight this disease?

Gund: I’d seen a Dr. Eliot Berson at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary.

When I met with him, he said, “I don’t have anything that will help you. I wish I could put together a laboratory to start trying to find answers.” In the fall of 1971, Lulie and I joined with others to start a charitable foundation now known as the Foundation Fighting Blindness.

Later I followed up with Dr. Berson and our new foundation began to work hard to raise funds to construct and staff a multidiscipline lab that he was putting together at Harvard. We had to populate the field with researchers; there were very few there. Our initial focus was getting a lot more researchers into the field.

We had to do that before we could find treatments and cures.

Our scientific advisory board was our greatest asset, then and now. It has guided our whole research effort all the way through. These things are always more complex and difficult than you think, but we built up the knowledge base and developed a much better understanding of the retina and retinal diseases. The work we’ve done is largely responsible for having identified over Philanthropy: What has it been like to 260 different gene mutations that cause invest in something that’s so long-term?

How do you keep hope alive? these diseases.

Gund: In the early years it was difficult. Fortunately many members of our scientific-advisory board are skilled at communicating what’s going on in lay terms. That was very helpful.

There was tremendous progress being made, building the blocks of understanding that needed to be there

Research funded by the foundation has identified over 260 gene mutations that cause retinal diseases. More than 20 human trials are now testing treatments.

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Philanthropy: What’s the state of progress now?

Gund: We’ve still got a long ways to go, but we are really delivering on our mission. We have a gene-therapy treatment that we’ve funded since the gene was first identified as a culprit in 1993. The University of Pennsylvania C ­ hildren’s Hospital is one of our test sites, and they’ve finished their third phase of trials. More than 100 children and young adults have had significant amounts of sight restored through the therapy.

If you look at age-related macular degeneration, our research has led to two treatments that are improving sight for many people. We also funded the research that underlies a bionic eye called the Argus II that helps some people who have lost all of their vision to see anew.

We have over 20 human trials going on now. And the exciting thing is that it’s just the beginning. My wife says the analogy is making popcorn: You start out with just the kernels, then after a delay all of a sudden it starts popping, faster and faster—that’s what’s happening now.

My wife and I have issued a challenge to further accelerate things. We’ve said that we will match any major gift to the Foundation Fighting Blindness, dollar for dollar. There’s no limit to what any one person can give; we will match.

It’s open until June 30, 2016, and we’ve already raised $85 million. These clinical trials cost a lot of money, much more than lab-based research, so we need more funds to take advantage of all the progress that’s been made.

PHILANTHROPY

first, and happily we got through that. In the past 15 to 20 years there has been so much dramatic progress it’s pretty easy to retain interest. But it wasn’t for quite a while. The first gene defect wasn’t discovered until 1989.

We’re now exploring the use of induced pluripotent stem cells—where you can take cells from a person’s skin or from their blood, and the scientist can reprogram those cells back into b ­ ecoming stem cells that are able to be coaxed into growing into almost any cell type in the body. So you can make retinal cells out of a sample of adult skin. That avoids both the ethical issues of harvesting embryonic stem cells and the possibility of the immune system ­reacting against stem cells taken from another person. There’s a lot of research going on right now to replace whole retinas.

Philanthropy: Have you been able to take advantage of any of these treatments?

Gund: Well, my gene is not known. Of the over 260 genes that I mentioned, the experts believe that represents somewhere between 70 and 75 percent of people with one of these diseases. But it happens that mine’s not one of those, so I couldn’t avail myself of a gene therapy even if my photoreceptor cells still had any life left in them. And I’m not sure after this many years that there’s a lot going on in my eyes. I still have a little light sensitivity, which is valuable to me because it allows me to know the difference between day and night. That’s why I don’t use the bionic retina.

I don’t see any forms and I don’t see any colors. But I really appreciate ­orient­ing myself to day and night, and to light in a window and that sort of thing.

I’ve had a phenomenal life despite it. I still hope someday I’ll be able to see. My wife says, “Let me know a year ahead of time so I can get ready.” To me she looks just like she did back in 1970.

“Blindness never stops being difficult.

You never totally adjust. But if we can prevent my problem from happening to others, that gives the experience value.”

Philanthropy: And you’re a sculptor?

Gund: It’s a way for me to be in touch with a different part of the world and a different part of myself. It’s absorbing for me, a great way to get away from everything else and really just be in the moment. I really want people to be able to touch the things I make, because touch is how I created them, so anyplace that has them I insist the curators let people have that experience.

Philanthropy: Cleveland has a long history of philanthropic leadership. What was it like growing up there?

Gund: Cleveland has had very philanthropic people going way back. In the early years of the Industrial Revolution, John Rockefeller getting his start there, the Hannas, the mining families, the steel families, all were very philanthropic and very interested in community. It becomes something everybody understands the importance of and wants to participate in. That’s what happened early on with Cleveland. Both of my parents were very charitably inclined.

They devoted not only their financial resources, but their time and energy. My mother was very involved as a volunteer at an orphanage right near our house, for instance. So they got all of my siblings and me to be much more aware. They were great role models.

Philanthropy: You’ve owned several sports teams. We’re asking in this issue of our magazine whether there can be philanthropic effects from supporting athletic pursuits. Do you think sports can advance public purposes?

Gund: Oh, I think it’s huge. When the Philanthropy: I heard you’re a skier?

Cleveland Cavaliers were struggling we Gund: I skied a year ago. I used to ski found a way to acquire them because it a lot. would’ve been a huge downer for the city SPRING 2016

to lose its NBA team to bankruptcy or a move. For similar reasons we helped make it possible to bring the Cleveland Indians into a new baseball stadium. We owned our various teams to be businesses, and they were, but they also made a big difference in the spirit and pride and image of the areas where they were located.

Philanthropy: You mentioned that you’ve lived a phenomenal life in spite of your blindness.

Gund: Blindness never stops being difficult. You never totally adjust. Every morning I wake up wishing I could see the sun. But one of the things that really inspires me and my wife is trying to take something difficult and turn it into something positive. If we can help prevent my problem from happening to other people, that gives the experience value. That’s the way to look at any disability. Try and turn it into something that’s positive for yourself, which can be done, and positive for other people.

Since I lost my sight it’s amazing what has happened in terms of attitudes of the public toward disabilities.

There’s still an awful lot of unemployment among people who have disabilities, but it’s not because of old stereotypes or limits. The word “disabled” implies someone is unable to do things. That’s not the case at all. A better approach has to start with the people who have the disability realizing they have an obstacle in one area, but a lot going for them in other areas—which we need to figure out how to use, so we can be accomplished like other citizens. It’s not easy to do that, but you really have to focus on what you can do, not what you can’t. P 17

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istcokphoto.com/Kalawin; istcokphoto.com/OSTILL; istcokphoto.com/Cimmerian

istcokphoto.com/Kalawin; istcokphoto.com/OSTILL; istcokphoto.com/Cimmerian

PASSION PITFALLS of Giving to College Sports

By John Feinstein

In the spring of 1985, University of North Carolina basketball coach Dean Smith was driving by the construction site for the school’s new basketball arena, which would be named for him when it opened the following January. “It will have more than 21,000 seats,” Smith said. “I have a feeling I’m going to miss Carmichael.”

John Feinstein is a sports commentator for ESPN, NPR, the Washington Post, CBS Radio, and other outlets. His tale A Season on the Brink is the bestselling sports book of all time.

He has also written other acclaimed works on college basketball (The Legends Club is his latest), and on college football (A Civil War).

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stadium —and a fighting chance to ride herd, or at least consistently compete, in the Big 12 football conference.

Carmichael Auditorium was the relatively cozy 10,000-seat arena where North Carolina had played home games for the previous 20 years. Knowing how strongly Smith felt about social causes and helping those in need, I (a proud graduate of archrival Duke University) played the devil’s advocate: “How do you feel about raising $38 million to build a basketball arena?”

“I wish we had raised the $38 million for a new pediatrics wing for our hospital,” he replied without hesitation. “Or for cancer research. Or both. But the fact is, if we tried to raise that kind of money for those things, we wouldn’t get it. That would be true at Duke too, or any other school. All I can do is hope that if we play basketball 20

well enough, it will lead indirectly to raising more money for things that are more important.”

Arguably, no great coach enjoyed mixing with donors, alumni, and the media less than Smith, who passed away last year. “Dean would have been happy if he could have been beamed from his home to the practice court and to games every day of his life,” famed Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski once said of his old rival. “But he understood that isn’t the way the game works.”

That’s because the games aren’t just games—they are part of the multibillion-dollar business that is college athletics. Smith accepted that raising $38 million for a basketball arena had intangible benefits for North Carolina.

PHILANTHROPY

“I would prefer to play our games in a smaller, more intimate arena,” he said back then. “But if we can double the number of people who have a chance to see our games, that means more people will feel they’re part of the university.

And if they feel pride because of that, it benefits the whole school.”

Excellence breeds excellence The geology school at Oklahoma State University was the beneficiary of a $1 million donation in 1982 from oil magnate T. Boone Pickens. It was his first contribution to that university, his alma mater. Pickens was a geology major, so that was a natural place for him to share his wealth, express his thanks, and pass on the tools of success to another generation.

But his most prominent stamp on campus is the football stadium, whose renovation and expansion he launched

istockphoto.com/FredFroese; istockphoto.com/ava09; boonepickens.com

Oilman T. Boone Pickens donated $165 million to give his Oklahoma State Cowboys a renovated

istockphoto.com/FredFroese; istockphoto.com/ava09; boonepickens.com

with a $165 million donation in 2005.

“I was tired of walking from my seat to my car staring at the ground all the way after football games,” Pickens, who graduated in 1951, says with a laugh. “I went quail hunting a lot with [athletic director] Mike Holder and he came out one time and showed me a spreadsheet for a plan he had. He said, ‘this is what it’s going to take to be competitive.’ I didn’t ask what it took to win because you can’t guarantee wins, but I wanted to be competitive. There was talk that if we didn’t improve our facility we might get kicked out of the Big 12. I looked at all the numbers and said, ‘what’s the bottom line—how much do you need?’

He told me $200 million. I said, ‘well, I’m not going to give you $200 million.’

Eventually, though, I did. Of course through the years, I’ve given about a billion dollars to the school and only about 25 percent of it has been for athletics.”

A signatory of the Giving Pledge, Pickens estimates he’s “given away about half of my net worth—to date. I’m very comfortable with that, especially since a lot more of my money has gone to cancer research than to sports.”

The renovated stadium now seats 60,000 fans—up from 46,000—and has state-of-the-art locker rooms, offices, and weight-room facilities.

Since the project was completed in 2009, Oklahoma State’s football record is 67-24, including a couple of nearly undefeated seasons.

And Pickens argues that the success has spread far beyond the green grass of the football stadium. “It’s a fact,” says Pickens. “Oklahoma State has become a better school academically by doing better athletically. We get more applications and our applicant pool is smarter and deeper. And more people

medical centers, and a record grant to the KIPP schools of Washington D.C. (more than $4 million in 2015). But sports philanthropy is where he started.

Tad Taube also includes sports programs in his giving. He believes they have good effects on individual character, a philanthropic priority since ancient times.

And sports philanthropy can help young people of all classes and ages.

A former owner of the Oakland Invaders of the upstart United States As a student at Yale in the 1950s, Football League during the 1980s, Taube Joel Smilow was the sports director of the has for decades given money to nonprofits radio station and a “big fan and supporter” that use sports to “convert kids from lives of all the campus teams. In the Ivies, he points out, there are no sports scholarships that are not productive to ones that are.”

The programs Touchdowns for Kids, Hoops and athletes don’t live in parallel for Kids, and Goals for Kids—through which universes apart from other students.

Sports complement the academic mission professional sports teams channel funds rather than overwhelm it. During college to children needing better opportunities in and in subsequent years in the workforce, education, home-life, and recreation—and where he eventually became CEO of the other organizations that collectively reach millions of children have been supported Playtex company, Smilow noticed that the for years by Taube. Their recipients include teamwork, leadership, and unsentimental focus on hard measures of success that Juma Ventures (which employs low-income athletics inculcated in players stood them teens as vendors in sports stadiums in in good stead during later stages of their order to teach business skills, speed college lives. Indeed, the lessons of sports stayed readiness, and provide income), Positive with Smilow himself longer than his Coaching Alliance (which teaches coaches, academic course of study. parents, and children how to compete in When he began to turn to philanthropy ways that are respectful of others), and after his business career, his first major Playworks (which builds safe playgrounds donation was $1 million in 1989 to endow in low-income neighborhoods). “Sports, the head football coach position at Yale. It generally speaking, build character. And was that university’s first endowment of an people who have been imbued with good athletic post. The fund he created is now character are the future leaders,” he says. worth $10 million and yielding enough to Taube, who made his wealth in real support other coaching roles as well. Other estate and women’s apparel after earning donors soon followed his lead, and Yale now both a bachelor’s and master’s degree has 32 endowed coaching positions. Three from Stanford, thinks that sports can have of these were also created by Smilow—for positive effects on all young people, not just the men’s and women’s basketball coaches, those who grow up needy. He was for years and the women’s lacrosse coach. chairman of the athletic board at Stanford, As a rule, Smilow doesn’t support was a major contributor to the university’s endowments—he likes to see his donations football stadium, and gave the principal put to use here and now. But these were gift to create a new tennis facility. College special efforts that blazed a path to new sports teach kids useful lessons about the places for an Ivy League school. Smilow competitive world they are about to enter, has also made donations to revamp and Taube argues. “They are going to have to expand the university’s field house to really hustle to get ahead, keep jobs, get accommodate added women’s teams, and promoted, and so forth. Athletics help to helped lead the fundraising to renovate instill that in kids.” —The editors the football stadium. His broader giving includes large donations to several leading SPRING 2016

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feel pride in the university and are willing to give money in other areas too.”

“I would say I got my money’s worth,” Pickens concludes. “I definitely got my money’s worth.”

Supporters, not owners “I’ve always believed that athletics is the social glue at many, if not most, colleges in this country,” says NCAA president Mark Emmert, who is also a former college president. “It’s also a distinctly American thing. Very rarely do colleges overseas field teams, especially the kind of teams we field here. The feeling of pride that Americans have in their schools because of sports teams doesn’t really exist in other places. I’ve always said that if you see someone walking around Paris in a ‘Sorbonne’ sweatshirt, you can be certain he’s an American.”

Emmert remembers taking the president of the Sorbonne to a Saturday night football game while he was the chancellor of Louisiana State University, a football power with an 100,000-seat football stadium.

“At one point, I said to him, ‘so what do you think of American college football?’” Emmert recalls. “He looked at me and said, ‘My dream is to someday hear thousands of people scream, ‘Let’s go Sorbonne!’”

That distinctively American dream takes gobs of money for most colleges to achieve—money in large part supplied by enthusiastic donors. Some critics worry this enthusiasm can cross over into undue influence. “You have to make it clear to donors that you appreciate their money,” but “there is very definitely a line,” Emmert says. “What you can’t have is donors not liking the outcome of a game or a season and saying, ‘Let’s go have a word with the coach.’”

“There are donors who confuse philanthropy with ownership,” he goes on. “If you give money to the business school, that doesn’t mean you get to pick the dean. Sports are different because of the passion, and because there’s always a scoreboard that tells you who won and who lost. People who have given money, especially those who have given a lot of money, believe they should be listened to. Some believe it more than others.”

In 1983, Duke’s basketball team ended its season with a 109-66 loss to Virginia in the ACC

“I definitely got my money’s worth,” says Boone Pickens. “Oklahoma State has become a better school academically by doing better athletically.”

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Tournament. The Blue Devils finished with a record of 11-17, making Mike Krzyzewski’s three-year record as coach 38-47. When athletic director Tom Butters returned to the team hotel, he was besieged by members of the “Iron Dukes,” the athletic department’s fundraising arm.

“I was told in no uncertain terms that I needed to fire my basketball coach,” Butters remembered years later. “By the time I got home, I had letters from many of the same people who had attacked me in the lobby telling me that if the basketball coach wasn’t fired their support would be withdrawn. I didn’t fire him. Seven years later, when the Boston Celtics wanted to hire him, I got letters—many from the exact same people—telling me they would donate whatever money was needed to ensure he stayed at Duke.”

Krzyzewski is now Division I men’s college basketball’s all-time winningest coach and has led Duke to five national championships, most recently last year. “If the Iron Dukes had been making the decision, I would have been fired after three years,” he says.

Uncle Phil’s locker The University of Oregon raised eyebrows not long ago with a seemingly donor-directed hire. No one has given more money to an athletic department than Phil Knight, the 78-year-old co-founder of Nike. Knight has donated to many other causes, including $500 million to the Oregon Health and Science University for cancer research. He has also put up more than half a billion dollars to Stanford, where he got his MBA. But he has spent more money on Oregon athletics than anyone has ever spent on athletics at any school.

Oregon’s $200-million basketball arena, opened five years ago, is the Matthew Knight Arena, named for Knight’s oldest son, who died in a diving accident 12 years ago. Oregon’s three-year-old state-of-the-art $68-million football training facility was paid for by Knight, who also contributed $100 million several years ago to the Oregon Athletics Legacy Fund. Even before those contributions, Knight had given close to $200 million to the Oregon athletic fund through the years.

Oregon football players call him “Uncle Phil.”

He has a locker in the football facility and can often be seen prowling the sidelines at games. As one non-Oregon coach noted, “he owns the damn sideline, why shouldn’t he be on it?”

Has Knight crossed Emmert’s line in terms of booster influence? In 2006 Knight’s good friend and

1983 and 1986 after its men’s basketball team reached the Final Four three times, winning the national championship in 1984. When Northwestern University won the Big Ten football championship in 1995, student interest spiked 21 percent. After George Mason University’s basketball team reached the Final Four in 2006, the student bookstore raked in $876,000 of sales in just ten days. Then the matriculation rate among The day after Thanksgiving in 1984, prospective students tripled. reigning college football champion Gonzaga University invoked the Miami was leading Boston College by Flutie Effect after its men’s basketball four points in the last six seconds of the team reached the Elite Eight in 1999. Its Orange Bowl. While BC had the ball, it Bulldogs returned to the NCAA tournament was on the 48-yard line. BC quarterback almost every year since, and the office of Doug Flutie dropped back, dashed to his admissions reports a 320 percent increase right, and flung a “Hail Mary” pass which receiver Gerard Phelan cradled in the end in applications between 1997 and 2014.

Annual donations jumped from $9.7 million zone, miraculously winning the game. in 1997 to $16 million in 2000.

That play was named one of the “top In 1994, Robert Murphy and Gregory 25 defining moments” in the hundred-year Trandell found that when a school history of the National Collegiate Athletic increases its winning percentage by .250, Association, and it made an impression there is a statistically significant increase on the millions of Americans who saw it in applications. In 2000, Thomas Rhoads on television. Flutie became a household name, won the Heisman Trophy a few weeks and Shelby Gerking reported that alumni contributions increase 7 percent per later, and led his team to two more bowl student when a football team wins a bowl games over the next two seasons. And game, or if a basketball team makes more over those same two years, applications to Boston College increased 30 percent, while than two NCAA tournament appearances.

In 2008, Rutgers University donations flooded in. professor Randall Smith determined The crisp after-effects of Flutie’s pass that “breakthrough seasons” in athletics triggered much discussion and theorizing sometimes produce small academic about the impact that sports victories can bumps, but not reliably or sustainably. have on a university. Colleges became That same year, Jaren and Devin Pope enamored with the idea that media compared application and enrollment exposure from athletic wins could produce a larger, better applicant pool, which would rates at 330 NCAA Division I schools between 1983 and 2002, and found that improve the school’s academic standing.

Additionally, proud alumni would contribute significant athletic victories increase applicants by 2-8 percent on average, to the university. depending on the sport and level of Since then, various schools have trumpeted a “Flutie Effect” when application surges followed athletic success. For example, Georgetown University saw a 45 percent leap in applicants between SPRING 2016

success. Harvard’s Doug Chung fanned the flame with a 2013 study reporting that when a university’s football team goes from mediocre to excellent, applications typically increase by 18 percent. Students with ­­­lower-than-average SAT scores place more importance on a school’s athletic success, he found, but victories also encourage applicants with higher SAT scores enough to raise the overall quality of the pool.

None of this, however, is easy to engineer.

The NCAA commissioned two studies that determined there is no correlation between spending more on athletics and winning more. Nor does increasing coaches’ salaries demonstrably affect on-field success or yield increased revenue.

According to Boston College administrators, the school had been gearing up for years to increase enrollment and become a nationally recognized establishment. While Doug Flutie and his winning team provided welcome exposure, the college was already increasing faculty, financial aid, and other features intended to boost student interest. In sum, BC invested in academics so it was ready for its big break. —Jen Para 23

Underwritten by the Under Armourer Meanwhile, on the opposite coast, another fortune in athletic gear is being reinvested in athletic programming. Under Armour, the underdog of sports fellow Oregon booster Pat Kilkenny was named athletic apparel companies, has taken jock-world by storm in director. Kilkenny, who previously made millions in the last 15 years. Kevin Plank, the 43-year-old CEO, insurance, had no experience in athletics. He did manage to secure a $100 million donation almost right away to get took inspiration from perspiration. He drenched so many uniforms with sweat as a football player at the construction started on the long-stalled basketball arena project. The donation, of course, came from Knight.

University of Maryland, College Park that he decided to make clothing that would wick fluid away from the Thanks in large part to Knight’s involvement, skin for evaporation. Soon after graduating in 1996, the size of Oregon’s athletic program tripled within Plank started his company with $17,000 he made a decade—growing faster than any major football during college through a business he called “Cupid’s school ever. In seven of the last ten years, the Ducks’ Valentine.” He turned that into a net worth, 20 years football record is 10-3 or better, and most games sell later, of $3.3 billion. To say that Plank is now rich out. There’s a palpable buzz surrounding the campus, beyond his wildest dreams is inaccurate, though, and the school is experiencing a rise in applications. because he not only dreamed of being wealthy but (See the previous sidebar on the ­“Flutie Effect.”) sees Under Armour as still in its nascent stages.

Some professors complain that the football hype “I never believed it couldn’t happen,” Plank has distracted the school from its educational focus says on a stiflingly hot morning, sitting at a table in and commitment to academic integrity (for more on his office with a spectacular view of the Baltimore the perceived perils, see “Are College Sports Out of Control?” on page 57). In the world of college athletics, harbor. “I don’t know why more people don’t begin the day with more hope. Maybe that’s trite, but I’ve Oregon is known as “University o­ f Nike.”

No one has given more money to an athletic department than Phil Knight,

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University of Oregon

the co-founder of Nike, and wing-footed angel for the University of Oregon.

University of Oregon

Sports in America have long reflected and reinforced the character traits that created the country: teamwork, discipline, toughness, fair play, courage, hard work.

Journalist Robert Lipsyte noted that sports rose in popularity and became surrogate tests of moral timbre once the nation was settled coast to coast: “After the closing of the Western frontier in 1890, there was no place left for American men to transform themselves into the stalwarts who would keep democracy alive and lead the country to global greatness. No more real redskins and bears to test our mettle. So sport became the new frontier.”

Elite college undergraduates created football as a means of waging controlled war on foes, as training for the real world.

For poor immigrants, it became a way to assimilate into American culture.

Social reformers proclaimed organized physical fitness a path to broader personal improvement. Sports taught and instilled the virtues of endurance, self-control, overcoming, and sacrifice. In 1869, the YMCA began building gymnasiums with donated funds, to strengthen the minds, bodies, and spirits of young Americans. Boston YMCA staffer Robert Roberts coined the term “bodybuilding” and developed the first exercise classes and regimes that many of today’s gyms, trainers, and athletes follow. To instill confidence and rescue skills in young boys, the Y popularized swimming lessons. It fed teamwork, conditioning, and dexterity by building the first youth basketball leagues.

Philanthropist Cecil Rhodes was one of the first philanthropists to recognize the

linkage of mental acuity to physical vigor.

Having been brought up in South Africa he saw firsthand how rough and demanding conditions could make young people more vigorous and self-reliant. Throughout his life he advocated for sports as a useful training ground for adult competence and character.

He was concerned that leading academics were often too feeble and too secluded from the rough-and-tumble world, so his 1902 will establishing the Rhodes Scholarships to educate future world leaders at Oxford stipulated that recipients be more than bookworms. His ideal student would not only show strong scholastic achievement but also possess “the energy to use one’s talents to the full, as exemplified by fondness for and success in sports,” devotion to duty, dedication to public service, and “moral force of character.”

Andrew Carnegie also saw sports as an important part of a well-rounded education.

Although known for building great libraries and esteeming mental self-improvement, Carnegie gave funds to Princeton’s rowing team rather than its academic program. For years, Princeton presidents James McCosh and Woodrow Wilson had failed to interest Carnegie in donating to the school. Then while sitting for a portrait in 1902, Carnegie was convinced by the painter, a former varsity rower at Princeton, to create an artificial lake for the team to practice on, with a boathouse to boot. Lake Carnegie opened in 1906 as one of the world’s great sports-training facilities. At the grand opening, Wilson pitched Carnegie on a second donation, to Princeton’s graduate college, saying “we needed bread, and you gave us cake.” Carnegie refused.

The University of Chicago, John Rockefeller’s creation, once recruited students for its football program as many schools do today. Founding president William Harper, who used mass advertising and public-relations tactics to attract students and faculty, loved how sports united the campus. He hired Amos Stagg to lead the athletics department, hoping thereby to increase enrollment. Stagg revolutionized the then-nascent game of football, set many of its current standards, and created the first football conference and the bowl system. Stagg was also linked to many of football’s corruptions, however, being criticized for questionable SPRING 2016

recruiting methods, for allowing athletes to miss classes before games, for pressing professors to be lenient with player grades, and other controversies.

Chicago’s fifth president, Robert Hutchins, disliked athletics, believing they distracted the student body and professors.

He hated seeing players valorized. So he eliminated the physical-education major and forced Stagg to retire. Over the 1939 Christmas break, while the campus was empty, Hutchins announced that the University of Chicago would no longer have a football team. Students and alumni were furious: The school’s distinguished history included the first tenured coach, the first Heisman trophy winner, and founding the Big Ten Conference. Donations and enrollment decreased for several years.

Football returned to the university in 1969 as a varsity sport, and eventually at the Division III level with no athletic scholarships. The current stadium has 1,600 seats—old Stagg Field, which had 55,000 seats, is now a 4.5 million-volume library.

Another Midwestern university set a different course at that same time.

The Great Depression was a desperate time for Oklahoma, vortex of the Dust Bowl. The state lost almost a fifth of its population, and locals were humiliated by their depiction in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which was banned from the University of Oklahoma campus. Along came philanthropist Lloyd Noble, a sandy-haired oil driller who struck gold in the famed Seminole field. He set up a foundation that poured hundreds of millions of dollars into technical assistance for the region’s beleaguered farmers and ranchers, and provided funds to lure talented professors and medical researchers to his alma mater.

A longtime regent of OU, Noble also decided that a powerful football team could help revive the beaten-down spirits of Oklahomans. He built athletic facilities and hired skilled coaches, including the legendary Bud Wilkinson. By 1957 the football team had won 47 consecutive games and three national championships.

Sooners didn’t feel like doormats anymore.

—Jen Para 25

that university athletic officials consult with him before making major moves—whether jumping to the Big Ten or firing or hiring a coach. “I tell people the football coach is my football coach and so is the always thought ‘why can’t anyone be great and do basketball coach—and he’s theirs too. I will back great things?’ them in every way I possibly can. But I don’t want to Plank has also long dreamed of being a donor, be consulted on things like that.” returning the favor to institutions that help others Plank’s giving is informed by Andrew Carnegie’s succeed. He gave Maryland $25 million in 2014 to The Gospel of Wealth. Of the three ways Carnegie launch their campaign for a new $90 million football outlines for the very rich to use their money, “the practice facility. “If you want to play with the big worst way is to leave it all to your children,” Plank boys, you have to have the same chance to prepare, says. “If you do that you deny them the chance to to recruit, to compete,” he says. He could have given be self-made—to do what you did. The second way more, and Maryland would have gladly taken more, is to set up a foundation—let someone else decide but he told the school’s fundraisers they needed to how to handle your money. The third is to commit find additional donors. to giving away more than half the money you’ve “I don’t mind being the first one in, but I don’t made in your lifetime and be able to see it at work. I want to be the only one,” he said. “To me, Maryland believe in that way.” is the ultimate bandwagon school. It’s easy to say, ‘well, I’ll give when you start winning.’ I think Are college sports educational? there’s a better story to be extracted from the school A common criticism of college athletics is that in its than we are getting right now, but other people out modern incarnation it has become entirely divorced there need to get involved.” from a school’s academic mission. The biggest sports He smiles. “Look, my life doesn’t change if operate in a parallel universe, with different admissions Maryland wins or if Maryland loses. But I do like and sometimes academic standards—occasionally walking into a bar in Chicago and saying, ‘hey, put including fluff classes created specifically for players, a willful disregard (or even enabling) of cheating, and a distasteful culture of entitlement and nonexistent expectations that leaves some of the athletes hardly qualified as “students.” Coach salaries have grown to an order of magnitude greater than any other university employee (including the president). Hundreds of millions of dollars are lavished on sports amenities.

Are college sports teams still features of a school’s the Maryland-Indiana game on!’ I feel better when larger educational enterprise? Or are they competitive, Maryland wins. I want my school to be great. But I for-profit businesses? have no intention of trying to do it alone.”

That largely depends on the school. There Fundraising is at least as important a part remain many havens where the teamwork, discipline, of an athletic director’s job as hiring coaches or and leadership developed by athletics are genuinely understanding athletics. Even with all the television integrated into the school’s mission, the players are money that has flowed into football and basketball not segregated, and the sports programs are not in recent years, many athletic departments are unduly commercialized. still strapped for cash. Recently, Maryland left the One obvious example is the United States Military Atlantic Coast Conference to join the Big Ten Academy. In the late 1990s, Lieutenant General because the new league, anxious for an East Coast Daniel Christman, the superintendent, knew that the presence, offered what amounted to a financial school’s facilities were horribly outdated. Contrary to bailout. Having been forced by rising costs to cut popular belief, the athletic departments of the three seven non-revenue sports, Maryland almost had no military academies—Army, Navy, and Air Force—are not choice but to accept. government-funded. They are philanthropically funded “I understood why people were upset with entities that must raise their own support. leaving the ACC,” Plank says. “It was an emotional Enter AOL founding CEO Jim Kimsey, whose decision. But in the end it was the right thing to do. early involvement in the Internet made him, as You have to be practical.” He bridles when he reads he put it, “stupid rich.” I had the chance to speak

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Under Armour

Plank long dreamed of being a donor.

The worst thing you can do with a lot of money, he says, is “to leave it all to your children.”

Under Armour

with him before he passed away in March. “I felt an obligation to give something back to West Point,” the Class of 1962 alumnus said. He was semi-retired, living in Virginia right down the block from the Kennedy estate, with a grand view of the Potomac River. “Funny thing is, I didn’t like West Point when I was there. I was a bad cadet. But I enjoyed being in the Army.” He smiled. “Believe it or not, back then, a lot of us thought the idea of going to Vietnam was cool.” Kimsey served in Vietnam twice.

“I’d rather see my school win than lose,” he continued. “But I also feel an obligation to the cadets. Like I said, I had stupid money, so why not help out if I could? Dan showed me the athletic facilities, and they were completely outdated in every way. That was really the way he sold it to me: I’d be helping cadets who were athletes. It was a good sales pitch.”

The Kimsey Athletic Center cost $40 million—about half of it paid for by Kimsey’s initial donation—and opened in 2003. It now houses a 20,000-square-foot weight room, a massive football locker room, meeting rooms, Army’s sports Hall of

Kevin Plank channeled the lessons from sweaty summers of football practice into a house-afire apparel business, then shared his roaring success with his alma mater, the University of Maryland.

Fame, and comfortable football offices that overlook the stadium and the adjacent Lusk Reservoir.

Unfortunately, the new facility hasn’t done much to reverse Army’s football fortunes. Since the Kimsey Center went into use, the football team has had one winning season and hasn’t beaten arch-rival Navy a single time.

“Money can’t buy happiness or wins,” Kimsey told me with a wry smile. “I like winning, but I don’t live and die with the outcomes of games.”

Sport as an alternate path to success Plank, Pickens, and Kimsey all dealt with failures early in adulthood. Kimsey and Plank were both asked to leave D.C.-area private schools—Kimsey from Gonzaga, Plank from Georgetown Prep. In a twist, both ended up graduating, nearly 35 years apart, from St. John’s, another D.C. private school. Pickens went to Texas A&M on a basketball scholarship. But at the end of his freshman year, his coaches informed SPRING 2016

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PHILANTHROPY

Washington Life magazine; United States Military Academy at West Point; gettyimages/Charles Norfleet/Contributor

Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., recently announced a $50 million gift—one of the largest in the university’s history. It was given for athletics.

The donation by real-estate developer Peter Cooper and his wife, Susan, will upgrade Georgetown’s main outdoor sports complex, primarily used for football, lacrosse, and field hockey. But the more interesting chunk of the gift will be used to ramp up a leadership program aimed at helping athletes excel off the field as well as on it. “We believe that athletics and academics combine to provide an ideal crucible to create future leaders,” states Cooper.

Like a lot of philanthropy, the couple’s donation has a very personal root—all five of their children studied at Georgetown, and serious participation in sports was a big part of what they found satisfying and important during their college years. At Georgetown and many other universities, athletic participation goes way beyond the few games that get media publicity. There are 750 athletes—about 10 percent of the undergraduate student body—participating in 29 Division I sports at Georgetown. Three of the Coopers’ sons played football, and their daughter was a swimmer.

Currently, every Georgetown athlete is required to attend a series of leadership classes. “We believe that every student athlete needs to be trained as a leader,” says assistant athletic director Mike Lorenzen. “As persons of influence from day one on campus, we put the mantle of responsibility on their shoulders.” Juniors and seniors will have the option of participating in an advanced program, which combines mentoring, discussion, field experience, and individual coaching.

A highlight for Joshua Yaro, Georgetown soccer captain and this year’s No. 2 pro draft pick, was taking tests to identify his strengths and weaknesses as a leader, then discussing the results and implications with experts. He believes it will not only make him more successful as he starts his professional playing

career with the Philadelphia Union, but more effective in life generally.

With the Coopers’ funds, Lorenzen will be able to expand today’s leadership program and offer expanded courses, conduct research on the subject, and provide new services. At the same time, he says, it’s important not to “blur the line” between athletics and academics.

This leadership training needs to meet the same “high hurdle of intellectual rigor and seriousness to fit within Georgetown’s academic framework,” and not become just “an athletics thing.”

A former head gymnastics coach who holds a master’s in international relations from Yale and an education doctorate from University of the Pacific, Lorenzen will teach many classes himself. He realized there was an opportunity for “a much more rigorous approach to leadership development using the athletics laboratory in college.” And that Georgetown, with its broad Jesuit mission, is a good fit.

In addition to being required for athletes, n ­ on-athletes will be able to take the leadership courses for academic credit. Lorenzen guesses that 51 percent of seats will be reserved for non-athletes to prevent the field from becoming a ghetto for jocks. Today, he notes, there isn’t any place on campus where, say, a student-body president or chair of a campus group can learn in a structured way how to lead and influence.

Georgetown’s approach is a contrast to typical “life-skills programs” that some universities offer their athletes, Lorenzen says, and will take a more academic, multidisciplinary, and thorough approach.

Other universities that have created programs more like Georgetown’s include Stanford and the University of Texas at Austin.

Georgetown’s training will be broad. A “Captains’ Council” recently brought the leaders of all campus varsity teams to the Gettysburg battlefield for a twoday immersive retreat. All 700-plus campus athletes gathered together for perhaps the first time for training and discussion. This summer, ten athletes will head to Peru, for the first in what will be a series of trips, to learn about how Jesuits lead in Latin America in pursuit of healthy social reforms.

Too often, suggests Lorenzen, the institutional advice offered to college athletes is “don’t be a knucklehead.”

The new efforts funded by the Cooper family will aim for something more ambitious. The message in a nutshell will be, “We’re going to educate you to become an effective advocate for improving society.” —Andrea Scott

Washington Life magazine; United States Military Academy at West Point; gettyimages/Charles Norfleet/Contributor

him that they had recruited guards more talented than him and were pulling his scholarship. He transferred to Oklahoma State, and “to this day I have Aggie [Texas A&M] friends who tell me that if I’d stayed there I might have made something of myself.”

Plank readily admits he had not yet “gotten my act together” when he was at Georgetown Prep and only became a good student after leaving. “Still, every time I write a check to St. John’s, there’s a part of me that’s saying, ‘Hey Prep, could have been you,’” he laughs. He recently donated $16 million to St. John’s.

Kimsey said he was never a good student anywhere. He was just stubborn.

“One of the reasons I managed to graduate from West Point was because people kept saying to me, ‘you’ll never graduate.’ I didn’t make it by much, but I did make it.” He went on to a legendary career in the Special Forces.

After AOL made Jim Kimsey “stupid rich,” he donated a smart chunk of his windfall to support athletics at the United States Military Academy, an institution that, although funded by the government, must raise private money to pay for its intercollegiate sports programs.

All three men admit to still being bothered by these long-ago low expectations. Plank played Maryland football as a walk-on and eventually became captain of special teams.

Former Maryland basketball coach Gary Williams, who is now the school’s chief athletic fundraiser, believes not being on scholarship and not being especially talented athletically drives Plank to this day. “As much money as he’s made, as successful as he’s been, I think he’s still trying to prove himself,” Williams says.

Plank agrees. “I think having a chip on your shoulder that way is a good thing,” he says. “I know I have it and I hope I keep it. As well as we’ve done, I still plan on catching Nike in total sales SPRING 2016

and going past them someday. Five years ago their sales were 19 times our sales. Now they’re nine times our sales.

We’re going to pass them—and there’s nothing they can do to stop us.”

Plank thinks there is too much focus on donations to big-name schools with big-time athletic programs. “I rarely hear people talk about the fact that we are supplying gear now for every public school in Baltimore,” he says. Or his support for entrepreneurship in the funding he gave to the University of Maryland. And “frankly, I would rather see other people give money in order to help people in this city rather than to the University of Maryland.”

He smiles. “But I’d like to see them give to Maryland too.”

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Ginny Gilder arrived at Yale in 1975 with serious asthma and no experience in sports.

But something called her to the water, and by force of determination she made her way onto the women’s crew team and ultimately to the Olympics, where she won a silver medal.

Along the way, she made headlines with a nude demonstration in the university athletics office to protest a lack of adequate showering facilities for women in the early days of their new crew program. Today, thanks to a lead gift from Ginny’s father, investor and major philanthropist Richard Gilder, male and female rowers alike at Yale enjoy a state-of-the-art boat-shaped boathouse.

Ginny has become a philanthropist in her own right. She has helped local women get off welfare and into stable jobs, and offered funding for the exodus of 100 children from a failing public school. Her latest philanthropic exploit is a new community sports center near her home in Puget Sound, focused on promoting health and opportunity for area youngsters. And she has continued to make waves in women’s athletics, becoming one of the first female co-owners of a WNBA team, the Seattle Storm, in 2008.

Q: In your recent memoir Course Correction you describe personal challenges, and attribute much of your ability to overcome them to what you learned from rowing. Based on your PHILANTHROPY

experience, how do sports programs complement a college education?

A: The perspective that sports is part of a liberal-arts education has really been lost.

There’s so much you can learn through sports.

Because of men’s football and men’s basketball, universities have gotten a little tangled up about the role sports plays in education. There is no minor league for those sports, so the college system ends up serving as an informal farm team. Of course there’s a lot of money in that role.

That structural issue leads to the creation of double standards for those athletes compared to everyone else, and undermines the education some of them receive.

One of the reasons it is important to increase accessibility to sports for girls and women is because it’s such a great teaching tool. You learn about pushing yourself, challenging yourself, disappointment and failure, setting goals, getting along with people—so much that’s applicable to the rest of life.

I was not happy during high school, worked really hard academically, and by the time I got to Yale I was looking for other ways to learn. I often joke that I majored in rowing. I learned how to count on myself in a way that I don’t think I could have learned in any class. I got a lot out of my education academically, but I got more wisdom and emotional and psychological sustenance out of my time as a rower.

There is no single pattern for pursuing sports in college, and a lot of athletes even in the big-money sports get a very good education. Without their athletic scholarships many of them wouldn’t go to college at all, and their lives would be much different.

So for a broad swath of the college-going population, sports makes a lot of things possible. In some cases getting

Jim Garner

Teaching about life Back to Chapel Hill. It’s February 2015, and players and fans are gathered in the “Dean Dome” to celebrate the life of Dean Smith. The floor is packed with lanky men in chairs, and player after player recounts the lessons and contributions of his former coach, suggesting that what transpired on the hardwood in front of Smith’s steely gaze somehow involved more than basketball. A statement from Michael Jordan perhaps summarizes it best: “Other than my parents, no one had a bigger influence on my life than Coach Smith. He was more than a coach—he was my mentor, my teacher, my second father. Coach was always there for me whenever I needed him and I loved him for it. In teaching me the game of basketball, he taught me about life.”

Ideally that’s what donors to college athletics are supporting—a combination of character training and stress-testing and life lessons and community that is palpable even if it resists measurement. While the hospital down the street saves lives, a sporting team that competes at a high level without losing its soul sprinkles local citizens with hope and pride and indelible images of bravery, excellence, and loyalty.

Months after Dean Smith’s death, every letterman who played under him received an envelope from his estate lawyer. Enclosed was a check for $200 and a note. “Enjoy a dinner out compliments of Coach Dean Smith.”

Though he worked in a dome in front of 20,000 strangers, this coach and teacher never lost his personal touch. P

Jim Garner

them in the door, in many cases enhancing their experience while there.

An under-acknowledged fact about college is that there’s a lot of down time. Students have pretty open-ended schedules. One of the things that sports does is force you to be more organized, and to use your time, rather than squander it.

Q: The importance of determination is a major theme in Course Correction. An inner drive allowed you to overcome medical issues and other hurdles. Can something like drive be inculcated in people, through sports or other teaching?

A: I was talking with a mom the other day who has a ten-year-old madly in love with gymnastics and willing to do anything so she can be engaged in it. And then she has another child who is not focused at all. I do think we are probably endowed with different measures of particular attributes.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t develop more determination. There are things we all can learn that increase our resilience, our ability to overcome failure, and so forth. In some ways, the person who is weak in those areas needs the reinforcement of structured activities and training more than anyone.

One of the aims of expanding participation in sports (or arts training or other forms of non-academic education) is that there are kids out there who may have that drive in them, but don’t have access to the avenues to develop it. I see sports philanthropy as not intended for would-be stars, but to offer every person life lessons, to the point where they can take better care of themselves, better care of their families, and ultimately better care of their communities.

I’ve recently begun to get involved in increasing sports access to young people who are struggling with what we call diabesity— diabetes and obesity. Many of them don’t see themselves as athletes, may never have had exposure to sports, and need help to learn about the importance of physical fitness. It’s the intersection of sports and health.

Most people won’t do things just because it’s good for them. One value of sports is that they can make it fun to do healthy things. I’m interested in supporting the third of our population that’s really struggling with health, to get them more access to sports for both the enjoyment and the health improvements.

Our new community sports center is my starting point. Philanthropically I’m pretty new to this area, but am excited to get more involved. I hope the programming we’re just starting to take from dream to reality can be tested and refined and become a model elsewhere. I like to work at my own community level. It feels more accessible.

Q: What was your involvement in creating the Gilder Boathouse?

A: I was very involved in raising funds for it. A Yale classmate of my father’s asked me to approach the university about building a new boathouse. Margaret Matthews, my best friend from rowing at Yale, went with me to talk with thenpresident Rick Levin in the mid-1990s.

He told us we would never be able to raise the money to build what we wanted.

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Never a good idea to tell members of the Yale Women’s Crew what they can’t do!

We wrote the case for giving, reached out to Yale rowers to help raise funds, and of course donated ourselves. The Yale development office basically ended up chasing us. Nothing felt as good as receiving that letter from President Levin stating that the construction process could go forward. Winning never gets old.

The boathouse project remains one of my best memories of fundraising with my dad. He and I came up with three very particular criteria for our gift: The architect had to be chosen via a design competition among graduates of the Yale architecture school; the boathouse needed to host a new community rowing program to benefit more than just college students; and the funds raised had to include a maintenance endowment so the building would always be taken care of properly. The community rowing program, which is now thriving, turned out to be something the university was able to raise money for independently. We’ve had its participants get into Yale and go on as athletes and college students.

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In neighborhoods wracked by family breakdown, violence, and wasted potential, athletics can sometimes be the most immediate way to get the attention of kids. In this feature we touch on four efforts—two in Chicago, one based in Philadelphia, and one national program—that have shown how sport can be used as a tool by philanthropists in places where children need help in living by a better set of rules.

These items were reported by Ashley May, Marques Chavez, Andrea Scott, and Karl Zinsmeister

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istockphoto.com / Evgeny Sergeev

College teams entice the biggest donations, but sports philanthropy at a grassroots level—usually targeting young people to encourage strong values, physical health, and good citizenship— attracts far more givers and volunteers.

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istockphoto.com / Evgeny Sergeev

PLAY AS AN ANTIDOTE TO VIOLENCE

Rob Castaneda is the founder of a small charity in Chicago called Beyond the Ball that provides creative athletic programming to 1,500 children per year. It has had major positive effects on the neighborhoods where it operates, and recently won an award for Most Courageous Use of Sport. Below are Castaneda’s comments from an interview with Philanthropy magazine. y wife is a teacher in the Chicago public schools, and we knew we wanted to be involved in whatever community she was teaching in. Both of us grew up participating in sports, so the idea of coaching came naturally. We never planned on starting a nonprofit organization. Our hand was forced when we moved into the Chicago neighborhood of Little Village in 1998.

We bought the house during a hard winter and arrived during a blizzard, so it was quiet and everything was nice when we first got there. But after the snow melted we realized we had purchased a home on one of the worst blocks in the area for gang activity. It’s a very dense community with a large immigrant population, and one of the youngest populations in the city.

We have some of the biggest gangs in Chicago. Plus a 30-year-old gang rivalry.

When the number-two guy in one of our neighborhood gangs was put away a few years ago, the FBI reported he had 10,000 guys associated with him.

After a year of living there—coaching, volunteering, telling kids to get their education, don’t give in to intimidation in the streets, and so forth—a local gang found out we were also calling the police on them when they were engaged in gang activity outside of our house. In retaliation, they set our house on fire while we were sleeping inside. Our immediate reaction 34

was to leave, but the girls’ basketball team came over and shed some tears of encouragement, and we ended up staying.

Our house was set on fire again, and the gang came back and broke our windows.

Staying was the easy choice. The harder decision was what we were going to do to help our neighborhood be a safer place. Little Village has the least amount of green space per capita for all the city of Chicago, and we noticed that there weren’t a lot of kids playing outside. So at the school where Amy was teaching we got the gym opened on weekends for kids to play. Before long we were working with hundreds of kids, but we still weren’t an organization.

Then the principal retired, and the new principal didn’t want children around any more after school hours.

That’s when we formalized to become Beyond the Ball. We do sports-based youth and community development, now primarily outdoors.

We’re not only teaching social responsibility through sport, we’re reclaiming public space for public use.

We run after-school programs and year-round community leagues that happen in the evening. In the summer we have Project Play to get families out playing together in spaces once known for violence. We operate the largest community-based outdoor basketball tournament in the city of Chicago.

PHILANTHROPY

Gang members set Amy and Rob Castaneda’s house on fire twice, but the couple, determined to stay in their neighborhood, used sports activities as a way to knit residents together and reclaim public spaces.

Peter Thompson

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Peter Thompson

In soccer we’re the first programming partner in the U.S. for the English premier league’s Premier Skills Program along with the Chicago Fire. We do volleyball, flag football, softball. We introduce kids to schoolyard games like four square, various tag games, sidewalk-chalk drawing. Our offerings start in kindergarten and go up to age 18. Everything is free.

We’re a small organization, and don’t have a development person, but we have a broad spectrum of donors. When we first started doing this work 15 years ago, very few people wanted to give to anything that was related to sport or play, which they dismissed as not serious. But now people have bought into the idea of teaching personal and social responsibility through sport.

Everything we do is about community relationships. Expansion for us doesn’t involve getting into more neighborhoods or cities. This is very personal work best done close to home.

Working in the community through sports creates opportunities to get to know people well. You’re not meeting them confrontationally. It’s parents bringing their kids to play, or siblings watching a younger brother’s game, or they are coming to play themselves.

If a kid ends up joining a gang later in life, we knew them before and have some credibility. It creates a lot of very unique opportunities for relationship.

We also get neighbors, residents, parents, and youth involved as volunteers and providers, not just on the receiving end of programming. For instance our Project Play program has 30 to 50 youth volunteers every Tuesday who run that whole program.

For me personally, people playing outside is success. Chicago has the second largest park district in the country and spends more than any other park district in any city. Yet you go into the South and West sides of Chicago and you don’t see people playing outside, even in these beautiful large parks. One of the favorite parts of my job is seeing places that were once abandoned and vacant now thriving as play spaces. It has an impact on perceptions of safety, and neighborhood economic vitality. Plus all the research says that when kids play, when anybody plays, it makes them more resilient to trauma and helps them overcome chronic stress. It chips away at illnesses like obesity and depression.

There needs to be more of an emphasis on doing things outdoors. So much support goes to under-resourced communities today. But most of these activities take place in controlled indoor environments, and local residents can’t see anything happening in public. That leaves the community thinking “nothing’s happening here, nobody’s giving here.” When in reality the opposite is true.

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scorched by his own character failures as a young man, Muzikowski today lives a powerful version of tough love—repeatedly bringing bereft children into his own home to give them chances for happiness and success, while expecting solid citizenship of them.

Muzikowski sees the Academy’s athletics program as a force for good for the entire neighborhood. It pulls in youngsters who might otherwise be drawn into much bleaker activities. He’s proud that the boys’ teams support the girls’ teams, and vice versa. After creating inner-city Little League programs in both Chicago and New York City, he is adamant that local athletics hicago’s Near North and Near West can build real community—much more effectively neighborhoods are where Bob Muzikowski and than the grand spectacles of big-time collegiate or his wife, Tina, have concentrated their philanthropy. professional sports.

Muzikowski’s story—chronicled in his autobiography “We say: It’s a big game if you’re in it,” Safe at Home, inspiration for the movie Hardball— Muzikowski explains. “Look, sports is exciting. But includes not only generous donations but thousands it’s mostly escapism if you’re just watching.” of hours of personal time devoted to building Since overcoming his own demons nearly 30 up some of the most vigorous inner-city Little years ago and then thriving in the insurance and League programs in the country. Then ten years investment industry, place-based philanthropy has ago he founded Chicago Hope Academy, a new been the center of Muzikowski’s life. And sports Christian high school, to serve needy kids from has been one of his most effective tools. He is a devout Christian who takes literally the commandment to love your Local athletics can build real community more neighbor. He and his wife moved into the crime-ridden Near North effectively than the grand spectacles of neighborhood in 1988, and would big-time collegiate or professional sports. later build the first of his hugely popular Little Leagues with the neighborhood. At the school he puts as much money he donated himself and raised from business emphasis on athletic programs as a means of reaching acquaintances. In addition to pouring himself into children from Chicago’s mean streets as he does on its helping children in trouble, he wove a massive web college-prep curriculum. of mentoring relationships built around volunteer “You want to go see the fields?” Muzikowski coaches, summer camps, and family assistance. asks the reporter from Philanthropy. “We can talk Eventually, though, he noticed that participation along the way.” in his baseball leagues could only help so much.

Stepping onto the turf, the Chicago Hope Academy “Chicago Hope Academy was birthed out of baseball,” Muzikowski explains. “It didn’t seem right football team is preparing for the opening game of its that my kids could go to the finest prep schools, state tournament. Muzikowski knows this game as well as he knows baseball. He played football and baseball at while their teammates all had to go to garbage.”

When the St. Callistus Catholic school on the Columbia University, before being felled by an alcohol West Side closed, Muzikowski bought it in 2004 and drug addiction that he subsequently fought off with a linebacker’s ferocity. He later became a successful along with the help of a few colleagues. Chicago businessman. Now he is proud that this Hope team Hope Academy opened in 2005 as Chicago’s only nondenominational private Christian preparatory his philanthropic work has built up is succeeding while high school. And Muzikowski enrolled his own upholding strict academic standards.

“We’ve declared four starters ineligible because children. “If you want to fix an inner-city school, put your own kid in it.” of grades,” he notes forcefully. “Yet our season record The next stop on the tour is Altgeld Park, a public is eight and one.” He feels certain that holding athletes accountable, academically and morally, leads complex that his school helped the city renovate, and to more success on the field, not less. Having been which now serves as home for Hope’s baseball team

ACE OF DIAMONDS

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Peter Thompson

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and the Near West Little League teams.

Along the way, he talks about how sports can fit with philanthropy.

“Well done, sports is a great character-builder. Ask most sports fans who won the World Series eight years ago and they won’t be able to tell you. But ask them about a coach who touched their life…”

One of the things sports does better than most other parts of modern life is to link people, even across barriers. When Muzikowski started his first Little League program near the infamous Cabrini-Green public-housing project, he sought out corporate sponsors. But the businesses were not allowed to just fund a team.

They also had to provide someone to coach it. He hoped to not only teach kids the game of baseball but to connect them with people who could help them beyond the diamond.

One of the reasons participation in baseball has declined sharply among urban youngsters is because most of the kids come from single-parent or no-parent homes. Basketball is easily self-taught. But “a sport like baseball is a father-taught game and a grandfather-taught game. If you don’t know who your father is, or you don’t see him, you’re not going to play the game,” Muzikowski says. “Somebody coached me once. And so I felt I should coach these kids.”

After visiting Altgeld Park, the interview finishes at Chicago Hope Academy. But Muzikowski’s broader ministry intervenes. There’s a student from the school who needs eyeglasses.

“He’s a great kid, and he might be waiting for me,” he says. And so it’s off to the eye doctor.

There’s a lot more than baseball mitts in the big bag of philanthropic tricks that Bob and Tina Muzikowski carry with them. Their strongest passions are Christian values and quality education.

But sports have proven to be one of their most potent ways of sharing love with their needy neighbors.

Bob Muzikowski is investing in kids, using sport to build Peter Thompson

character that stands up under pressure­­— something he

understands himself, after beating a drug addiction 30 years ago.

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A HARD SPORT CHECKS THE DROPOUT FACTORIES

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onor Ed Snider is bringing something a little unexpected to inner-city youth in the Philadelphia region: hockey. Since 2005 the Ed Snider Youth Hockey Foundation has run programs that teach urban kids how to succeed on the ice and in school. “Sports has the power to motivate,” says foundation president Scott Tharp. “It gives us a platform to hold the attention of youngsters so we can engage them in more important life lessons.”

Many Philadelphia public schools have dropout rates higher than 50 percent—one recent report labeled them “dropout factories.” But nearly all of the more than 3,000 children in the Snider hockey program, drawn from nearly 350 schools across the city, stay in school.

Hockey is just the hook, Tharp explains. “We kind of fool our kids. We give them access to a fun recreational activity, and they buy into the other aspects of our programs. It was never our intent to be a standalone sports-delivery program.” Players are required to attend classroom sessions a minimum of three days a week (though many come every day).

After attending 10 sessions, each player receives his or her own hockey equipment.

Players are taught the game by experienced coaches, then have a chance to play in leagues. There are 22 Snider teams competing in the Delaware Valley Youth Hockey travel league, with transportation provided by the foundation. Weeklong summer camps are a reward for regular participation in the after-school program.

The after-school program aims to improve critical thinking and communication. A “reading buddies” program (with 830 five- to eight-year-olds enrolled) promotes literacy and reading excitement. An acclaimed life-skills curriculum develops virtues like empathy, respect, responsibility, and accountability— useful lessons for students growing up in fragile families and gang- and drug-ridden neighborhoods.

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Health and dental screenings for players and their families, nutrition education, homework help, and tutoring sessions are also available. School report cards are collected and students with poor grades receive mandatory special help, or they lose their ice time. Kids can start Snider Youth Hockey at age five—before bad habits and school failures get engrained.

Hockey is difficult­­—engendering hard work and honest effort.

To make the effort work, Snider—the 83-year-old head of Comcast Spectator and owner of the NHL Flyers team—helped rescue four inner-city ice rinks that had been slated for destruction. There currently are nine Snider Hockey rinks in use, which include classrooms and tutoring centers. Snider also pledged, in perpetuity, to himself donate $2 to the program for every $1 given by others. Most of the $4 million annual budget comes from gifts.

Hockey may be an especially useful enterprise for children who are at risk. It is difficult to learn to skate well, and the sport “engenders hard work and honest effort,” according to Tharp. It demands stamina and toughness. Perseverance is essential. Tharp credits Snider Youth Hockey’s high retention rate to the sport’s very nature. “If something is difficult to pick up, it’s more difficult to put down.”

DIFFERENT SPORTS FOR DIFFERENT LESSONS?

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eonard Wilf, co-owner of the Minnesota Vikings, serves as one of seven trustees of the NFL’s charitable arm, the National Football League Foundation. The foundation is interested, among other goals, in promoting sports as a path to useful life lessons. “Football teaches you dedication, self-discipline from rising in the early morning for practices and sweating out a hot day, responsibility, teamwork, and how to get along with very different people.”

But Wilf believes that different sports may have different capacities for transmitting particular lessons or healthy habits. So he is also a supporter of the First Tee, an organization that introduces the game of golf to all kinds of youngsters who might otherwise not have the chance, using golf ’s highs and lows as a path to character training. Wilf first became a donor in the late 1990s after a friend introduced him to a chapter in the Bronx. Since its founding, the First Tee has reached over ten million kids in all 50 states.

“Most young people don’t have the patience or the perseverance to get really good at golf,” explains Wilf. It’s “a very difficult sport to master and conquer.” Unlike other sports that have a heavy emphasis on team, golf is primarily a solo affair.

And according to Wilf, that’s not a bad thing. “The individuality required in golf forces people to learn to take care of themselves and to develop their own set of values; they can’t rely on their teammates as much as they would in other sports.”

Keep your self-control. Be honest even when people aren’t looking. Pay attention to little details.

Respect your opponents. Wilf and other supporters believe these are habits worth mastering, and that golf can help engrain them in young people who don’t have other ways of learning the value of such concepts. P

The program uses golf’s highs and lows as a path to character training.

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Feronia Forests LLC

A teenager zips through the foliage at Ramblewild, an outdoor-challenge course in Berkshire County, Massachusetts.

Call of the wild The market-oriented conservationists at Ramblewild help struggling kids swing through treetops

Feronia Forests LLC

By Naomi Schaefer Riley

“The younger generation is spending all this time looking at a screen two feet away rather than peering half a mile outside,” says Paolo Cugnasca, “and so they are growing up shortsighted.” It is part of the charm of speaking to Paolo, an investor who came to New York from Italy in the 1970s, that his English idioms are still a bit off. He means to say that more children are nearsighted—the rate of myopia in people 12 to 54 years old increased by nearly two thirds in the past few decades, according to a National Eye Institute study—but upon realizing his mistake he suggests they are shortsighted as well.

Naomi Schaefer Riley is a contributing editor to Philanthropy.

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Most people cannot afford to let forest land sit idle. The Cugnascas’ company helps woodland owners produce value from their acreage. up. My sister and I were always in the lead, the self-appointed “park ranger” and “nature guide” clambering up the rocks ahead. At the time, the reward was a rest on a rock at the top of the mountain and the lunch we had packed in our bags. But looking back, what was most memorable was all the time we had for talking. No dinner-table conversation or long car-trip dialogue ever seemed as pleasant or as natural as chatting while we hiked.

For Paolo and Giovanna, this enterprise has been a family affair from the beginning. Their daughter, Valentina, is a full partner in their philanthropy as she is in their business.

As a child, “when she was not behaving I could put her in front of trees and she used to talk to the leaves. She loved climbing trees and never wanted us to cut them down.” Valentina went on to get a Ph.D., writing a dissertation called “Tree Hugging Capitalism.”

The value of forests After working at Citibank in Milan and New York, Paolo launched his own firm, Emcor Securities. He began investing in forestry in 2003 as a way of diversifying his clients’ portfolios.

It soon became clear that he thought about the value of forests in a different way than some people. Pointing to the influx of Green-romantic New Yorkers to Vermont a few decades ago, he notes that “the first thing they did was stop harvesting trees,” resulting 40 years later in “a very high risk of fires, which lumbered forests do not have. There PHILANTHROPY

is practically no wildlife left, because by not cutting trees you deprive the environment of the undergrowth that makes it possible for baby deer and baby rabbits and baby everything to live. If there is no undergrowth, coyotes are going to get to them. That is a failed experiment in forestry. People don’t understand that cutting trees is actually very good for the environment.”

But then there is the other extreme: people who cut too many trees too soon. Paolo has studied the history extensively. During the early years of our country, he explains, land on the East Coast was cleared quickly because its value was almost entirely for farming. Once it became cheaper and easier to farm in the Midwest and South, the forests in the East began to grow back. By then, wood was needed.

In the late nineteenth century, wood was used for building, for railroad ties, to make industrial charcoal, to smelt metals, and for other industrial endeavors. Forest depletion became an issue.

George Vanderbilt, whose grandfather Cornelius amassed a fortune building railroads, created the first forestry-education school in the country at his Biltmore estate in North Carolina.

Vanderbilt wanted to ensure that the forests around Asheville were managed intelligently, and put early conservationist Gifford Pinchot in charge of them.

According to the Biltmore website, “His scientific approach to ‘planned forestry’ was something new and marked a shift in the nation’s approach to renewable

Feronia Forests LLC

Paolo, who grew up outdoors, laments that too many kids today are not spending much time in the open air, and have little appreciation for the natural world. He calls it “nature-deficit disorder,” a phrase drawn from Richard Louv’s 2005 book Last Child in the Woods.

In 2014, Paolo and his wife, Giovanna, set out to chip away at this trend with Feronia Forward, a nonprofit that would bring lower-income, inner-city ­­ kids to Ramblewild, a “challenge course” the Cugnascas constructed in the Berkshire hills. With the use of harnesses and a belay system, visitors to Ramblewild can climb 30 feet up into the canopy of the forest. The 900-acre park allows visitors to scramble from one tree to the next via a 200-foot suspension bridge, kayaks dangled in mid-air, rope ladders, and dozens of other creative pathways.

There are now more than 750 such “aerial-adventure parks” across North America, and more opening all the time. They began as a way for ski resorts to make money in the off-season, but some like Ramblewild are built from scratch and open year-round. Visitors have opportunities to immerse themselves in glowing fall foliage, to witness the beauty of a winter forest, to identify animal tracks and dens. In the spring, Paolo notes, “we have maple sap running. They can even drink it from the tree.”

When I visited, the park was filled with people of all ages and skill levels—novices and athletic thrill-seekers, grandparents with grandchildren, even a bachelorette party. Courses of varying difficulty offer something for everyone. It was encouraging to see adults letting kids test their limits, and to see multiple generations engaging in a common activity.

My time there reminded me of trips hiking with my family growing

Feronia Forests LLC

resources.” Vanderbilt’s hire later became the founder of the U.S. Forest Service.

Vanderbilt was also instrumental in pushing the passage of the Forest Reserve Act. That now-125-year-old law set aside timber reserves to be “managed for the people.” Today almost 200 million acres of land are classified as National Forests. Unlike National Park land, natural resources can be extracted from National Forests, and in many cases that extraction is encouraged. After Vanderbilt’s death in 1914, his wife sold most of the Biltmore’s 125,000 original acres to become the Pisgah National Forest.

Most people who own forest land cannot afford to simply let it sit idle.

Many forest owners in need of cash flow cut down trees before they are at their most valuable, Paolo reports. Letting trees fully mature can significantly improve their value. But how can owners make some money in the meantime?

Feronia Forests, a company set up by Paolo and his partners, offers enterprises that help woodlands produce value Paolo Cugnasca and his even while the trees are still standing. daughter, Valentina, are Whether it is products like maple syrup, partners in both business ginseng, or mushrooms that can be harvested and philanthropy. from the living forest, or recreational activities like hiking, skiing, or hunting that people will pay for, there is untapped potential.

One of Feronia’s businesses is Vertical Water—the raw sap taken from maple trees, which is sold as a health food instead of being boiled down into concentrated syrup. The company pays farmers in upstate New York to collect it, providing landowners in the economically stressed region with cash, while leaving their trees “vertical.” Otherwise, “between January and March, farmers in the Northeast have no source of revenue,” Paolo explains.

The company also manufactures maple syrup.

There is a 110-acre sugarbush at Ramblewild, and the Cugnascas work with the University of Vermont’s forestry program to tap some trees and thin others in order to provide the best growth rate for maples and maximum maple syrup. In addition, SPRING 2016

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Feronia Forests LLC

Products marketed by Feronia Forests to get economic value out of private woodlands include maple water, a health drink, and pure maple syrup.

Feronia Forests LLC

Ramblewild has gathered new revenue by allowing renewable energy companies like the ­Berkshire Wind Power Project to erect wind turbines and solar panels on their land in return for annual fees.

Into the woods But it is Feronia Forward—the nonprofit education and conservation organization—that Paolo and Giovanna are most proud of. For the general public, the summer price of admission to Ramblewild’s adventure course is more than $50 per person. But since its 2014 opening the couple has offered 1,300 students a visit to Ramblewild for free under Feronia Forward’s philanthropic mission.

These students mostly come from rural western Massachusetts, where, despite the influx each summer of wealthy attendees to Tanglewood concerts and Shakespeare festivals, there are a good number of poor youngsters. In 2013, about a quarter of the children living in Berkshire County were on some form of public assistance. The Cugnascas’ goal is to bring the Ramblewild woodland sports course to about 10,000 children per year from nearby cities like Springfield, Hartford, and Albany.

Prior to launching Feronia Forward, the Cugnascas’ philanthropy was focused on think tanks like the Manhattan Institute and the Independent Women’s Forum. But with this venture, Giovanna feels they have a more direct impact. Typically the Cugnascas will approach a disadvantaged school and offer a trip to Ramblewild

as a reward for students with good attendance and behavior. Anecdotal evidence suggests it works.

Students in a pattern of acting up are pressured by their classmates into behaving better to earn the trip. The Cugnascas are also gratified to see how kids interact with each other while up in the trees.

At each obstacle, children tend to cheer each other on and offer advice about the best way to navigate challenges. It’s the kind of social interaction that disappears when people are staring at their phones.

Says Paolo, “We want to offer them a transformational life experience in terms of how they look at fear, for example. Or how they look at teams. How they view their friends. How they learn to do things they didn’t think were possible.”

Fifth-grade teacher Andrew Mickle took his own family to Ramblewild last spring (his kids’ verdict: “fun and cool and a little scary”). When he found out that the site offers educational programs he immediately thought of his students, most of whom could not afford the entry fee. Thanks to Feronia Forward he has been able to take them to explore the aerial park as well as the surrounding forest and wildlife. They learned to “challenge themselves in safe ways.” He was particularly impressed by the way some students stepped up to lead the group in making decisions, while others encouraged their classmates to take risks and try new things. He plans to return and integrate science lessons from classroom to copse.

A trip to Ramblewild is an opportunity for students to learn about the natural world. To explore animal habitats. To learn about energy production and land economics. There are signs all over the property with interesting facts about the forest, and students who send in new facts can receive a free ticket to return.

Paolo believes Ramblewild can offer what Rabbi Abraham Heschel calls “radical amazement,” a chance to “get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted.”

“We are trying to use the forest for new adventures, new ideas,” says Giovanna. “For thousands of members of our community. And especially for kids.” P

About 10,000 children per year will visit Ramblewild to build individual confidence and social interaction, and reinforce constructive behavior at school.

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Cast members of the goofy sketch-comedy show “Studio C” work for laughs

Justin Hackworth

every week.

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PHILANTHROPY

Justin Hackworth

By Jarom McDonald

A young priest in cassock and sideburns sits at a boy’s bedside. The child coughs and writhes with a high fever as his mother looks on in alarm. The priest pronounces a blessing, and lays his hand on the youngster’s forehead as morning light warms a window.

It’s a scene from Silent Night, a film portraying the actual origins of the Christmas hymn with the same name. And Lora McAllister is enjoying the scene.

Having provided major financial support for the production, Lora and her husband, David, are on-scene in Austria to witness some of the filming.

The film is a project of BYUtv, an entity you probably have never heard of, though it is becoming difficult to ignore in the entertainment world. It’s a television network

run out of Brigham Young University’s broadcasting facilities in Utah. It was the first network to stream content online, and all programming is available free through the Internet, touching millions of homes worldwide. Founded in 2000, BYUtv’s mission is to help people “see the good in the world” by producing high-quality, entertaining family content that people of all faiths and backgrounds can enjoy. And in the process, the network has become an important training ground for hundreds of young people who will write, film, animate, produce, and distribute America’s future entertainment products.

The BYUtv lineup currently runs from original movies to the Cold War drama “Granite Flats” to the popular sketch-comedy show “Studio C.” “The world is full of good

Jarom McDonald, a former Philanthropy magazine intern, is a student at Brigham Young University.

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people,” says Lora McAllister, but “there just isn’t a lot of that on the major networks.” One goal of BYUtv is to circulate content that encourages, inspires positive living, and helps people be good neighbors and citizens. Another goal is to equip professionals with those values so they can succeed in Hollywood and Manhattan and other centers of popular culture where more nihilistic and narcissistic views are often dominant.

It is legions of donors, like the McAllisters, who make this (very

former history teacher Stan Ellsworth, who motors his Harley Davidson across the country, beard and long hair blowing in the wind, to explore American history.

When first approached about In one episode, he rumbles up to the supporting BYUtv in its early days, they Kentucky Horse Park to talk equine weren’t convinced. Lora remembers history and culture with a local expert. thinking the lineup seemed “boring.” But “American Ride” has become one of the they eventually took a leap. “We watched most popular shows on BYUtv. them struggle the first year or two, but they According to Scott Swofford, BYU gradually started putting together quality Broadcasting’s content director, the shows programming,” says David. The McAllisters are all about broccoli and pizza. “The have seen BYUtv rise from a basement joke we use is that we’re smooshing them

Stan Ellsworth and his Harley are the stars of BYUtv’s “American Ride,” one of the network’s most popular shows.

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office to its current state-of-the-art broadcasting facility, and from an initial peak viewership below 10,000 people (for a quilting show) to 351 million cumulative online views for “Studio C.”

together and making broccoli pizza,” says Swofford. “You want your kids to eat broccoli. They want to eat pizza. One has to find the balance. If there’s too much broccoli in the form of edifying or uplifting or faith-based content, then no one’s going to eat the pizza.”

Broccoli and pizza How an entertainment network can make Swofford and his colleagues discovered that kind of leap in popularity and impact through survey work that many people are is perhaps best illustrated by a biker in interested in having more values-based a denim vest. “American Ride” features entertainment. But viewers won’t tune in PHILANTHROPY

Brooke Redman

expensive) work possible. David and Lora have long been active philanthropists. They have volunteered in their community, in Scouting, in schools, and in their Mormon church, even participating in two year-long volunteer missions. After graduating from BYU themselves, they moved to Portland, Oregon, where David worked at an accounting firm while Lora taught elementary school and raised their children.

After much success, they are now retired.

Brooke Redman

unless ideas are fresh and production values are high.

With a glance at its positive ratings, the “American Ride” presentation of history and patriotism seems to be onto something.

A veteran of the IMAX film circuit, Swofford knows how to produce arresting shows. He’s an original thinker with a history of climbing pyramids and living with an Amazonian tribe to get a good story, bringing practical experience and useful ideas with him to BYU. Donors like the McAllisters have noticed a shift to a higher gear at BYUtv since his arrival.

BYUtv doesn’t easily fit the entertainment industry’s existing molds. Swofford refers to it as “thinking man’s family.” Because this model is an experimental a flavor of content that has not previously existed, it’s very unlikely to emerge from the existing commercial networks. And it relies on donor support to germinate and gain public traction.

Investing in popular culture By commercial standards, BYUtv operates on a shoestring. “Granite Flats,” its first scripted series (described by Swofford as a cross between “The Wonder Years” and The Goonies), costs just under $1 million per episode to produce. That’s comparatively frugal when considering the Hollywood-quality production levels and the professional cast, which includes Cary Elwes (The Princess Bride) and Christopher Lloyd (Back to the Future). Shows on commercial networks commonly cost $3 million or more per episode.

But $1 million per show is still a mighty big shoestring that has to be raised somewhere. BYUtv relies on donors to keep the cameras rolling—primarily loyal supporters from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the folks who underwrite BYU’s wider educational mission as well).

Recognizing the power of popular culture today—and the ability of whoever is holding the megaphone to influence the direction of our lives, particularly the minds of young people—donors have stepped up. They have built expensive studios, they help pay talented instructors, they have bought the many pieces of technology, from HD cameras to supercomputers, that go into sophisticated storytelling today. And they have subsidized the classes, work-study programs, industry internships, and other elements that are part of building successful careers in this cutthroat industry.

A new fast track to Hollywood At any given time, there are 200 student employees working and learning their craft at BYU Broadcasting.

The real-world experience these students receive is

not only part of their education but a potent boost to their professional trajectories. Abbie Horlacher, a student working with BYUradio (a sister to BYUtv also housed within BYU Broadcasting), has seen this happen firsthand. Horlacher is majoring in film, and wants to help make movies that have a wholesome effect on the world. While only a freshman she got a salaried production position that offers her a great deal of creative leeway.

Horlacher’s characterization of her office sounds something like a cross between Google headquarters and a law firm, blending fun and strict professionalism.

She describes an ongoing conversation she had with a desk neighbor who comes into the office at different times—which they conducted via sticky notes. Students are serious about their responsibilities, though. Many of them are given key positions that require a high degree of professionalism, such as director of a show. Horlacher has a lot of trust placed in her, not to mention expensive equipment and production time, and she faces high expectations and stiff performance reviews.

“One of the things we’re trying to offer is a great, real-life employment situation,” says Damien

Many people are interested in values-based entertainment. But viewers won’t tune in unless the ideas are fresh and the production quality is high.

Bard, who oversees fundraising. By her account, Horlacher is experiencing just that. “Though I’m in my early years of college I’m working for salary in a real job, doing something that is related to my field, demanding, and professionally valuable,” she says.

And it isn’t just technical experience she’s referring to.

“I have opportunities here not only to expand myself, and my capabilities, and my perspective, but also to expand others,” she explains. “When I work at BYU Broadcasting I have power to reach thousands and millions of people across the world.”

Horlacher’s philosophy about media work mirrors that of the progenitors and funders of BYU Broadcasting: “The visual arts have a lot of influence on the choices people make, and the way they see the world.

I respect that power, and want to use it for good things.”

Horlacher has a passion for storytelling she hopes to tap via future employment in film. “I like telling the story,” she says. “Stories have power. Stories have lasted for centuries and centuries, and crossed cultures, and brought people together. Even in our modern society that’s just as true as ever.” Horlacher describes BYU Broadcasting as “a perfect combination of the secular SPRING 2016

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and the spiritual,” and “not necessarily in an overt way, which is sort of the beauty of it.”

Philanthropy’s Summer 2011 issue for more on this.)

The skyrocketing viewership of BYUtv seems to be sending the same message.

(One “Studio C” comedy sketch about an endless soccer shootout currently has 37 million views on YouTube). But it’s not just eyeballs—BYUtv has been getting a remarkable amount of critical acclaim as well. In 2015, BYU Broadcasting won ten Emmy Awards for regional programming.

It is earning praise from media outlets like the New York Times and the Huffington Post. Silent Night was given a Gabriel Award by the Catholic Church.

Since family-friendly entertainment is one of BYUtv’s deepest goals, one of the most encouraging statistics concerns viewing habits of families. Though the shows follow Mormon values—there is no smoking, no drinking, no “adult” content—they are created for families of all faiths and backgrounds, Swofford insists, and for everyone in the family.

David McAllister is especially interested in what BYUtv does for families.

“Parents today have to keep a close eye on their television if they have children in the house. When you put on a channel and

BYUtv gives away its programming for free to cable networks, YouTube, Roku, Amazon Fire TV—any outlet with an appetite for broccoli pizza.

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David and Lora McAllister were at first hesitant to support BYUtv. Years later they have seen the dividends. Above they are pictured with Emmys awarded to the network.

know the programming is going to be something you don’t mind your children watching, that’s valuable. The principles of love, kindness, faithfulness, respect, working toward a goal even when you face obstacles—all of those qualities and others are reflected in the programming.”

It takes a creative village Lora McAllister admires the team effort that goes into this. “The wonderful leadership and talent at BYUtv, and then the donations of so many people, are what has allowed these things to happen.” The river of content pouring out of BYUtv demands the concentrated attention of hundreds of directors, writers, producers, actors, camera operators, editors, sound and lighting technicians, computer programmers, and other specialists—an army of students overseen by a corps of talented adults.

And it takes generous givers as well. “The programming can only occur if people band together,” says David McAllister. In the end, it is just television, entertaining and fun. But this crew knows that can have power. “The reason we band together,” McAllister notes, “is to protect and spread virtues that are worth cherishing.” P

Jaren Wilkey, Brigham Young University

New technology, new values In addition to preparing students to occupy high ramparts within America’s castles of popular culture, BYUtv is working hard to get their uplifting content to as many hungry eyes and ears as possible. A lot of buzz comes from the “distinctive qualities of our content,” but “if people don’t have a way to watch that content, there’s a real problem,” says Bard. So the university and its donors have invested heavily in making sure their work is delivered to everyday citizens.

“Right now, BYUtv is really on the cutting edge in terms of the number of platforms where you can see our programming,” Bard reports. By the number of viewing platforms where it is available, BYUtv has now surpassed ESPN. Its TV studio is completely digital. It sends out all of its content in HD, at no cost, to cable companies and directly to online viewers, on platforms like YouTube, Roku, Amazon Fire TV, and its own BYUtv app. In 2015 alone, there were 190.7 million BYUtv page views spread throughout these various platforms. Because BYUtv invested in its digital setup early on, it is well positioned to remain relevant and fast-moving in the years ahead.

Of course, all these investments and all this calculated effort are for naught if people aren’t actually looking for the broccoli pizza the department is cooking up. Scott Swofford and the rest of the team are betting heavily that there is a big market in America for wholesome content. There are many hints that they are right. One is the dramatic box-office successes of the funny, wholesome animated films produced

by Pixar—which has its studios packed with BYU graduates. (See “Joy Story” in

The A Public rt of Philan Policy thropy (third i n a thre

e-part s

eries)

Fighting for School Reform In three consecutive issues of Philanthropy we have been presenting wisdom from America’s leading experts on public-policy philanthropy. This niche—where donors aim to nudge national opinion and lawmaking in constructive directions—is a difficult art, but one that can have large payoffs for those who understand its mysteries. In this final

Bri Hermanson

Chester Finn Chester Finn entered the policy arena in the late 1960s as a liberal who was optimistic about ending poverty through education. He evolved into a conservative attentive to the unintended side-effects of social engineering. He remains an advocate of energetic public-policy reform, a proponent of private giving as an alternative to bureaucratic social programs, and one of the nation’s leading experts on excellent education.

“I was drawn into education by a desire to improve the world. Lyndon Johnson persuaded me that the path to ending poverty ran through education. So I went to a school of education and became a social-studies teacher, then later realized I wanted to work on a larger canvas, in public policy. But donors in those days were mostly just paying for programs that would benefit people directly.”

installment, our authorities offer wisdom on how philanthropists can help enact and protect useful school reforms. These expert testimonies are condensed from the recent Philanthropy Roundtable book Agenda Setting: A Wise Giver’s Guide to Influencing Public Policy (philanthropyroundtable.org/guidebook/ agenda_setting).

“The most famous policy intervention by a donor at that time was the Ford Foundation’s effort to bring local control to the schools in New York City. This was a pet project of McGeorge Bundy, who worked in the White House before becoming president of Ford. They decided that the New York City school system should be turned over to the people of New York at the neighborhood level. That unexpectedly led to all sorts of awful stuff: racism, anti-­S emitism, and the first major teacher strike in the country’s history. That scared donors away from governance change in education. Funders generally opted for safer and simpler solutions. ‘Let’s build a library.’ ‘Let ’s give scholarships to 87 kids to go to private school.’ ‘Let’s donate computers.’”

But a gradual push toward more fundamental governance reform began to simmer in the donor community. “As fresh ideas for reform began to bubble up, reformers started to seek private funding. The venture capital for educational experimentation started coming from philanthropy.”

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To improve the chances of real and lasting change, “a lot of philanthropists added political engagement to their foundation work. Outside of their tax-exempt, charitable work they made donations to advocacy groups and political action committees. Now donors are very mindful of groups like ­StudentsFirst, 50CAN, and the Policy Innovation in Education Network that are pushing for dramatic school reforms. Donors like the F ­ ishers, Eli Broad, the Waltons, the Gates ­Foundation, and others strategize together and even coordinate their work to counter­act political and policy sclerosis.”

“My own Fordham Institute is an example of this. Our roots are in Ohio, and recently it became one of our top priorities to get Ohio’s messed-up ­charter-school law rewritten. Toward that end, we undertook, as a grant-receiving nonprofit, what the IRS calls a 501(h) election, so that our institute can legally engage in part-time lobbying, even though we’re a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. We are working with other groups whose legal status allows them to engage in political reform even more directly. We’re doing this because the 51

John Kirtley For years, John Kirtley had focused on building up a venture-capital firm in Tampa. “I wasn’t involved in philanthropy at all. And I didn’t do anything in politics except vote in presidential elections,” he says. But by the mid-1990s Kirtley was ready to do more.

He returned to Florida (where he had attended high school) after ­working at a large bank in New York City. At age 25 he set up his own v­ enture-capital firm focused on small companies in the

Things don’t stay done.

Every policy change has its opponents.

It requires constant vigilance to keep improvement on track.

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Southeast. Soon he was making more than enough money to live on, and began to think about giving some of it away. A friend had told him about a program that paired patrons with needy ­Catholic schools, and Kirtley signed up even though he isn’t Catholic, because the schools were such lifesavers for many children living in neighborhoods with terrible public options.

While he was involved with one low-income Catholic school, Kirtley read about the efforts of philanthropists Patrick Rooney and Virginia James to launch scholarship funds across the country that would help lots of poor students attend private schools. “I decided to start a scholarship program in Tampa Bay.” He eventually became the local affiliate of the Children’s S ­ cholarship Fund, a new nationwide initiative launched

by Ted Forstmann and John Walton to help low-income students attend private schools.

Kirtley publicized his scholarships himself—walking around neighborhoods, visiting churches, and speaking on radio stations. When the application d ­ eadline arrived, his new fund received about 12,000 applications for 700 scholarships of $1,500 each. “It just blew me away.”

Kirtley felt good about meeting a need, but the experience also troubled him.

“We had to turn away a lot of good people.

Parents kept calling—my phone number was listed—and asking, ‘Don’t you have just one more scholarship?’ That’s when I realized that philanthropists must become involved in public policy.”

In the spring of 1999 the Florida legislature took up Jeb Bush’s school-choice proposal that would allow students to escape failing public schools. Kirtley bused parents to Tallahassee to be heard.

“A lot of politicians say that parents want more public-school ­funding. Our parents got up and said they want choice.”

Kirtley and his allies faced tremendous political resistance as they pushed for new alternatives for parents, much of it motivated by fear and self-defense.

Bri Hermanson

Ohio charter law is so bad and truly needs to be changed.”

“The foundation side of Fordham also continues to fund projects that provide good services directly to needy people.

That will always be the heart of philanthropy. But there are so many bad policies in education that beg for change. The bad policies get in the way of good works, and can swamp any benefit you do.”

Before it entered combat in Ohio, Fordham built a base of facts. “We’re ­starting with two research studies that are both philanthropically funded. One is an evaluation of charter-school performance that documents how much these schools vary depending on how they are structured, and how mediocre our Ohio schools are.

The other study is a forensic analysis of current charter laws in Ohio. We are identifying the many statutory elements that get in the way of good charter schools in Ohio.”

This is classic nonprofit research pursued in the public interest. It provides the public with useful information. It allows the foundation to set an accurate and useful agenda. It helps Fordham set smart priorities in its push against counterproductive policies.

“We’re also quietly rallying allies to join a coalition that will inform and encourage legislators to support changes.

We won’t quarterback a change team. It needs to be a grassroots, local, popular coalition. But we are helping to recruit players, and carrying water to the people on the field.”

“And then there’s a public case we need to make. We have to persuade John Q. Public and members of the media that there’s a problem. That we have viable solutions. And that there’s a moment of opportunity to act.”

As a former Senate and Cabinet­ department staffer, Finn knows that measuring impact is tricky in this kind of work. “Every policy change has opponents, and even if they lose they will do their best to undo the change as soon as they can. Things don’t stay done. So it requires constant vigilance in order to keep improvement on track. And the payoff can be very slow in coming.”

“Meanwhile, defenders of the status quo are usually more deeply invested than those who want change. Beneficiaries of an existing system know exactly what they will lose if change occurs. They’re fighting for their present benefits and advantages—and sometimes their jobs.”

“In comparison, the benefits of change are only something promised, not a real thing. A parent hears, ‘Your kid’s odds of getting a good teacher will rise if this law passes.’ But a teacher thinks, ‘I will lose my job if this law passes.’ Guess who fights harder?” That’s one of the reasons donors are so important. They can help balance the incentives. They can promote long-term promise over ­s hort-term expediency. They can risk the ire of politically powerful interests.

Bri Hermanson

“One day, a black legislator who publicly opposed school choice took me into his office.” He handed Kirtley a list of ten things he wanted to accomplish as a legislator. “You’re right about school choice,” he told Kirtley. “But if I put school choice on my list, the teachers union will take me out, and I won’t get to the nine other things.”

For Kirtley, the comment was a revelation. “He was making a perfectly logical decision,” he says. “I realized we had to broaden the political support for school choice. We needed more than a traditional nonprofit group that funded scholarships.”

So Kirtley became a political actor.

In addition to his 501(c)(3) scholarship fund, he started a pair of campaigning organizations: a 501(c)(4) to focus on communications and lobbying and a 527 group to fund elections. He picked hardball activists to run operations. One was a former public-school teacher, union leader, and lifelong Democrat. Another was a former newspaper editorialist, tasked with the job of winning hearts and minds in the media. A third was a veteran organizer in African-American communities.

Kirtley devoted millions of dollars to these efforts, both his own money and funds he raised energetically from others. In each election cycle his groups spread the word about school choice and ran advertisements educating voters about candidates who favored choice and those who opposed it. “We had a lot of tough days,” says Kirtley. Yet for every step backward, the movement seemed to take two forward.

By 2010, school-choice bills had wide support in F lorida, including co-sponsors among Democrats. Majorities of both the black and Hispanic caucuses had become supporters of a large expansion of F ­ lorida’s s­chool-choice programs. In a historic vote taken on the same day that Kirtley brought thousands of parents and community leaders to march in Tallahassee, the ­F lorida Senate voted to strengthen school choice across the state.

The success helped even students who stayed put. “Our results indicate that p ­ rivate-school competition, brought about by the creation of scholarships for students from low-income families, is likely to have positive effects on the performance of traditional public schools,” concluded researchers David Figlio and Cassandra Hart.

“If others want to do this in their states, the first thing they should do is contact the American Federation for Children, which advises school-choice supporters around the country,” Kirtley says. “Then they should be ready to do more than just fund scholarships. You also have to get involved in politics and public policy. If your goal is to change K-12 policy, you’re going to have to change laws.

And if legislators refuse to change those laws, then you’re going to have to change those legislators.”

And “you need to steel yourself,” offers Kirtley, because “you will be a target. It’s amazing what the press will print about you. If you’re in it for the accolades or to score political points, this isn’t for you. But if you want to improve the schooling of our children and can handle the pressure, the rewards are so worth it.”

Fred Klipsch Fre d K l i p s c h knows how to raise the volume on a public conversation. His name is on the speaker company whose products are found in everything from miniature earbuds to massive home-theater systems. And his home state of Indiana has become a national leader in educational innovation partly because of the loud-and-clear m ­ essages that Klipsch

has helped introduce into public discussions there.

“You know what’s unacceptable?” he says. “It’s unacceptable that kids living in the wrong zip codes don’t get educated. We’ve known about this problem for decades but we’ve decided not to talk much about it.”

“I’m a product of public schools,” says Klipsch. “My dad worked in a factory. I went to grade school in the inner city of ­Indianapolis. This was back in the days when we made sure everybody got a good education.” He went on to Purdue University.

For years, Klipsch paid far more attention to his businesses than to public policy.

In the 1990s, a fellow Indiana businessman approached Klipsch about improving education. The late Pat Rooney ran the Golden Rule Insurance Company. As a philanthropist, he was tireless in creating scholarships to help low-income students escape failing public schools and attend effective private ones. Klipsch agreed to get involved.

They raised millions of dollars in donations and gave away thousands of annual tuition stipends. “That felt good,” says Klipsch. The group deliberately stayed out of politics. Over time, however, Klipsch began to sense that scholarships treated a symptom rather than offering a cure.

“I knew we weren’t doing enough,” he says. “Public education is a state-funded political monopoly. There’s no competition, so our best students don’t match up with the best students in other countries, and our other students are even worse off.”

In 2006, Klipsch started a pair of ­nonprofit groups, now called the Institute for Quality Education (concentrating on policy development) and Hoosiers for Quality Education (focused on politics and elections). Philanthropists who want to shake up dysfunctional public i­nstitutions

If you’re in it for the accolades or to score political points, this isn’t for you. But if you want to improve schooling, and can handle the pressure, the rewards are so worth it.

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education. And those in a position to become philanthropists in this area need to become leaders. People say they can’t do anything to fix public education. But that’s just wrong.”

Betsy DeVos The activism of Betsy DeVos began in the 1980s, when her family started supporting low-income families at a private school in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Since then, she has pushed for school choice as

It took a long time for our education system to get to where it is today. It’s going to take a long time for us to change it.

This is a generational battle. will realize they’re available—especially if officials aren’t committed to a program’s success. “You can’t leave this up to the politicians. Once they enact a policy, they move on. The successful execution will come back to you.”

Klipsch warns that lasting, large-scale school improvement “will take a couple of decades, not a couple of years. It’s a hard journey.” He donates generously and seeks allies, fundraising among successful men and women who share the vision of Indiana as a blazer of new paths to educational excellence.

“Most of my donors are successful businessmen. About 60 percent of our budget comes from 20 to 25 individuals.”

Motivating fellow donors is a big part of this. “Our society allows a lot of students not to get educated and says it’s okay. But if you see a bus hit a lady in the street, and then walk around without helping her—maybe you bear some responsibility for her death.

That’s how we should think about public 54

both a philanthropist and a political leader.

“I was optimistic educational choice would happen much more quickly than it has,” she says. “I’ve learned that this is a generational battle.”

“Getting involved in reform can be intimidating,” DeVos admits, because politics is controversial. Her solution is to focus on personal lives. “I’m always encouraging people to come with me and visit schools that work,” she says. “Look into the eyes of the children who are benefiting from a good education—and then think about how we’re denying the same opportunity to the ones who aren’t here. I just have to see the faces of these kids. It makes all the criticism worth it.”

“We became aware of the Potter’s House, an urban Christian school in Grand Rapids,” she says. “We were struck by how hard many of the parents worked to pay the tuition.” Betsy and her husband, Dick, started to sponsor needy students on PHILANTHROPY

an individual basis, and their philanthropic commitment to the school grew. In 1990, Dick DeVos won election to Michigan’s State Board of Education, and the family began a decade of intense political activity.

“Every night at the dinner table, we talked about improving opportunities for education.” In 1993, the couple helped Michigan pass its first charter-school bill.

Their state’s constitution expressly forbade tax dollars from supporting private schools, so in 2000 Betsy and Dick led an effort to amend it through a ballot initiative. The measure would have lifted the ban and provided vouchers to students in the worst-performing schools across the state, but it went down to a stinging defeat.

Many philanthropists might have given up. DeVos resolved to keep battling.

“It took a long time for our education system to get where it is today,” she says.

“It’s going to take a long time for us to change it.” She helped to fund and lead several national organizations devoted to expanding school choice. She is chairman at the American Federation for ­Children, which works with local allies in many states to eliminate caps on charter schools and school-choice programs, push tax credits and school vouchers through legislatures, and otherwise create new options for low-income children trapped in poor public schools. In this role she has helped bring educational choice to its current high-water mark, with the number of children attending private or religious schools with public support from vouchers or tax credits rising from 29,000 in 2000 to 354,000 today, and the number of charter schools nationwide soaring to 7,000.

After decades of involvement as a donor, DeVos has learned that charitable efforts must be backed by practical political activism—or even the best ideas are likely to be ignored. Changing policy always makes enemies, so reformist donors must cover the backs of legislators willing to stand up to the status quo. “You can’t neglect the political side. We need to elect allies and defeat politicians who stand in the way of reform. We have to put money behind legislation.”

“In the future, education will look a lot different,” DeVos argues. “We’re

Bri Hermanson

and policies can’t ignore the rough and tumble of politics, he insists. “A policy arm without a political arm will fail.”

When Klipsch leapt into the politics of education in 2006, Democrats controlled Indiana’s general assembly. Within four years, the GOP captured a majority and began pushing through a series of major reforms, including merit pay for teachers, charter-school expansion, and tax credits for donors of scholarships. By 2014, Indiana was sponsoring the country’s second-largest school voucher program, allowing nearly 20,000 students to attend private schools rather than failed public alternatives.

Coming up with good ideas is the first step for reformers. Then comes excellent communication. Once new policy ideas are enacted, strong implementation is essential.

“You have to help with their execution,” Klipsch notes. Just because a state sponsors vouchers doesn’t mean that families

going to see options that we can’t even imagine right now because nobody has thought of them yet.” Nothing is inevitable, though, and philanthropists can be important influences. “We have to get involved in public policy to make sure these options can flourish—so that children can flourish.”

Bri Hermanson

Thomas Carroll Thomas Carroll is a public-policy marathoner. At New York’s Foundation for Opportunity in Education he helps connect donors with alternative schools, nonprofit reformers, and needy students. When New York passed a groundbreaking law in 1998 allowing a limited number of charter schools across the state, he knew the fight for education reform was just beginning.

He was right. As charter schools began to take root in Brooklyn, H ­ arlem, Albany, and Buffalo, policy battles increased. “There was political pushback from the teacher unions and local school boards that were affected.” Legislation to cap the growth of charter schools caused reformists to rally their troops. “It was the beginning of a more aggressive advocacy phase. Charter-school advocates had to create a permanent policy and political presence within New York. The value of relationships in politics is paramount.

Someone who shows up on an issue for the first time and expects to compete against teacher unions or any organized lobby is at an extreme disadvantage.”

“So once the charter-school law was adopted, we didn’t pop champagne corks and think it was over, but rather set up a series of ongoing nonprofit organizations funded by donors to handle the intellectual, policy, advocacy, and political side of

advancing charter schools. Some of the charter networks looked at politics with great disdain. But as they started to suffer some of the indignities of the political process, they became more active.”

“Over the last 15 years, it has become much more of a fair policy fight.

There is now a pretty substantial set of ­education-policy donors in the state that, depending on the year, can match or exceed what the teacher unions spend.

Because of that, there are mature advocacy organizations, getting more sophisticated every year, working to make our state’s education policy more innovative. Donors no longer view it as, ‘Oh, we just have to do this for a couple of years and then we can move on.’ They see that there has to be a permanent ongoing effort funded at a fairly substantial level.”

“In New York, charter schools came in under a Republican governor, and

“The biggest mistake donors make in this area is an assumption that politics is linear and predictable. Donors, like all people, want instant gratification. But politics works in a zig-zaggy way. We need patience. The charter-school law had three defeats before final approval. We’re now in a phase, with a New York City mayor who’s hostile to education reform, where a lot of political slugging is going to go on for a long time.”

“That means people have to make donations with more risk. Giving on the other side of the mayor is an uncomfortable place for a lot of businesspeople in New York. In New York, 501(c)(4) donors can be publicly disclosed, unlike the rest of the country, so there are no quiet checks. It’s out in the open,

We make the assumption that politics is linear and predictable. But it works in a zig-zaggy way. We need patience. Political slugging is going to go on for a long time. there have been three Democratic governors since. We still had growth in charter schools, because great care was taken to make sure that the movement was perceived as a bipartisan effort benefiting children statewide.”

“For my current work on behalf of a tax credit for donations that allow children to attend a school of their choice, I’m pulling together a coalition that’s very broad. We have more than 80 community groups including the Brooklyn NAACP, the Urban League in Buffalo, the New York City Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, and more than 20 labor unions. The religious coalition includes the Catholic Church, Orthodox Jews, evangelical Christians, and Muslims.

We joke when we have meetings that nobody is allowed to talk about any other issue, or the room could descend into a bar brawl. But this is one issue that ­e verybody comes together on.”

SPRING 2016

so people have to get over being timid about controversy. They have to realize that’s the price of moving forward on reform.”

“On any public-policy issue where you have a well-financed, determined opponent with political capacity, 501(c)(3) charitable activities alone are simply not going to be enough. Donors who want to be successful policy advocates have to be willing to get engaged in politics, and be comfortable with a high level of uncertainty and risk. Some people just don’t have the stomach for it.”

“A tremendously high percentage of charitable giving on education reform currently goes to things like setting up charter schools or paying private-school tuitions for poor kids. A relatively small percentage goes to advocacy. I think the ratio needs to be rebalanced a bit. Givers of charity should focus somewhat more on changing the policy environment in which district schools, charter schools, and private schools operate.” P 55

books

Are College Sports Out of Control?

BY LE SLIE L EN KOW S KY

In 1852, what most regard as the first intercollegiate sporting event—a rowing race between Harvard and Yale—took place on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. The sponsors included a railroad line and a brewery. Although the start had to be delayed to enable the athletes to sober up, Harvard eventually won and its rowers received coveted black oars from future United States President Franklin Pierce, who attended.

Collegiate sports have come a long way since then, but commercial revenues still provide financial support for them. And Gilbert Gaul argues in his new book, Billion-Dollar Ball, that athletic programs at a number of major universities have become so lucrative that it should be questioned whether they deserve to be considered part of higher education and entitled to the various benefits, including tax savings, that colleges and universities normally receive.

This is not a new topic for Gaul, a ­P ulitzer Prize-awarded journalist who has reported for the Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, and other papers. In an earlier book, Free Ride: The ­Tax-­Exempt Economy, he and Neill Borowski took on the ­profit-making arms of hospitals, trade associations, and research laboratories at universities. They accused these organizations of serving private interests rather than public ones, and urged that the law should not treat them as charities.

Putting “big-money” athletics in the dock this time, Gaul levels essentially the same indictment.

But as in his earlier book he confuses the performance of a small proportion of organizations with the main body, exaggerates their transgressions, and offers no practical remedy. Failing to separate excesses from wider practices, Gaul ignores the possibility that “big-money” sports—and for that matter, other kinds of commercial activity carried out within sectors of the nonprofit world—might serve useful purposes, justifying their inclusion as one element of higher education.

Gaul focuses his attention on the programs of the “Power Five” athletic conferences: the Big Ten, Atlantic Coast, Southeastern, Big 12, and PAC-12. The schools in them are predominantly large state universities that have long traditions of 56

Billion-Dollar Ball: A Journey through the Big-Money Culture of College Football

By Gilbert Gaul

PHILANTHROPY

i­ntercollegiate football and considerable (though by no means unlimited) authority over how they conduct their programs. Their games are heavily televised, earning them copious broadcast revenues.

Successful football programs also often bring substantial flows of donated money to colleges—from alumni and local givers. What the members of top football conferences do with their revenues is what agitates Gaul. Many use them to build or expand lavish stadiums and other facilities. They also pay seven-figure salaries to coaches, and employ numerous staffers to administer their athletic programs and oversee their athletes. To ensure that their players meet NCAA academic standards they employ armies of tutors and counselors, and erect state-of-the-art study halls. To market their teams, they invest ­heavily in media events and develop licensing agreements with clothing manufacturers and others to promote their “brands.” Gaul reports that at the University of Oregon and elsewhere, the provisions for student athletes are now more lavish than those to which even honors students have access.

In the past two decades many universities have moved toward a business model that expects most campus departments and schools to be self-supporting to some considerable degree. Programs with falling enrollments can face retrenchment, or even elimination unless schools choose to subsidize them. Major athletic departments with fast-growing revenues from football have thus been able to use much of their money for sports expansion, unless they decide—and, Gaul emphasizes, it is often their decision—to share funds with other parts of the university.

At some prominent Power Five universities, not even the school’s other athletic programs have benefited much from the dollars flowing into football. Gaul constructs a table showing that among the athletic departments that were most successful financially in 2012, only Stanford’s supported a significant amount of student participation in varsity sports besides football. (The University of Alabama operated a total of only 15 varsity teams, with just 478 student-athletes.) By contrast, some universities with less lucrative football programs but other fat sources of revenue—like Princeton, Harvard, and Yale—fielded more intercollegiate teams and involved more students in them.

A cademics have been torn on this subject.

In 1987, Ira Heyman, then chancellor of the ­University of California, Berkeley, told a meeting, “We have overemphasized athletics to the point

that a­ thletics has become more important than education.” There have been blue-ribbon commissions, NCAA task forces, and Congressional hearings about the dangers of “big-money” sports.

But not much has changed, except for continued growth in athletic programs.

G aul entertains faint hope that university ­leaders might rein in their sports programs. He quotes one expressing the view that doing so would be a quick way of becoming an ex-president. Nor does he expect rebellion from college athletes. He suggests that paying them, as some critics who believe they are being exploited suggest, would just redistribute the proceeds of a system he dislikes, not restructure how it works.

Changing public policy is not a likely solution either. Altering the tax laws to remove tax-­exemption from the television benefits and other commercial revenue athletic departments receive, and ­tax-deductibility from donations tied to tickets and other perks, would undoubtedly undermine the economics of “big-money” sports. But as Gaul notes, clever accounting can find ways to counteract such changes. And Congress has resisted such interventions in the past.

A crucial reality that Gaul fails to acknowledge in this book is that, actually, relatively few of the “big-money” athletic programs are financially flush.

In fiscal year 2013, according to the NCAA, just 20 of the top-division athletic programs earned a profit. The schools Gaul focuses on are the elite, not the mainstream. They pay the higher salaries, have larger staffs, and occupy fancier facilities. A few even give money to other parts of their schools.

While the rest of the 125 schools in the “Football Bowl Subdivision” drew 80 percent of their revenue from ticket sales, broadcast revenues, and donations, they also relied on subsidies from their colleges or universities, who view these investments as marketing and student-life support. During the past decade, athletic expenditures as a percentage of university budgets grew from 4.6 percent to just 5.8 percent—hardly an explosion.

If spending on intercollegiate sports is not as wildly out-of-control as Gaul suggests, one can still ask whether it should be treated as part of an educational and charitable enterprise, rather than as an entertainment business which should be taxed. The fact that most universities and colleges are willing to subsidize their programs—and the importance of the subsidy rises rapidly among lower-division schools—suggests one answer: The institutions

involved seem to think there are important payoffs to athletic investments.

Considerable academic research has been done on how successful sports programs affect donations to colleges, applications for admission, and other aspects of higher education. A 2009 paper by the Congressional Budget Office summarized the ­findings as “positive but small.” Even ­state-government appropriations tend to be more forthcoming for colleges with a ­football team (whether or not it had a winning record), a­ ccording to one study.

In other words, contrary to what Gaul argues, “big-money” football can further the educational capacities and purposes of universities in any number of ways. Astronomical salaries for coaches, luxurious seating in stadiums, and “donations” that seem more forced than voluntary may simply be the costs that have to be incurred (at least in some schools) to remain competitive. Supporting higher education for its own sake might be preferable. But the former president of a top-division school may have shown a better grasp of reality when he stated: “Show me a chemistry lecture that attracts 100,000 people to my school.”

Leslie Lenkowsky is professor of public affairs and philanthropic studies at Indiana University, and a contributing editor of Philanthropy.

Redefining Usury B Y JO H N ST E E LE G O R DO N

The Richest Man Who Ever Lived: The Life and Times of Jacob Fugger

By Greg Steinmetz

SPRING 2016

Jacob Fugger, who lived from 1459 to 1525, powerfully nudged the modern world into existence. He had nothing to do with the two most momentous events of his lifetime—the European discovery of the New World in 1492 and the Protestant R ­ eformation that began in 1517. Fugger was no seagoing explorer, and he was a staunch Catholic all his life.

Jacob Fugger was a banker. In the fifteenth century the European economy was expanding rapidly.

That made bankers—who collect capital from those who have it in surplus and lend it to those who want to put it to productive use—very important.

In his entertaining new biography, The ­Richest Man Who Ever Lived, stock analyst and former Wall Street Journal reporter Greg Steinmetz shows that Fugger was an exceptionally gifted financier, possessing in spades the dual instincts such men need if they are to succeed: the ability to correctly judge worldly risk and the ability to assess human ­c haracter. With these capacities, plus a boundless ambition, Fugger became the richest and 57

books most ­powerful moneyman in Europe. He walked with kings and influenced them by ­lending—or refusing to lend—the resources they needed to realize their schemes. Active all across Europe, Fugger provided many services that other bankers could not match.

For instance, it was via his banking network that small sums placed in collection plates all over Europe gently but relentlessly flowed to the Vatican.

Born into a family that had recently moved up to the burgher class (his grandfather had been born a peasant), the Fuggers lived in Augsburg, in what is now Bavaria in southern Germany. It was then a free city, answering only to the Holy Roman Emperor. A nexus of trade routes between northern and ­Mediterranean Europe, the town was very prosperous. By the time he was 40 Fugger was running the family bank, despite having two older brothers in the business.

Steinmetz guides the reader through many complicated historical twists. These are essential to appreciating the depth of Fugger’s accomplishments. His dealings with the Pope were probably Fugger’s most important contribution to the emergence of modernity. The work of bankers is powered by the interest they charge borrowers and pay depositors. Without this, the financier has no role to play and no contribution to make. In the fifteenth century, there was a big problem: The Catholic Church forbade charging interest, calling it usury, and a sin.

The prohibition against lending money at interest has ancient roots, dating back almost to the invention of money itself in the seventh century B.C. Aristotle, for instance, argued that while it was all right to lend someone land and charge rent, that was because land produced crops and the owner of the land should get his share. Ignorant of the concept of liquid capital, Aristotle thought money produced nothing, that it was sterile. Later, in the New ­Testament (Luke 6:35), Jesus said, “Lend, hoping for nothing again.” In 1187 Pope Urban III declared usury a mortal sin and both St. Thomas Aquinas and Dante denounced it.

Banking, however, cannot exist without payment of interest in return for the use of capital. As the European economy expanded 58

in the high Middle Ages and Renaissance, the need for banking expanded with it.

Jews—who were not subject to church laws against usury, and who were blocked from many other professions—often filled the economic niche for money lenders.

Although banking can be a hazardous business (especially when lending to kings, who were notorious for defaulting on their obligations), it can also be very profitable. As the economy expanded, more and more Christians, such as the Medici family, became bankers. To do so, they had to engage in subterfuge. Instead of referring to the money they earned as interest, they would call it “penalties,” or ­“processing fees.”

before a large audience. Soon the “­Augsburg Contract” by which Fugger and other bankers agreed to pay five percent interest to depositors stopped being denounced as heretical.

Fugger wrote to Pope Leo X about a definitive change in Vatican policy. In 1515, Leo signed a papal bull specifying that “Usury means nothing else than gain or profit…that is acquired without labor, cost, or risk.” The ancient prohibition against charging interest was dead and capitalism could take a big step forward, thanks to Jacob Fugger.

In addition to his successful banking, and his successful reforming of church

While done in self-interest, Fugger ’s crusade to redefine usury had philanthropic effects, expanding prosperity for hundreds of millions of people.

Or they took payment in kind. Fugger, for instance, made a large loan to Archduke Sigismund of Tyrol that was backed by the output of silver mines the archduke owned.

Fugger took his interest on the loan not in cash but in silver bullion, thus avoiding being charged with usury, even though bullion can be almost instantly coined into money.

These efforts complicated bookkeeping and contracts, though, and increasingly influential bankers wanted the prohibition against usury ended. ­Fugger had heard about a young theologian named Johannes Eck who argued that lending at interest was acceptable so long as the lender was assuming risk. Fugger asked him to expand on his argument and to publicly debate it with other scholars. While done in clear self-interest, his sponsorship of Eck had philanthropic effects, spreading popular understanding that charging interest was rational fairness, not exploitation, thereby normalizing capital exchanges and expanding prosperity for hundreds of millions of people.

Many intellectuals—then, as now, often more interested in theory than in real-world practice—objected to the debate, and no university in Germany was willing to host it. Undaunted, ­Fugger arranged the event at the University of Bologna—Europe’s o­ ldest ­university—and the discussion was held PHILANTHROPY

policy, Fugger helped bring Renaissance ideas to northern Europe. His banking house and personal residence in Augsburg were the first buildings north of the Alps to be built in the new Renaissance style.

They helped popularize it.

And Fugger was a philanthropist. In 1516 he founded the Fuggerei for housing the poor of Augsburg. By 1523 it contained 52 houses, and in later years would include a church. Each apartment had its own entrance, a kitchen, parlor, bedroom, small extra room, and a garden. Still in use today, the Fuggerei is the oldest social-housing project in the world.

According to Steinmetz, when Fugger died he was worth 2 percent of the total European GNP of his day. Economic statistics of that era are few and far between, and translating the value of money over large spans of time is difficult under the best of circumstances. But whether Jacob Fugger was the richest man who ever lived or not, he was certainly an unsung hero of human prosperity, whose actions birthed our current engines of capitalist success, steadily improving the civic life that we sometimes take for granted today.

John Steele Gordon is a Philanthropy contributing editor.

{books in brief }

Peggy Guggenheim: The Shock of the Modern

BY FRANCINE PR O S E

Materialism, sex, and celebrity social life filled Peggy Guggenheim’s often-sad life, but her flamboyant personality brought prominence to modern art. She used her name, funds, and connections to not only support talented friends and save countless paintings from destruction during World War II, but also change the way that the public interacts with art.

In Peggy Guggenheim: The Shock of the Modern, Francine Prose uncovers the sources of Peggy’s controversial bohemian lifestyle and her mythologizing of herself and the artists she supported.

Rather than just reporting the scandalous scenes of Peggy’s life, Prose carefully examines her contradictions. While regularly making attention-drawing scenes, Prose argues, Peggy was actually an unconfident person. Her many anxieties included her Jewish heritage, a large nose that made her feel ugly, and her belief that she wasn’t intelligent or talented.

Peggy’s fortune also played a complicated role in her life. While she was always the richest person in her social circles, she wasn’t wealthy

get in her way.” Prose asserts that despite this apparent lack of empathy, Peggy genuinely believed she was helping artists.

And, in fact, she did. She saved countless paintings from being destroyed by Nazis. Her buying gave some of the creators cash with which to flee. And during

by G ­ uggenheim standards. Prose the war she gave over 500,000 francs to explains that Peggy’s father, Benjamin help diplomat Varian Fry save 200 artists, ­Guggenheim, made a poor business scientists, writers, musicians, and film decision to pursue his own investment directors, including Andre Breton, the interests rather than working with his founding father of surrealism. brothers in the mining and refinery In 1942 she opened another gallery sector. (If a poor investor, he was yet a in New York, called Art of This Century. gallant gentleman, famously choosing to Inspired by the surrealist exhibitions she forgo a seat in a lifeboat and go down saw in Europe, “Peggy changed the way that with the Titanic, stating that “No woman people looked at art. No longer a passive shall be left aboard this ship because spectator, the gallerygoer would have a Ben G ­ uggenheim was a coward.”) With a cerebral and sensory experience.” Art of This name like Guggenheim, her peers always Century was a cross between an amusebelieved Peggy had more money than she ment park, haunted house, and Parisian café, ever let on, yet her inheritance was less combining innovative architecture with than $1 million. theater set design, sculpture, and paintings.

With comparatively little free cash, It offered free admission so anyone from Peggy had to be inventive to fulfill any background could access the highbrow the philanthropic expectations for a art world. Through her outrageous persona, ­Guggenheim. Encouraged by friends like eye for art and display, and ability to listen Marcel Duchamp and Samuel Becket, she to advice, Peggy made her galleries the began collecting modern art when she was up-and-coming places for modern artists.

39. She opened an art gallery in L ­ ondon Her patronage allowed Jackson Pollock, from 1938 to 1939 that “was not commer- Pablo Picasso, and S ­ alvador Dali to become cially successful,” according to Prose, but household names. “did help to create and solidify the reputaPeggy eventually became bored with tions of many artists.” It launched Peggy’s life in New York and closed her gallery in journey as an art collector.

1948, donating over 150 pieces to various After the gallery closed, she went museums, galleries, and universities. She on a spree of buying a painting a day. moved to Venice and renovated Palazzo Despite her limited funds, with tension Venier dei Leoni, making it into both a building toward the Second World War gallery and her home. Before her death in she was able to amass a horde of mod1979 she transferred her collection to her ernist pieces for relatively little money. uncle’s Guggenheim Museum to ensure European artists had no idea what that the art would be safe and open to would happen to them or their work, so the public. they sold to Peggy. During this time, she From Peggy’s fears and insecurities to appears insensitive and cutthroat; one her successes in the art world, Prose guides friend accused her of “being so fixated on the reader through a bumpy journey, s­ howing her collection that if she found a truck to in the end how even a donor on a limited transport it, she would happily run down budget can make a huge impact with the any refugees who had the misfortune to right strategy, people, and timing. —Jen Para SPRING 2016

59

president’s note Inviting Your Response

My thanks to the many members and friends of The Philanthropy Roundtable who have taken time to send reactions to our new Almanac of American Philanthropy.

To encourage all of you to crack open your volumes and make the Almanac a hardworking part of your daily philanthropic decision-making, you’ll find some excerpts below from the surge of responses some of your peers sent in during the first few weeks of the book’s availability.

T he Almanac is the handiwork of the Roundtable’s Karl Zinsmeister. A masterful storyteller, Karl has been giving lively and entertaining talks around the country about the indispensable role of philanthropy in fueling American success. If you would like to host Karl as a speaker in your community, please contact ­AlmanacEditor@PhilanthropyRoundtable.org.

And if you have suggestions, encouragement, or criticisms for the book itself, please e-mail that same address, or let me know directly. The Almanac was created to be a helpful practical guide, so we will listen carefully to your feedback. Our goal is to keep this work up-to-date and relevant as a valuable resource for generous givers for years to come.

It is the most worthwhile book I have ever received on this important subject.

—Ken Davis, Ken Davis Foundation You had a great start to the year with the publication of the Almanac of American Philanthropy. Congratulations!

—Emmett Carson, Silicon Valley Community Foundation I’ve already turned to it twice to find answers! —Tim Delaney, National Council of Nonprofits This unbelievable compilation is a treasure of information to be utilized as an educational and operational resource for years to come. —Charles Huston, Huston Foundation No other book chronicles the extent to which private philanthropic action has changed the face of the country for the better. —Peter Lipsett, DonorsTrust

Adam Meyerson, President The Philanthropy Roundtable

Well-researched and useful.

—David Rubenstein, Carlyle Group

The Almanac of American Philanthropy I had no intention of reading the What an amazing compendium. is something new under the sun: a Almanac…. As I began to thumb through —John Kramer, Institute for Justice sweeping reference guide to one of the pages I found one excitement after the most remarkable institutions of another and was not prepared for how It is simply outstanding. —David Wills, American life. —Jeff Jacoby, readable the Almanac is. In fact, under National Christian Foundation Boston Globe separate cover I am ordering two copies for my daughters because the Almanac You’ve produced an immensely An epic and important book that is such a treasure. —Red McCombs, valuable resource for those of us who anchors us in the reality of America’s McCombs Foundation study generosity. —Hilary Davidson, philanthropic history, values, and impact.

University of Notre Dame I am amazed, overjoyed, intrigued, and An indispensable roadmap to the inspired by this work! evolution of philanthropy. Just Congratulations on a remarkable —Tom Tierney, Bridgespan Group spectacular! —Rip Rapson, collection. —Bruno Manno, Kresge Foundation Walton Family Foundation I started browsing through it and couldn’t put it down. —Carol Adelman, This is the aspirational story of One for the ages! —Kim Dennis, Index of Global Philanthropy humanity living in a free society. When Searle Freedom Trust we unleash the human spirit we see I find it really interesting and easy to beauty, creativity, and prosperity.

I actually think it would be an read…. Indeed, a “lively compendium.” —Randy and Ken Kendrick, interesting book for my book club!

—Ray Chambers, Malaria No More Arizona Diamondbacks Foundation —Judy Miller, Turner Family Foundations 60

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