WALTER ISAACSON’S ASPEN • WORK VS. POVERTY • RUMSFELD & GREITENS A PUBLICATION OF THE
S U M M E R
2 0 1 5
As the Uniform Is Put Away,
Bold New Philanthropy Kicks In You thought only government could do defense? Think again!
You are invited to The Philanthropy Roundtable’s 24th Annual Meeting: Strengthening Our Free Society
FEATURED SPEAKERS Carol Adelman Center for Global Prosperity, Hudson Institute
Joel Kotkin Chapman University Gara LaMarche Democracy Alliance
Daniel P. Aldrich Purdue University
Christopher G. Oechsli Atlantic Philanthropies
Kurt Altman Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation, Goldwater Institute
Yossi Prager AVI CHAI Foundation
Thomas F. Blaney O-Connor Davies Denis Calabrese Laura and John Arnold Foundation Rick DeVos ArtPrize Brian Fikkert Chalmers Center for Economic Development, Covenant College Ted Frank Center for Class Action Fairness Samuel Gregg Acton Institute John Hood John William Pope Foundation Philip K. Howard Common Good Kay S. Hymowitz City Journal, Manhattan Institute
Rip Rapson Kresge Foundation Douglas Rutzen International Center for Not-for-Profit Law Isabel V. Sawhill Center on Children and Families, Brookings Institution Dane Stangler Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation JohnTyler Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation Richard W. Weekley Weekley Development Company and Texans for Lawsuit Reform Donn Weinberg Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation
SESSION TOPICS College Scholarships for High-achieving, Low-income Students Grantmaking for Capital Projects How Philanthropists Can Influence Public Policy Managing Foundation Compensation Philanthropic Freedom Around the World Raising the Value and Lowering the Cost of Higher Education Reading a Grantee’s 990 Religious Perspectives to Help the Poor Self-dealing and Conflicts of Interest What Makes a Resilient and Flourishing Community? Rebooting Entrepreneurship: What Can Donors Do? Tax Reform and Private Giving Incentives
THE WILLIAM E.SIMON PRIZE FOR PHILANTHROPIC LEADERSHIP HONORS
David Weekley The Philanthropy Roundtable is pleased to announce the selection of David Weekley as the 2015 recipient of the William E. Simon Prize for Philanthropic Leadership. The Simon Prize honors the ideals and principles that guided Mr. Simon’s giving, including personal responsibility, resourcefulness, volunteerism, scholarship, individual freedom, faith in God, and helping people to help themselves.
Mitch Daniels Purdue University
BUILDING CAREER PATHWAYS FOR MIDDLE-SKILLS JOBS A PRE-CONFERENCE TO THE ANNUAL MEETING Wednesday, October 14 Today’s employers require a nimble, adaptable workforce with skills well-suited to the needs of a competitive global economy. But workers who lack basic educational, life, and work skills face challenging job prospects—typically low-wage jobs with few opportunities for advancement. This donor event explores strategies to help low-income workers find, keep, and advance in good-paying jobs through career and technical education programs aimed at improving chances for unemployed/underemployed adults, especially in “middle-skills” jobs. Effective programs not only help individuals build economic security and independence, but can also boost regional economies by addressing mismatches between employers’ labor needs and workers’ skills.
Eva Moskowitz Success Academy Charter Schools
REGISTER BY AUGUST 7 and receive an early registration rate of $1,095. A $50 group discount is applied when three or more participants register at the same time. Attendance at our Annual Meeting is limited to donors who make charitable grants and contributions of $100,000 per year or who expect to do so in the future. This is a solicitation-free event.
ONLINE AT PhilanthropyRoundtable.org/Annual
E-MAIL US AT AnnualMeeting@ PhilanthropyRoundtable.org
CALL US AT 202.822.8333
table of contents
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38
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PHILANTHROPY
features
departments
18 D onors Who Come to the Aid of Their Country
4 Briefly Noted
Winnings for cancer. The church grocery.
Protecting donor intent. National defense may seem like the last place philanthropy could have a role. Here’s some 9 Nonprofit Spotlight little-known history to make you think again. Birch Community Services gives away By Karl Zinsmeister food and asks for life-change in return.
30 Labeled Disabled
A government system rates veterans as incapable, but philanthropy can change that. By Cheryl Miller and Thomas Meyer
38 Just What the Doctor Ordered
Purpose-driven organizations help veterans transition to civilian life. By Justin Torres
10 Interviews Donald Rumsfeld Our oldest and youngest Secretary of Defense is also a philanthropist. Eric Greitens A scholar and Navy SEAL shares his secrets for reintegrating vets at home.
59 Ideas Why Work Is the Best Charity for the Poor Poverty is one part economics, one part psychology—work helps both. By David Bass
46 Changing of the Guard
Where are the old-line veterans’ charities headed? By Timothy Carney
50 W ar, Peace, and Philanthropy
Bringing the spirit of America to combat zones. By James Carafano
56 F rom Big Success to Local Succor
How one donor found satisfaction in helping a unique community. By Carrie Besnette Hauser and Walter Isaacson
Policing Philanthropy? Why a new federal bureau for investigating charity is a terrible idea. By Joanne Florino
64 Books The Other One Percent Introducing those who defend the country. By Andrea Scott
Something Out of Nothing Stories on the sources of prosperity. By John Steele Gordon
Books in Brief The paradox of generosity.
67 Face to Face Photos from our National Forum on K-12 Philanthropy and ACR Summit. SUMMER 2015
A P U B L I CATI O N O F THE
Adam Meyerson PRE SI D E NT
Karl Zinsmeister
VI C E PRE SI D E N T , P U BL ICA T IO N S
Caitrin Nicol Keiper E D I TO R
Ashley May
MA NAG I NG E D ITO R
Andrea Scott
A SSO C I ATE E D IT O R
Taryn Wolf
A RT D I RE C TOR
Kelly Martin
G RA PHI C D E S IG N E R
Emily Rothbard I NTE RN
Arthur Brooks John Steele Gordon Christopher Levenick Bruno Manno John J. Miller Tom Riley Naomi Schaefer Riley William Schambra Evan Sparks Justin Torres Scott Walter Liz Essley Whyte
C O NTRI B U TI N 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 © 2015 The Philanthropy Roundtable All rights reserved Cover: Chris Flynn
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Racing Against Cancer Jockey Victor Espinoza netted about $80,000 when his mount American Pharoah swept the Triple Crown of horseracing this year. But Espinoza gave away every penny. He handed his historic winnings, in their entirety, to City of Hope—a charity that operates pediatric cancer-treatment centers in California. Espinoza has for years donated 10 percent of his income to City of Hope. This dates to a visit he made to the facility with a friend. “We walk in and I can’t stay. I see kids with no hair…I went back out to the car and sat.” Overcome by emotion, Espinoza started sending tithes anonymously. One of 12 children, Espinoza drove a bus in Mexico City before moving to the United States and becoming a jockey. When he won the first Triple Crown in four decades there was nothing he wanted to do more with the money than donate it. “Sometimes I forget to pay my bills,” he told a reporter, “but I never forget City of Hope.”
Rolling Charity Victor Espinoza is not the only athlete creating philanthropic ripples this summer. The 22-year-old Wisconsin graduate Matt Stoltz is biking to every Major League baseball stadium in the United States—a 11,155 mile cross-country ride—in an effort to raise visibility and $100,000 in donations for mentoring organizations like Big Brothers Big Sisters and the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. Stoltz began his journey in Seattle on opening day, then headed down the coast to San Francisco, Oakland, Anaheim, Los Angeles, and San Diego. He expects to spend 180 days on his journey, relying on the good will of baseball fans, travelers, and fellow Americans to turn his exertions into good deeds. 4
Victor Espinoza shifts from tither to sacrificial giver.
Is it a grocery store? Is it a church? It depends on where you wheel the shelves.
PHILANTHROPY
Seeding Civil Society Clark Millspaugh had created a successful oil and gas company in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He had completed the New York City and Boston marathons. He had been a solid citizen. But he was searching for life significance as he approached his 50th birthday. Attending an event led by prominent philanthropist Bob Buford got Millspaugh thinking about the second half of his life, particularly in regards to faith. “He moved from being a Christian who thought about the list of do-nots, to instead focusing on the dos,” summarizes local pastor Daniel May. After a time of praying and dreaming about helping the poor, Millspaugh retired early, sold the controlling share in his company, and started mentoring students. Then the school principal told him that if he really wanted to help, he should create a local grocery store for families in the area. The Westside neighborhood of Tulsa, where 80 percent of the housing is government-subsidized, was classified as a food desert: no grocery store was within walking distance or reasonable public transportation connections. Millspaugh raised $625,000 from friendly investors and purchased two metal buildings within walking distance of 3,000 Westside residents. In 2009, the Harvest Market was born: a 1,200-square-foot grocery staffed by job-seekers from the neighborhood. The elementary school next door complemented the effort by running a gardening program for students on the property. Today, the Harvest Market has expanded to include a free health clinic, GED classes with an 89 percent pass rate, and counseling services. Families can even come to the store for nutrition-focused cooking classes hosted by the Junior League. Perhaps the most original twist is that a small church now meets inside the market on Sundays. Pastor May agreed to manage the store and all activities on premises in return for use of the space for services. The grocery racks are all on wheels so they can be pushed to the perimeter to clear a central worship space. The combined operation runs on a total budget of $100,000, using three store employees and three church staffers. The health clinic and counseling services are manned by partner organizations and a healthy corps of volunteers drawn from the church and elsewhere. When May moved his small
Bob Warren; Ashley May; Team Rubicon
briefly noted
Bob Warren; Ashley May; Team Rubicon
church to the premises it was attended by 35 primarily white, young married couples. Today the congregation has more than doubled and includes an unusual mix of races and economic classes. “Clark’s vision was always to get the market up and running and then turn it over to another organization to run,” May says. “Because of his belief that the grocery store was a tool to pull together people in the neighborhood and build relationships and introduce the Gospel message, he wanted that organization to be a church.” Millspaugh said that his main goal for the Harvest Market was for the people it serves “to realize that they’re loved, cared for, sharing God’s unconditional love.” Now a new Harvest is coming: Tulsa’s George Kaiser Family Foundation has offered to expand the market, buying the lot next door to increase it to 4,800 square feet. That will enable the market to carry more varieties of food and to expand its program offerings. All of this will be privately funded. Millspaugh passed away in 2012 but his wife, Anne, and their daughter, Julie, serve on the Harvest board, along with three of his dearest friends. “They were all original investors in the property,” says May. So “his vision lives on”—almost as concretely as the cans stocked on the soup shelf.
Mapping a Disaster On April 25, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit Nepal, killing more than 7,000 people and injuring many more. In Kathmandu, the country’s capital of 700,000 people, local engineers have said that more than three quarters of the buildings need repairs before they can be considered safe; one fifth are uninhabitable. As if that wasn’t turmoil enough, the surge of planes transporting tents, water, food, and medical aid to Kathmandu destroyed the airport’s main runway. Aid workers and government officials called for helicopters in order to to reach rural villages in Nepal inaccessible by vehicle. O ne of the aid organizations that leapt to respond was Team Rubicon, which provides work groups of ex-military volunteers after disasters of any kind. A TR reconnaisance team landed in Kathmandu the day after the quake and used drones to survey the scene and assess the most
PhilAphorism
“It is one of the most beautiful compensations of life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.” —RALPH WALDO EMERSON
(from the Roundtable’s forthcoming Almanac of American Philanthropy)
crucial physical priorities. Partnering with HaloDrop and Palantir Technologies, the Rubiconers overlaid their aerial shots of the disaster zone on maps that were used to direct their medical team that followed, as well as other aid groups. Team Rubicon sent more than 30 medics, linguists, and other first responders. For more information on how Team Rubicon and other new-wave veterans groups are keeping their members in public service, see page 38. Team Rubicon clears rubble in Nepal.
Donor Intent Rescued in CT When Shelby Cullom Davis gave $750,000 to Connecticut’s Trinity College in 1976 to endow a chair to teach private enterprise and entrepreneurship, he specified that there would be “no exceptions whatsoever” in the use of the money. A few years later, the college approached Davis SUMMER 2015
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briefly noted
An ex-addict helps others turn their lives around in the mini-series “Comeback.”
Don’t kill with kindness: Mathematicians who are awarded the prestigious Fields Medal become about
45%
less productive than peers who were finalists but passed over. *National Bureau of Economic Research
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maintaining the trust of current and future Trinity College donors.” Subsequent investigations showed that Trinity had been diverting monies from the entrepreneurship fund for years. The college eventually returned $193,000 to the endowment, but the slugging between Gunderson, Davis’s descendants, and the school administration continued. With the attorney general’s office refusing to approve the school’s alternative spending proposals, and the prospect of litigation hanging over their heads, a new Trinity president agreed in late 2014 to honor Davis’s wishes. The Shelby Cullom Davis Endowment Fund will now support two additional tenure-track faculty members.
PHILANTHROPY
A Force Awakens This December, the cast of the Star Wars saga will include an unusual new member: a donor. Mr. D. C. Barns of Colorado will appear as an extra in one scene because of his donation to UNICEF’s I nnovation Lab. Disney created a fundraising challenge as part of its marketing for the movie: individuals who donated to the designated charity would be entered into a raffle, with a bit part on screen as the prize. The gimmick raised more than $4 million, enough to support several new Innovation Labs. The 14 existing labs promote international mentorship programs, development of energy sources, health-care technology useable in the field, and other projects.
Performance vs. Potential In a series of Web mini-documentaries called “Comeback,” social entrepreneur Robert Woodson and Congressman Paul Ryan exercise their long fascination with grassroots action against social problems. Viewers meet San Antonio’s Outcry in the Barrio, a faith-based ministry that battles substance abuse with love, supervision, and discipline. Addicts stumble in for a warm meal and find
Opportunity Lives; Goodwill
about changing allocation of the funds because of evolving views and conditions at the school. Davis repeated that “no other purpose” for the funds would be acceptable to him. Fast forward to 2008, when the occupant of the Davis Chair, professor Gerald Gunderson, caught wind that the college was diverting some of the funds. Despite his repeated attempts to build an entrepreneurship program in line with the stated wishes of the donor and documented student interest, the college had instead steered much of the money into other projects. Gunderson, who knew Davis while he was alive, reported a violation of donor intent to the Connecticut attorney general. Then-attorney general and now-Senator Richard Blumenthal was sympathetic to G underson’s concerns. Gunderson’s administration was not. “Trinity’s president summoned him to the school’s cavernous Gothic conference room, where he called the professor a ‘scoundrel’ and threatened not to reappoint him,” the Wall Street Journal reported. The A merican Council of Trustees and Alumni got involved, petitioning the board of the college to honor Davis’s intent, as this was “critical to
themselves nourished in more ways than one. “The majority of our work is character development,” says leader Jubal García. We’re also introduced to Harvest of Hope, a New Jersey group that settles foster children in stable families. Harvest has arranged 194 adoptions, reunited almost 60 children with their biological families, and placed 490 children in loving foster care. Another family-bolstering force is pastor Shirley Holloway, who operates a haven in Washington, D.C.’s Anacostia neighborhood where addicts and others who are hurting find relationships that push them toward independence rather that failure and dependency. Holloway says she deals with untapped potential, not performance. Episodes can be screened at cneonline.org/ comeback-series. —Emily Rothbard
In Memoriam: Randy Richardson Randy Richardson—decorated WWII veteran, serial entrepreneur, philanthropist, and patriot dedicated to strengthening liberty at home and abroad—passed away in May. Joining right out of high school in 1944, he served in Patton’s Third Army among the grunts who turned the tide of the German offensive and won the Battle of the Bulge. After the German surrender, R ichardson’s unit helped block Soviet advances in C zechoslovakia, an experience which would shape his future anti-communist views. On roads t eeming with traumatized refugees he watched Soviet troops shoot down “defectors,” leaving him with a hunger to help liberate Eastern Europe during the Cold War, as he and his fellow G.I.s had liberated the West amid hot war. After returning home he completed his education, pursued various business ventures, then ran the Smith Richardson Foundation from 1973 to 1993, using its funds to seed free-market, pro-democratic, and anti-communist efforts at home and abroad. His foundation assisted Eastern European dissidents including the Andrei Sakharov family, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s wife, the Czech-born playwright Tom
UBER- FLEXIBLE PHILANTHROPY The constantly evolving flexibility and power of philanthropy is illustrated by a little promotion the app-based car service Uber ran this spring in partnership with Goodwill Industries. As we’ve highlighted in yellow on this screenshot, Uber added a special “GIVE” button to its app for one day in May. Any customer pushing that button would have an Uber car and driver show up at his or her door, willing to cart off as many bags of donated clothes as the user wanted to get rid of, free of charge. Though the event was available in only a few cities (Uber faces a maze of different regulations in every local market), it collected 450,000 pounds of clothing later sold to benefit Goodwill’s mission of helping strugglers find jobs. SUMMER 2015
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Stoppard, and leaders of Poland’s Solidarity movement. At home, his family’s foundation supported think tanks like the Manhattan Institute and the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and academic programs like the Federalist Society, Law and Economics Centers, the National Humanities Center, and courses on governance and policy at Harvard. Having co-founded a television syndication company in the 1960s, Richardson knew the importance of the media. He encouraged free exchange of information in repressive societies by supporting Radio Marti broadcasts into Cuba, funding transmission towers and programming for Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, even supporting bodyguards and a bullet-proof car for Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto when his prescription of market liberalizations for poor countries brought him death threats. Under Richardson’s direction, the Smith Richardson Foundation supported publications like the Public Interest, the American Spectator, the National Interest, and the New Criterion, and books like Jeane Kirkpatrick’s Dictatorships and Double Standards, George Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty, Jude Wanninski’s The Way the World Works, Michael Novak’s The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, and early research by economist Michael Boskin. His foundation contributed to television production of Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose.” The bemedaled G.I. passed away on Memorial Day 2015, a true servant of his country.
In Memoriam: Jack Templeton Jack Templeton was the eldest child of Sir John Templeton, the legendary investor and mutual fund innovator. He studied to be a pediatric surgeon, including under C. Everett Koop at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, then devoted two years of medical service to the Navy. He settled outside Philadelphia, where he and his wife, also an M.D., built successful medical careers and raised their two daughters. By the 1990s, he found himself more and more drawn to helping his father with his increasingly complex philanthropic work. Eventually he left his medical practice to oversee the charitable efforts of John Templeton, whose three foundations were valued at more than $7 billion. Sir John’s passion was uncovering the ways that religion and the sciences invigorate each other and inspire people to live more virtuous and happy lives. Carrying this out was a challenging duty. 8
Randy Richardson
Jack Templeton
PHILANTHROPY
Aware of the danger of philanthropic drift, the Templetons worked energetically to encode Sir John’s ideas into the DNA of the foundation—through its bylaws, practices, grantmaking guidelines, and even its investment policies. Jack Templeton made it his mission to honor the donor intentions of his father, which he saw not as a restraint, but as “a positive virtue.” His leadership at the foundation combined the curiosity of a scientist and the can-do confidence of a surgeon. He also recognized the importance of humility whenever one is exploring complicated topics. “If you approach a subject where there is limited knowledge with a spirit of humility and open-mindedness, you’re much more likely to see ideas that others put forward but you have not thought of,” he wrote. He shared with his father a passion for “relentless questioning,” focusing on the “big questions.” He believed that a healthy democracy required an educated voting populace. Any person, from a cab driver to a member of the Royal Society, could be a source of knowledge or insight. Hence the pen and notebook he always carried. Outside the foundation, Jack Templeton was generous and thoughtful. R. J. Snell, director of the philosophy program at Eastern University, remembers attending a baseball game with Templeton and two students where his host took a stroll between innings and returned with all sorts of food for the two students and stuffed animals for Snell’s children. “He sent gifts upon the birth of my child. He sent books to students.” “While he had grave concerns about politics and the future of the republic,” says Snell, Templeton “was fundamentally hopeful. He thought the world was ordered by a wise and generous God. He believed, as did Sir John, in spiritual progress. He thought love was an unlimited resource which drove the sun, moon, stars, and human affairs. If anything, I was the old skeptic in the room, he was youthfully optimistic. Hope was constant.” “The key to understanding Jack is this,” says one Templeton Foundation executive. “He was a doctor. His mother died in a horrible traffic accident when he was 11, and he spent the rest of his life trying to heal those whom the world had broken. He saw children whose bodies were mangled by disease or trauma, and he would stand in the operating room, throwing everything he had at fixing them…. He saw a nation that was sick at heart. So he did everything in his power to heal it.” —Tom Riley
Ed Wheeler; Richardson Family
briefly noted
nonprofit spotlight
Client-volunteers sort food at Birch Community Services.
Birch Community Services
BIRCH COMMUNITY SERVICES At a warehouse on the edge of Portland, Oregon, low-income shoppers fill large yellow carts with produce, canned goods, frozen meat, and pastries. They can also pick up household items, clothing, and work boots at this 23-year-old nonprofit, the second-largest redistributor of food and other goods in Oregon. The staff at Birch Community Services, however, make one thing clear to their working-poor clients: This is no handout. In an unusual twist, Birch participants agree to use the money they would have spent on groceries and clothes to pay down debt and build up savings, further their education, or upgrade job skills. They must meet regularly with a financial planner and take classes at Birch to make sure they set and reach these goals. There are also optional classes on computer skills, cooking, gardening, and searching for a job. More than 900 families participated in Birch in 2014. Personal responsibility and accountability are big here. To remain in the program, every month participants pay a $60 fee and volunteer two to four hours at Birch. “We talk about it as the dignity of exchange,” says development director Ray Keen. “A family who gives back doesn’t feel like they have to check their dignity at the door when they come for food. They’re part of the solution.”
Universal volunteering also fuels a strong sense of community. “The provision of food and household goods is secondary to the extended friendships that have resulted, as we have seen God provide for the working poor,” says Suzanne Birch, executive director and co-founder with her husband, the late Barry Birch. There was a time Barry never expected to live past 40. His history of alcoholism and broken relationships left him dumpster-diving for food and contemplating suicide. But he started going to church and found God, and also Suzanne. Together they started making better choices, and three years later they married. In 1992, a friend at the local Union Gospel Mission delivered a batch of bread to the Birches’ porch. They gave what they didn’t need to two single moms in the neighborhood. Their generosity blossomed and eventually grew into Birch Community Services. In 2014, Birch received donations from 150 community partners at its 22,500-square-foot warehouse, and the organization distributed 8.1 million pounds of food and other necessities. Groceries come nearly expired or barely bruised from Costco, Starbucks, and other local retailers, and from Birch’s two v olunteer-run teaching gardens. Having access to these donations allows an average family to offset about $9,000 of expenses per year. “We were living month to month,” says Amber Smart, a mother of two teens and part-time church administrative assistant. “If not for Birch, my husband wouldn’t have been able to change his career to become an electrician. We were SUMMER 2015
also able to save for a new roof and to replace my car.” Smart and other Birch participants are referred by current or past participants or by Dress for Success Oregon, a Portland organization that helps low-income women re-enter the workforce. Participants must attest to financial fragility and be employed or seeking work. After an average of 37 months, graduates of the program increase their emergency savings by 98 percent and reduce monthly debt payments by 28 percent—all as a result of generous donors and participants’ perseverance, rather than dependency on aid. Like its participants, Birch as an organization strives for self-sufficiency and sustainability. “We want to model what it looks like to be financially responsible,” says Keen. “Our debt is lean.” So are the organization’s expenses. In 2014, 36,000 volunteer hours equaled the work of 17 full-time employees, complementing its staff of ten. Birch has never received government funding. Monthly fees and revenues pay for about 70 percent of its operating expenses; donations and philanthropy cover the rest. Birch received its first grant from the Collins Foundation in 2003, $20,000 to help with staff expansion. The M. J. Murdock Charitable Trust became Birch’s strongest champion. Its gift of $50,500 in 2011 paid for a refrigerated truck to transport perishable food, and it later gave $162,000 over three years for a development director position. The Autzen Foundation, O regon Community Foundation, and Rose E. Tucker Charitable Trust are also supporters. Since 2014, Birch has helped instruct nonprofits from other communities on how they might start similar programs, which have come to fruition in six states. Birch aims to grow that number of sites, and to double its operating capacity. It also hopes to expand its education and mentoring efforts so that the average stay in the program is reduced to 24 months. —Claire Sykes 9
interview DONALD RUMSFELD
Donald Rumsfeld was an influential member of Congress, served as a White House chief of staff, and aided four Presidents. This included time as both the youngest Secretary of Defense and then the oldest. He also worked for 20 years in the private sector, including as CEO of the G. D. Searle pharmaceutical company, CEO of General Instrument Corporation, and chairman of Gilead Sciences. Rumsfeld started two family foundations, and now donates his money and time to a handful of special causes through the Rumsfeld Foundation. His philanthropy helps veterans returning home, aids small-business proprietors abroad, supports graduate students planning a career in public service, and encourages young leaders from critical countries in Central Asia to forge connections with the United States and each other. Philanthropy sat with Rumsfeld to learn about his giving and ask how private donors can promote a free society. With a smile, hands crossed, energy high, he dove right in.
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Donald Rumsfeld lands in Iraq for a troop visit during his time as Secretary of Defense.
Philanthropy: What are your focus areas? Rumsfeld: Needless to say, I’ve been interested in military activities. My dad was in the Navy on a carrier. I was in the Navy and spent time in the Pentagon. So we are interested in supporting the men and women who serve and their families. And Central Asia is a focus. I grew up in Chicago around folks with relatives in countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia coming out from under communism. As those countries made their transition to freedom, they were connected to a lot of people in the United States who were very friendly and helpful. Chicago and Detroit and Pittsburgh didn’t have a lot of Uzbeks or Tajiks or Kazakhs, but those countries were m aking that same journey, figuring out how to PHILANTHROPY
live freely. I thought it would be useful if we did something in that often-neglected region—the five Central Asian countries (Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan), the three South Caucasus countries (Georgia, Armenia, A zerbaijan), and Afghanistan and Mongolia. Third, we provide grants to global microfinance organizations that promote entrepreneurship and opportunities for self-sufficiency for the least privileged around the world. Fourth: I had a couple great people work for me in the Pentagon who came from very modest families but ended up getting doctorates thanks to Earhart Fellowships, eventually preparing them for senior posts in government. One was the number-three person in the P entagon.
David Kennerly
Philanthropy: How did you start your family giving? Rumsfeld: When I left the Ford administration and went into business for the first time at G. D. Searle, someone told me that an effective way of getting involved in charitable activities was to put some Searle stock in a vehicle. So my wife, Joyce, and I put it in a private foundation. The stock did so well that I ended up with some money we could use for charitable gifts. Later I put in stock from the other companies I’d been involved in. After years of family giving through our first foundation, in 2007 Joyce and I decided to establish the R umsfeld Foundation to focus our efforts on encouraging public service in the United States and supporting the growth of free political and free economic systems abroad. To that end, we chose to concentrate on four areas of specific interest that tie into our mission.
David Kennerly
Rumsfeld: You’ve got to keep injecting people into it at every level who come from the outside, who have different experiences, young people who don’t believe that something “can’t be done” and are willing to try heroically and in some cases actually achieve it. There’s something about dealing with other people’s money—and this is a risk for foundations as well—there is a risk they’ll treat other people’s money differently than they would treat their own. That’s a reality of human nature. How do you deal with it? It takes bringing people in from the private sector who’ve had to earn it and having them be a part of government. The closer government is to the people, the more likely it is that the people will affect how it behaves.
Another was in the policy shop and then was deputy national security adviser and one of our ambassadors. I heard the Earhart Foundation was tapering down and thought, golly, the people it’s been helping might not have the opportunity absent assistance. So we decided our foundation would assist those kinds of students interested in serving our nation. We have advisers at 19 colleges and universities. They recommend promising students with an interest in public service who are working on graduate degrees and need assistance. We gather these graduate fellows here in Washington from time to time, and they have a chance to meet alumni who are out in government or think tanks or doing things related to public service, and those relationships are helpful. Philanthropy: How else can government be improved?
Philanthropy: Does this principle apply to philanthropy as well? Rumsfeld: Oh my goodness, yes. I constantly ask, “Are we looking at these charities we’re giving money to? What’s happening to the boards of directors? Are some good people getting off ? Why are they getting off ? Is the focus of that activity still relevant and important? Are we satisfied that their administrative costs are appropriate?” One model that avoids many of these concerns is microfinance, which we’ve had an interest in since the beginning. I watched governments do development programs where many poor countries had corrupt officials, so I always worried about going through a governmental structure. I was attracted to the idea of going directly to individuals. Microfinance does that, bypassing governments. And it’s not a gift; it’s a loan that has to be paid back. In the microfinance programs we support at the Rumsfeld Foundation, we’ve found that the pay-back rate is often above 90 percent. SUMMER 2015
Philanthropy: Where do you think the foundation is making an impact? Rumsfeld: The graduate fellow program is developing a life of its own. And the Central Asia program has been a big surprise. I thought what we’d do is bring people over to the United States and let them see something of our country besides our movies and our music and the big cities—the obvious things that people from other parts of the world tend to focus on. But there have been byproducts we didn’t anticipate. The fellows would meet Joe Lieberman or Nino Scalia or a head of an association, and it caused the people they were meeting with to have to sit down and get out a map and say, for example, where in the world is Turkmenistan? Meeting with sharp young folks who are doing impressive things in Central Asia, Americans have a chance to focus on a new part of the world. They think a little about what Russia may be doing or China may be doing in that area, and realize that Central Asia and the Caucasus is really not on the radar screen over here. The countries in our program are largely former Soviet republics, but they don’t have a regional identity. I’ll have the fellows to lunch and go around the table and say, “Okay, you’re from Kyrgyzstan. How many of the other nine countries have you visited?” Generally it isn’t more than one or two. The visa controls are tight. To get anywhere in that part of the world you’ve got to go to Istanbul or Moscow or someplace else to get back in. They tend not to drive between countries. We try to link them together. We’ve been doing the program for eight years. One fellow became an ambassador. Another is a deputy minister in his government. Another has a chain of retail apparel stores. Another is a banker. Some serve in the American chamber of commerce in their countries. Some are academics. One is a tribal leader. It’s a very interesting array. Without question the single most important part of the program is the fact that the fellows get to know each other. 11
interview They live with each other, travel with each other, and develop relationships so that they’re now doing business deals together between countries. They’re doing government deals between countries. They have also formed networks bringing together fellow countrymen from various walks of life who didn’t know each other at all. All of a sudden there’s a network in that part of the world that never existed. It’s built on independence and self-rule and modernity. That is probably the single most important thing that came out of this. And, to be candid, it was totally unanticipated. Philanthropy: Do you think about how the foundation’s work should continue when you’re gone? Rumsfeld: I’ve seen people leave their money to others to decide what to do with it, and there are occasions when it gets handled in a way that’s notably different than how the individuals who earned it would have wanted. I went to Princeton and saw what happened there when a big chunk of money was used for different purposes. I’ve seen people disassociating themselves from foundations that became “professionally managed” by people who had different views. We are going to sustain two pieces of the Rumsfeld Foundation—the public-service graduate fellowship program and the Central Asia Caucasus fellowship program—for five or ten years after Joyce and I are gone.
FOSTERING LEADERS IN CENTRAL ASIA The Central Asian countries pressed up against the underbelly of Russia are oft-forgotten. Several of them are energy rich; they are strategically located; and their importance in any struggle against Islamic extremism became clear after 9/11. But these poor, sparsely populated lands are dwarfed in current affairs by noisy neighbors like China, Iran, and India. And their rising leaders get few opportunities to travel, never mind experience life in the West. During the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld spent countless hours in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and surrounding locales, seeking diplomatic support for U.S. military operations. He saw the potential in these lands, and the pain inherent in their transition from communist Soviet satellites to sovereign nations. Since 2008, the Rumsfeld Foundation has partnered with the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at Johns Hopkins University to bring more than 100 students from Central Asia to the United States for six weeks of immersion in U.S. civil society. They meet with about 60 leaders from business, philanthropy, government, and journalism. Fellows are based in Washington, D.C., but travel for one week to a midsize city for another look at U.S. life. In places like Memphis or Huntsville, fellows live with host families.
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Rumsfeld Foundation
Philanthropy: Do you think the private sector today underestimates the potential of our returning veterans? Rumsfeld: People in the military get responsibility so much younger than you do in the private sector. They’re dealing with people’s lives. They’re dealing with equipment that costs millions of dollars. They understand discipline. They understand the chain of command. They have a desire to serve. I don’t know what better you can ask for in a private-sector enterprise than those kinds of characteristics. A lot of employers don’t know that. P
Fellows are encouraged to keep in touch when they go home. In 2013 the foundation held a conference for alumni in the Kyrgyz Republic. It held another reunion in 2015 in Mongolia. Ravshan Sobirzoda of Tajikistan first heard about the Rumsfeld Fellowship in 2009. He had been in the United States before, studying for his master’s degree in international affairs from Ohio U niversity, but the Rumsfeld Fellowship was different. “I have never had such a great experience.” He recalls a meeting with Dr. Ben Carson: “I still remember word for word what he told us—‘No information is wasted information, no knowledge is wasted knowledge.’ When you meet with such bright individuals, it encourages you to take on challenges in your life.” The program helped Sobirzoda to reach for new possibilities. He now works for the World Bank in Tajikistan. He keeps in touch with other fellows, and when one visits his city he extends a dinner invitation. Kyrgyz participant Zarina Chekirbaeva likewise says that “within the country, our team is very active on keeping up personal and professional ties. Many of us belong to business networks where we collaborate.” Some of the Kyrgyz fellows have been working with others in Tajikistan and Mongolia on startup companies. These cross-country efforts encourage fellows to think of Central Asia as its own region, full of possibilities.
PHILANTHROPY
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interview ERIC GREITENS A Navy SEAL, Rhodes Scholar, Purple Heart, champion boxer, social entrepreneur, humanitarian photographer, and now candidate for governor in Missouri, Eric Greitens is always on the move. On returning from Iraq in 2007, he used his combat pay to found The Mission Continues, a fellowship program for veterans transitioning to civilian life. Since then it has sent 1,300 fellows out to serve in their communities.(For more on The Mission Continues, see our story on page 38.) With his latest book, Resilience, a collection of letters sent to a fellow SEAL struggling to adjust at home, Greitens hopes to help many others discover strengths that can help them succeed. Philanthropy sat down with Greitens to discuss his nonprofit work and the surprising places it has taken him. Philanthropy: Why did you decide to join the military? Greitens: After finishing a Ph.D. from Oxford University, I had the option to go to a consulting firm, which promised to pay me more in my first year than both of my parents combined ever made in any year of working. Another option was to stay at Oxford and teach. A third option was the United States Navy, which promised to pay me $1,332.68 per month if I joined. They said, “The minute that you sign up you’re going to owe us eight years. In return, we’ll give you one and only one chance at Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL training. If you make it you’ll be on your way to becoming a Navy SEAL, but if you don’t then you’re still going to owe us eight years and we’ll tell you where and how you’re going to serve.” It’s not a great recruiting pitch, but I wanted to test myself, I wanted to serve. I walked into the rotunda at Rhodes House—a fancy mansion on the Oxford campus—and looked up at the names etched into the marble. Those were the names of scholars who left in World War I and World War II to fight and die overseas. I 14
stood there thinking that if they hadn’t made that choice I wouldn’t be here. I believed that everything in my life, everyone who invested in me along the way, had prepared me to serve and make a difference. Philanthropy: You’ve often said that servicemembers represent the most talented cross section of America. What is it about their training and experience that forms them in that way? Greitens: I worked with 19- and 20-yearold men and women from around the country from every conceivable background. They come together and you see them launching aircraft, talking on radios, loading their rifles, squeezing into Humvees, driving into the streets of Fallujah, kicking down doors behind which there are terrorists. These are men and women of incredible physical courage who are able to form teams to serve a common purpose. They have this experience of sharing together, serving together, suffering together, succeeding together. In the civilian world we’re looking for people who can take on a mission and create results, look at a complex problem and figure out how to break it down. That’s what you’re responsible for doing in the military. Philanthropy: Even with all that talent, when they come back home many servicemembers feel they’ve been highly trained for specific tasks that don’t apply here. What do they have to offer? Greitens: To understand what we can become we often need to have a model. When there was a draft, people served alongside motorcycle mechanics and artists and teachers. They had all these models around them of potential lives that they might live when they left the military. Now in a volunteer force, they serve with people who all signed up for the military. It can be difficult to see, at first, how to take this t remendous experience and all of these PHILANTHROPY
skills and actually translate them. Show them models of success. There are lots of people who have dealt with these doubts and gone on to build their own companies, to meaningful private-sector employment, to school to finish their degrees. I remind veterans, “When you were overseas you were serving the people beside you, and you were also serving a set of ideals about your country, and you should be proud of that. Bring that sense of pride home. You’re very well equipped to build a productive and flourishing life.” At The Mission Continues we have veterans work at places like Habitat for Humanity or Big Brothers Big S isters. They realize that they know how to inspire people in difficult circumstances, which is useful not only in Afghanistan, but in helping third graders who are struggling to read. They realize that they have what it takes to bring together a team of people who have no common background. Philanthropy: When veterans are transitioning to civilian life there are so many changes and choices going on at once. Where to begin? Greitens: Everybody gets focused on how. How do I find a job? How do I apply to school? How do I support my family? At The Mission Continues we concentrate on why: “You have to make this transition because your community still needs you, because your country still needs what you have to offer.” For many, the greatest difficulty is losing their sense of purpose. We need to help people rebuild that purpose here at home and put a great team around them—that’s what made them successful when they were overseas. They woke up every single day and they had a mission that was right in front of them; they knew other people were counting on them. When you are serving others and a purpose that’s larger than yourself, it gives
Eric Greitens
you a reason to get up every day. This is a problem faced not only by veterans, but also by civilians when they retire, athletes when they leave the game, parents when their kids go to college, workers when they lose their business or their job. Everybody asks the question, what am I here for now? There is a lot of wisdom in our philosophical and religious traditions that we no longer pay attention to today. In Resilience I talk about the Roman Stoics, who had a practice called the premeditation of evils. They would purposefully think about things that might go wrong and plan how to react to them. This is just like the mental rehearsal that we used in SEAL teams. What’s going to happen when I’m underwater and I feel out of breath? I’m going to remind myself to stay relaxed. W hen veterans come home and they’re worried, doctors and parents tell them not to worry. That’s terrible advice because they’re going to worry anyway and now they just feel bad about it. I encourage veterans to read widely and apply ancient wisdom to their lives today. Philanthropy: With its emphasis on service, The Mission Continues runs against the grain of more conventional nonprofits that are focused on giving things to veterans more than on asking them to rise to challenges. Where did you come up with the idea? Greitens: I did a lot of international humanitarian work before I joined the military and there were several key lessons that helped me with veterans. When I first went to work in refugee camps in Bosnia, I saw that the people adapting best were often parents with kids who they had to wake up and be strong for every day. People lost friends, family, and every material possession they’d ever owned, but what helped them make it through was the knowledge that other people were counting on them. The people
Eric Greitens, a Navy SEAL and lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy Reserve, served in special operations from Iraq and Afghanistan to the Horn of Africa and Southeast Asia. On returning to the U.S. , he founded The Mission Continues, which connects homecoming veterans with opportunities for civilian service.
I noticed struggling the most were older teenagers, young adults, people who felt like their lives had been cut short but did not yet have anyone else relying on them. In Rwanda, I was working with kids who had been separated from their parents during the genocide or the refugee movements that followed. There was a volunteer in an orphanage who was himself a refugee. SUMMER 2015
One day his friend who was running the home asked him if he’d help. He had every reason to say no, but instead he walked through this tarp door every day, and all of the kids would jump up and run to him. He said that serving those kids helped him survive. All because he had a friend who asked him to serve even in an incredibly difficult situation. 15
interview At The Mission Continues we’re working with men and women who have lost eyesight, lost limbs, been physically injured. They’re dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder or traumatic brain injury, and we ask them to serve. They make our community stronger and they get stronger themselves.
Philanthropy: Another thing you took away from your international work was the contrast between what you call a “morality of intention” and a “morality of results.” Can you say more about that and how it might inform philanthropy? Greitens: For my dissertation I studied how international humanitarian organizations worked with kids in war zones. What we knew is that in almost every emergency the number of truly unaccompanied children is at most 1 to 3 percent of the population. It’s extraordinarily unusual. For instance, I have an infant son at home. If—God forbid—something happened to both me and my wife, our parents would take care of him. If something happened to them, my brothers would take care of him. If something 16
Eric Greitens spent several years studying humanitarian crises around the world before joining the Navy. He took this photograph of a survivor of the Rwandan genocide who found new hope and strength in caring for the children in his refugee camp.
happened to them, neighbors and friends would step in. This applies to families around the world. Yet when I got to Goma, Zaire, UNICEF was estimating that there were more than 250,000 unaccompanied children out of a population of 1.2 million. Here’s what happened. After the Rwandan genocide, the international aid community set up orphanages because everyone wanted to help vulnerable kids. In such a complex and difficult environment, when you start providing food and water and shelter and clothing and education via an orphanage, desperate caretakers send their kids there. This was a problem that was created by wonderful intentions and fueled by a lot of money, but without the discipline to make sure it was actually working. The way they fixed it was by interviewing kids as they came in. It’s not that hard to break down a seven-year-old. He says, “Hey, my parents died. Can I come to the camp?” And you say, “I’m so sorry. That’s terrible. You must be heartbroken. Where’s your mom right now?” “Oh, she’s waiting for me outside.” So we’d talk to the parents and tell them they can send their kids to school here during the day and we can provide PHILANTHROPY
blankets and cooking tins and fuel and shelter and all of the things that they need to care for their own children. With a morality of intentions, we clap for ourselves. It’s fundamentally selfish because it rests on what I say, not what I actually do for someone. The same thing works at a personal level. If somebody decides to tutor a third grader, that’s a wonderful intention. But if he or she shows up for those lessons unprepared, just wasting that child’s time, it actually contributes to illiteracy. What great leaders and citizens do is hold themselves responsible for a morality of results, because what matters is making a difference in the lives of real people. That’s why when we started The Mission Continues, we had not only a financial audit, but also an audit of our effectiveness every year. We had no control over the survey questions or how they were administered. We wanted to know whether it was really working. We were always trying to get better. Philanthropy: Did anything in those evaluations surprise you? Greitens: I made a lot of mistakes, which happens in the beginning of
Eric Greitens
Philanthropy: Your trajectory from humanitarian work to the military is not the usual course. Greitens: When I was in Bosnia, ethnic cleansing was taking place. I was talking with a guy in one of the refugee camps who said, “Don’t misunderstand me, I appreciate the fact that there’s a shelter over my head and there’s food for my kids, but if people really cared they’d be willing to stand with us and protect us.” I didn’t know what to say at the time. I realized later that what he said was true, that if you really care about something you’re willing not only to offer compassion but to act with courage. Later in Rwanda I saw that a million people had been killed while the world stood by. I came to believe that in certain situations people with strength need to stand up and use that strength to protect others. Without courage, compassion falters. And without compassion, courage has no direction.
any new adventure. For instance, I had this great name before we became The Mission Continues: We were the Center for Citizen Leadership, because I wanted veterans to come home and be citizen leaders. But I went to a fundraiser and someone got up and said, “Eric’s got this new thing and it’s a Citizen-centered Leadership Center for Citizens.” People had no idea what it was. So we changed the name. Another learning point was the ideal length of the fellowship. We found out that if it was longer than six months the fellows started to think of it as permanent support, like a job. That wasn’t the intention. If it was less than six months, the experience wasn’t substantial enough to have the effect that we wanted. We came to find that six months was about right for fellows to connect to their strengths while maintaining forward motion in their lives. Philanthropy: You often talk about facing troubles and coming out of them stronger. How do you distinguish between something to fight through, and a time when you need to change course? Greitens: That’s one of the reasons why the morality of results is so important. You have to pay a lot of attention to the feedback that the world is giving you, and if the feedback is that your program to help third graders learn how to read isn’t actually helping, then you can maintain the goal but you have to change the program. Resilient people and programs are responsive to feedback. So if you’re doing something new, from social entrepreneurship to building a business, you should welcome all of those discouraging results. Every one of them brings you closer to figuring out what works. Philanthropy: You are a frequent critic of our disability compensation system and the common understanding of veterans as broken. What’s wrong with this, and how does it need to change? Greitens: If you ask people right now to name ten words associated with veterans, people will say honor, service, sacrifice,
courage. They will also say post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury, unemployment, suicide, workplace violence. People are associating veterans both with a lot of heroic qualities and with a lot of supposed brokenness. We have incredibly capable men and women who come home and want to be productive citizens, but too often our system will say to them “You are disabled, here’s a check for the rest of your life.” People often don’t want to accept a check, but it begins to creep in insidiously. They think, “I’ve been gone on a long deployment. I want to spend some time with my kids. I’ll do this for a little while and be comfortable.” And when a job offer comes they think, “If I took that job I’d actually make less money than I would if I’m on disability, so I’m going to let that one go. I’m going to wait for the perfect job.” They keep waiting, build a set of habits at home, and then they’ve been unemployed for two years and it really is hard to get a job. People designed this system from compassion, but if we really care we have to change the system. We have to change it to one that’s going to help people to live the most productive lives possible. In addition, veterans have to get out and show people they’re strong. And from a wider cultural perspective, we need to have leaders who have served in the military and can speak to this issue. Philanthropy: What do you say to someone who is falling into that spiral of dependence? Greitens: You say “I recognize you have been hurt and it’s going to be hard. Take hope in the fact that many people have been hurt before and found a way to make it through. I want to give you that opportunity because I respect you. I also want to make clear you are going to be responsible for making choices to make your life better.” W hen we take away people’s responsibility, what we’re really doing is taking away their control. The more responsibility people take for their lives, the happier they’re likely to be. SUMMER 2015
In the Navy, one of the things we trained for was how to survive if we’re ever taken prisoner of war. You can have your freedom taken away from you, your control of your day, your food, your very ability to stand up. And yet still you can remain in control of your thoughts. What resilient people recognize is that while we are not responsible for everything that happens to us, we are responsible for how we react. Give people practical things they can do—painting the walls of a church, building baseball fields, whatever. When they start to take action they begin to see that they can make their own lives better, happier, and more fulfilling. Philanthropy: The theme running through your work is that selflessness and service to others will actually change your own life. Why is that, and how does it apply to philanthropy? Greitens: We all need to serve a purpose that’s larger than ourselves, and when we make a decision to do that it strengthens us. We call on strengths that we didn’t even know we had because they’re needed by other people. When a problem arises you organize people, you raise philanthropic dollars to solve it, you volunteer. We do this better in the United States than anywhere I have been. Our society is resilient because the civic sector can quickly and effectively solve problems in this way. And one of the beautiful things is that this also helps the givers. The advice that I give to anybody who wants to start a nonprofit organization, and especially to kids who are in college and want to change the world, is figure out a way to change one life. In the beginning at The Mission Continues we changed one veteran’s life. And then we were able to take that success and show people that if you invest in this program we can do for another veteran what we did for him, and we did it again. By focusing each time on changing one life, it helped us build a program that now affects thousands of lives. P 17
DONORS WHO COME TO THE AID OF THEIR
COUNTRY
National defense may seem like the last place philanthropy could have a role. Here’s some little-known history to make you think again. By Karl Zinsmeister
g rowing up in Belgium, Bart Weetjens kept rats as pets. He became interested in their powerful s cent-detection ability, and how that might be put to good use for humanity. A few years ago Weetjens founded a charity that trains rats to detect TNT and raises money to deploy the animals to minefields across the globe. His so-called Hero Rats don’t false-alert on shell casings or empty sardine cans—they zero in solely on high explosives, which they are too light to trigger. As a result, a rat and its handler can clear 20 bedroom-size plots of land per day rather than just one. And ordinary people can go to websites like GlobalGiving.org to “adopt” a Hero Rat for an $84 annual donation. (The rats get paid in peanuts and bananas.) War-cleanup, war-preparation, war-fighting—these are generally thought of as classic government responsibilities. So it may be surprising to learn that private philanthropy has sometimes led the way in these areas.
Karl Zinsmeister has done extensive military reporting in books, magazines, and documentary film. The history covered here will be included in the Almanac of American Philanthropy, forthcoming this winter.
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NASA
T
he New York Times ran a surprising article this spring about a serious problem of war: How to clean up the minefields left behind after nasty guerrilla conflicts. In combat zones stretching from C ambodia to Colombia and Afghanistan to Angola, buried explosives continue to maim innocent people years after the bullets have stopped flying. Fear of mines causes much valuable farmland to be abandoned in hungry countries, just because the acreage cannot be cleared of hidden dangers in a cost-effective manner. National governments and international bureaus have tried. They hire men in bomb-suits to painstakingly sweep land with handheld metal detectors. Each metallic strike must be carefully dug up to find out if it’s a booby trap or a bobby pin. Using that method, a civil servant can clear about a bedroom-size plot per day. But now there are new angels hovering—and c rawling—over the world’s minefields. As a boy
Rocketry
Robert Goddard (with bald head and tie), the world pioneer in rocketry, was laughed at and ignored by academics, government funders, and the media. Luckily for the U.S. he had private admirers who almost single-handedly bankrolled his crucial innovations over a period of two decades: the Guggenheim family. After World War II, the federal government actually made a million-dollar payment to the Guggenheim Foundation and Goddard’s widow for infringing, during the war emergency, on the patents produced by donor and scientist.
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The military realm isn’t the only one where we have a hard time imagining “civil society” solutions. For years, wisemen like John Stuart Mill and Paul Samuelson liked to cite lighthouses as examples of a service that only government could provide. Then in 1974, Nobel economist Ronald Coase wrote a paper showing that, actually, 34 of the 46 lighthouses that protected British navigation in 1820 were built and maintained by private individuals, and 11 more were run by a private mariners’ association. Could there be unexpected contributions of a similar sort in the world of national defense? Financing our revolution The war that created America depended heavily on private action and philanthropy. In present terms, it cost billions of dollars to equip Washington’s Continental Army, launch our new navy, and fund the deliberations of Congress. Financiers Robert Morris and Haym Salomon borrowed or raised much of the necessary money—working for free, battling for low interest rates, and repeatedly donating their own funds. The unsung Salomon, for instance, gave money over and over to help key members of the Continental Congress come to Philadelphia to deliberate. He personally bought vital supplies and used his connections to get the best possible terms for the nation as it borrowed funds in turbulent money markets. When Washington trapped British General Cornwallis near Yorktown but lacked the means to move and supply his army for the final battle of the Revolution, he cried “Send for Haym Salomon”—who quickly scratched together $20,000 under great pressure. Having joined the Sons of Liberty early on, S alomon was twice imprisoned by the British as a spy. The second time he escaped on the day before his execution. He was an active philanthropist in several sectors, and gave money to many men he considered unrecognized heroes of the war, like army surgeon Bodo Otto, who had bankrupted himself buying medical supplies for his soldier patients. Salomon died at age 44 of tuberculosis (contracted while he was in prison). His repeated contributions in wartime left his widow and four children penniless, because the hundreds of thousands of dollars of Continental debt he bought with his own fortune were worth only about 10 cents on the dollar at the time of his passing. (Robert Morris, who personally purchased much of the ammunition used by Washington’s army, was likewise damaged financially by his giving and his work without pay during the Revolution.)
aggression from revolutionary France, private donors joined together to build fighting ships for the nation. Boston, Baltimore, Salem, New York, Philadelphia, and other towns took up subscriptions. Salem, for instance (with a population of less than 10,000 but a proud seafaring tradition), built the famous 32-gun frigate Essex, which dealt retribution on behalf of its nation over the next two decades. In amounts ranging from $10 given by Edmund Gale to a pair of $10,000 donations from Elias Derby and William Gray, citizens of Salem contributed a total of $74,700 to create their warship for the common defense. The donors didn’t just provide cash; they honed the weapon. Subscribers met at the Salem courthouse and voted on the exact kind of vessel they would build. Later, locals selected the captain who would command the ship when she was presented to the U.S. Navy three months after being launched. Residents who couldn’t donate funds were asked to supply building materials. This newspaper advertisement ran in the Salem Gazette: “All true lovers of Liberty of your Country! Step forth and give your assistance in building the frigate to oppose French insolence and piracy. Let every man in possession of a white oak tree be ambitious…in hurrying down the timber to Salem…to maintain your rights upon the seas and make the name of America respected among the nations of the world. Your largest and longest trees are wanted.”
The privately won war In the War of 1812 a decade and a half later, private contributions were even more vital. When the conflict broke out, the U.S. Navy possessed a total of seven frigates and less than a dozen other seagoing ships. The British Navy at that same moment numbered a thousand warships—including 175 double-gundeck “ships of the line,” of which the United States had none. The comparison by firepower was even starker: The U.S. Navy carried 450 cannons; the Royal Navy 27,800. The British were at the absolute peak of their historic maritime power, as a young Theodore Roosevelt noted in his classic book The Naval War of 1812: “Each European nation, in turn, had learned to feel bitter dread of the weight of England’s hand. In the Baltic, Sir Samuel Hood had taught the Russians that they must needs keep in port when the English cruisers were in the offing. The descendants of the Vikings had seen their whole navy destroyed at Copenhagen. No Dutch fleet ever put out after the day when, off Camperdown, Lord Duncan took possession of De Winter’s Fighting ships by subscription shattered ships. But a few years before 1812, Britain’s In the late 1700s, when the newborn U.S. was greatest sea-fighter…had crumbled to pieces the navies exchanging blows with Barbary pirates and rebuffing of France and of Spain.” 20
PHILANTHROPY
Shipbuilding
Print of the USS Essex battling British frigates in the harbor of Valparaiso. The Essex was one of America’s most famous warships, with a central role in building the outsized reputation of the U.S. Navy in its earliest years. Amid threats to the nation from revolutionary France and the Barbary pirates, the frigate was built by patriotic citizens from the small city of Salem, Massachusetts, who took up a collection to raise the
Navy Art Collection, Naval History and Heritage Command
necessary funds in donations ranging from $10 to $10,000. The donors also hired a captain, then put the ship into national service.
S o how did America avoid obliteration by the English juggernaut? Individually funded, decentralized warfighting—in the form of privateers. Typical records of the day from Marblehead, Massachusetts, showed that 900 local men volunteered for service during the 1812 conflict—120 of them in the Navy, 57 as soldiers, and 726 as privateersmen. Not long after hostilities were declared, there were 517 private corsairs defending the U.S. “Let every individual contribute his mite, in the best way he can to distress and harass the enemy, and compel him to peace,” urged Thomas Jefferson in 1812. Over the course of the War of 1812, the U.S. Navy captured or sunk about 300 enemy ships. Privateers captured or sunk around 2,000, blasting British trade. Maritime insurance became three times more expensive than when all of Europe was at war in the Napoleonic era. “Privateers contributed more than the regular navy to bring about a disposition for peace in the B ritish classes most responsible for the war,” concluded Henry Adams in his history of this era. The American merchants and ordinary sailors who organized themselves into private fighting units got everything they hoped for: no more impressment of U.S. seamen, a restoration of free trading, and deep respect for the ability of America’s
small colonies—weak of government but strong of civil society—to defend their interests. The birth of cryptology Jumping forward a hundred years: Private donors and volunteers are still putting big imprints on U.S. military capacities. George Fabyan was a classic entrepreneurial philanthropist—curious, full of passionate interests, deeply respectful of inventive thinking, distrustful of conventional wisdom and bureaucracy. A great believer in science, he set up one of America’s early private research labs, Riverbank Laboratories, on his estate near Chicago with proceeds from his textile business. Becoming interested in genetics and plant growth, he brought in a promising Cornell student to study, among other things, the effects of moonlight on wheat maturation. William Friedman went on the payroll in 1915.
When the War of 1812 broke out, the U.S. Navy possessed a total of seven frigates. The British Navy numbered a thousand warships. How did America avoid obliteration? SUMMER 2015
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Aeronautics
Harry Guggenheim, the son of one of America’s wealthiest men —mining magnate Daniel Guggenheim —volunteered as
a pioneering naval pilot in World War I. He is pictured here with the shorter Jimmy Doolittle, hero flier of the Tokyo Raid. Grasping the vital role that flight would play in both war and commercial life, Harry subsequently directed much of his family’s fortune into building aeronautical engineering schools at universities across the country. By the 1960s, nearly all of America’s senior aerospace engineers were graduates of one of the Guggenheim-sponsored schools.
The Guggenheim family applied their fortune to a remarkable multi-decade effort that propelled the U.S. to lasting leadership in aeronautics and rocketry. 22
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create for America the most secure cipher machine used in the war. The organization Friedman established evolved into today’s National Security Agency, the nation’s preeminent coding, surveillance, and information-security entity. The young geneticist whom George Fabyan recruited into the world of ciphers is today described by the NSA as “the father of American cryptology.” Mining the skies for defense and prosperity Young Harry Guggenheim was a member of one of America’s richest families, worth around $300 million when World War I erupted. He entered military service and became a pioneering naval pilot. Returning to civilian life full of enthusiasm for the possibilities of the airplane, he convinced his father, Daniel, the mining magnate, to become a seminal backer of the science and industry of flying. In 1925 a half-million-dollar gift from the Guggenheims to NYU created the nation’s first college aeronautical department. The family later established additional schools of aeronautical engineering at MIT, Cal Tech, Stanford, Syracuse, Harvard, Georgia Tech, the universities of Michigan and Washington,
Boston Public Library
Fabyan was also fascinated by secret messages and cryptography, and soon Friedman was as well. Before long, Friedman and his wife were running the lab’s Department of Codes and Ciphers and publishing a series of papers that established much of the mathematical basis for cryptanalysis. When World War I broke out, the U.S. military asked Riverbank Laboratories to train its personnel in the use of codes. Friedman became the principal instructor, and eventually an officer in the army’s cryptography unit. Throughout the war, George Fabyan’s private lab was the center for U.S. military code-making and -breaking. Friedman eventually ran signals intelligence for the army. He headed the group that famously broke the Japanese diplomatic codes—one of the great technical breakthroughs of World War II. He helped
in rocketry, which only existed in science fiction when he penned his first articles about it in high school. After he earned a doctorate in physics at Clark University in 1911, Goddard’s expenses for rocket research overwhelmed his salary, and he began fundraising. Despite launching the world’s first liquid-powered rocket in 1926 and notching other forms of progress, Goddard drew little or no support. Government and fellow scientists considered his field unserious, and the press mocked his ideas so mercilessly that he subsequently refused all publicity. In 1929, when Goddard was the only person in the United States doing scientific work with rockets, he was befriended by Charles Lindbergh. The famed aviator connected Goddard with Daniel Guggenheim, who provided a $100,000 grant in 1930. From then until Goddard’s death in 1945, the Guggenheims were the scientist’s primary (nearly sole) supporters. They provided his salary, research funds, and the materials he needed for his many breakthroughs in rocket and jet propulsion. Freed by their contributions from the demands of fundraising or teaching, Goddard made bold progress. He built and launched many rockets, and developed a gyroscope system to control them, as well as parachute recovery systems and other innovations. For all of this, Goddard is considered the founder of modern rocketry. The Guggenheims were the fairy godfathers. At his death, Goddard held 214 patents and was the creator of many inventions that set the stage for the jet and rocket revolutions, and eventually space exploration. His estate continues to earn royalties every time a multi-stage booster roars skyward. Indeed, the federal government, which largely ignored his work while he was alive, agreed after Goddard’s death to pay his widow and his patrons at the Guggenheim Foundation $1 million for infringing on his patents during World War II. (Guggenheim continued to fund space research at other labs, contributing to the Mars lander and probes that traveled to Jupiter, Saturn, and beyond.) When in 1946, a year after Goddard’s death, U.S. Army intelligence scooped up German rocketry genius Wernher von Braun and whisked him to White Sands, New Mexico, he was amazed to discover how much progress Goddard had made working alone with naught but a private donor. (Interestingly, German rocketry was also a product of civil society rather than government. In 1927 a group of enthusiasts organized themselves into the Society for Space Travel, and with donated money and time created the basics of a rocket Launching rocketry Another crucial defense-related innovation that was program, until Hitler dissolved the society in 1933 incubated almost entirely by Guggenheim patronage was and absorbed the experimenters, including von Braun, rocketry. Robert Goddard was the world’s greatest genius into the German army.) and other campuses. The Guggenheims bankrolled a weather-tracking service for commercial pilots, and underwrote development of a gyroscope compass and other technology. To hasten the arrival of commercial airline operations across the U.S., a Guggenheim fund was created to offer loans for the purchase of passenger planes. The fund also set up a Safe Aircraft Competition with over $150,000 in prizes to spur innovation in methods of flying passengers through bad weather, unstable air, primitive airstrips, and other adverse conditions. The Guggenheims also worked to popularize air travel by touring famous aviators like the pilot who reportedly flew Commodore Byrd over the North Pole. They personally funded Theodore Kármán, who invented the wind tunnel and designed the DC-3 airliner and an early helicopter. By the 1960s, nearly all of America’s senior aerospace engineers were graduates of Guggenheim-sponsored schools, and the family continued to endow professorships and fund research and development to improve flying. Today, U.S. aeronautic superiority is both a huge contributor to the U.S. economy and a linchpin of our national security. America’s other great angel of aeronautics could hardly have been more different from the G uggenheims, or pursued a more divergent means of bolstering flight. Raymond Orteig was a French immigrant to New York City who started as a porter at age 12 and worked his way up to owning hotels. Impressed by the good that regularized air travel could do for international understanding, economic growth, and human exploration, Orteig created one of the first great philanthropic prizes in 1919. He donated $25,000 to be awarded to any aviator and team of engineers who succeeded in flying nonstop between New York and Paris. That distance was twice as far as anyone had managed to stay airborne to date, but Orteig’s challenge spurred continual technological improvements. Six men died in failed attempts over an eight-year period. Then in 1927, Charles Lindbergh lifted off from a Long Island airfield, buzzed across the gray Atlantic chop for 33 hours, and touched down outside Paris. Orteig, who happened to be vacationing in France, rushed to hand the pilot his check. It was estimated that Orteig’s $25,000 gift sparked 16 times that much investment in new technology, speeding America into the skies.
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Radar/Atomic Bomb
Philanthropist Alfred Loomis, far right, used a fortune he built on Wall Street to create a private lab next to his home that hosted some of the world’s greatest scientists. During World War II, Loomis led U.S. production of radar, which turned the war’s tide, and he set the template for development of the atomic bomb. President Roosevelt described Loomis as second only to Winston Churchill in civilian contributions to Allied
A modern Franklin prepares to battle fascism Alfred Loomis came from a philanthropic family that created sanitariums for tuberculosis patients, funded medical research, and built up NYU, among other causes. The son and grandson of experimental physicians, he had a powerful scientific bent. But he realized it would take money to pursue science in a big way. So he made a plan. Applying a mathematical approach, Loomis and his brother-in-law built one of the largest investment banks on Wall Street by financing rapid development of the brand-new electric-utility industry during the 1920s. From almost nothing, his firm grew to underwrite almost a sixth of all the securities issued in the U.S. Then Loomis became convinced that the stock market was overvalued and likely to collapse. In early 1929 he and his partner began transferring all their money into cash or Treasury bills. When Black Thursday hit in October of that year Loomis was not only safe, but
ell-positioned to bargain-shop. It is estimated that he w made the modern equivalent of more than $700 million in the first years of the Depression, ending up one of the wealthiest and most powerful men on Wall Street, in a league similar to the Rockefellers and Morgans. Now able to subsidize high-level scientific research, he cashed out in 1933 and threw himself into the work of the private lab he had set up during the mid-1920s in a rehabbed mansion near his home north of New York City. The Loomis Laboratory became one of the world’s great research institutes, better equipped than top academic or corporate labs, and visited by many of the world’s leading scientists. Loomis had a special ability to crash-study a new subject and quickly become expert. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s he used his fortune to conduct pathbreaking experiments, alone and with other scientists, on ultrasound, radiometry, the precise measurement of time, and many other subjects. He created the techniques for monitoring brain waves, discovered new sleep states, and co-invented the microscope centrifuge. He also funded scores of other researchers and built up the science departments at universities like MIT. When Yale gave him an honorary degree, the citation compared him to the American who had best combined science and philanthropy: “In his varied interests, his powers of invention,
Philanthropist Alfred Loomis provided fluid cash and indispensable leadership to develop the technologies that won and ended WWII: radar and the atomic bomb. 24
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MIT Museum; NASA
victory in the war. At the opposite edge of this photo is Loomis’s close friend, nuclear scientist and Nobelist Ernest Lawrence.
Charles Lindbergh bridged two continents by plane after one of the first great philanthropic prizes accelerated the rate of technical advance in aviation.
and his services to his fellow man, Mr. Loomis is the twentieth century Benjamin Franklin.” Travels to Germany in the late ’30s left Loomis disturbed over both the popularity of Hitler and the gathering technical might of the Germans. Biographer Jennet Conant summarizes his next dramatic move: “Long before the government moved to enlist scientists to develop advanced weapons, Loomis had assessed the situation and concluded it was critical that the country be as informed as possible about which technologies would matter in the future war. He scrapped all his experiments and turned [his lab] into his personal civilian research project, then began recruiting the brightest minds he could find to help him take measure of the enemy’s capabilities and start working on new gadgets and devices for defense purposes.” Winning WWII with radar Loomis put his main focus on using radio waves to detect and fix the location of objects—what eventually became known as radar. He immersed himself in the field, recruited academics, studied England’s successes, then launched a series of intensive practical experiments. This work drew on several areas of science where Loomis personally was a scientific leader—wave behavior, electromagnetic spectrum research, and precise measurement of time. Within a year the Loomis Radiation Laboratory had completed basic research, achieved breakthroughs in making
r adio-detection practical, and created a working prototype radar mounted in a converted diaper-delivery truck. Loomis had made himself one of the world’s experts on radio-location. At just this point, bombs rained down on Pearl Harbor, kicking Loomis into overdrive. Back in World War I he had volunteered for service and been sent to test new weapons at the Aberdeen Proving Ground. The experience left him amazed at the sluggishness and resistance to change of the military establishment, and government generally. As this next, more terrible, war broke out, Loomis understood as few others did how important technical breakthroughs would be in determining the winner, and how much America’s deep bench of scientists could contribute to victory. He made it his personal mission to prevent bureaucracy from gumming up America’s magnificently inventive industrial machinery and blocking vital military innovations. Loomis’s leadership skills were even more essential to his success than his scientific perspicacity. When a small group of British scientists arrived in the U.S. on a secret mission to share their radar secrets in the hope that the
Aviation
After he buzzed from Long Island to Paris, Charles Lindbergh collected the $25,000 prize donated by New York City philanthropist Raymond Orteig. It was no easy task —six men died in failed attempts before Lindbergh succeeded eight years after Orteig first
offered his gift. It is estimated that Orteig’s challenge stimulated contestants to make 16 times that much investment in flying technology, speeding America into the skies.
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Americans could make the technology more usable, precise, and widely available to Allied fighting forces, Loomis was the catalyst in instantly understanding their crucial breakthroughs, pressing U.S. military and civilian authorities to build on them, and then orchestrating important refinements and advances beyond the British technology. He moved all of his valuable personal equipment and prototype findings to MIT, which had its own radar project (funded by him). When Congress was slow to approve the support needed to ramp up the MIT lab, Loomis began paying expenses out of his own pocket. Then he convinced MIT, on whose board he served, to advance the project $500,000, and he appealed to his friend John Rockefeller Jr. to advance another half million. (When government funding finally came through, MIT and Rockefeller were repaid.) Most importantly, Loomis and his close friend Ernest Lawrence, the Nobel-laureate physicist, used their credibility with many of America’s top scientific minds to recruit them to drop everything and go to work in Loomis’s new radar lab. Nearly all agreed. “ They had no official appointment from the federal government to do this. But Loomis got them all talked into doing it,” one observer wrote later, “and it’s a good thing they did.” Loomis, who recognized the power and efficiency of “American individualism and laissez-faire” and believed that most progress came from “free agency and freedom from politics,” fiercely protected the scientists from interference in their work and encouraged them to follow their own individual and team judgments to make the fastest possible progress. As Lawrence told an interviewer, “If Alfred Loomis had not existed, radar development would have been retarded greatly, at an enormous cost in American lives.” Very soon, the Loomis lab had not only mastered the science and technique of radar, but had designed nearly 100 different lifesaving and war-ending products. By June 1943, the Army and Navy had ordered 22,000 radar sets from the lab. These had many vital effects. Radar shot down Luftwaffe planes and kept the Germans from defeating England. Radar ended the U-boat menace, saving tens of thousands of lives and allowing the crucial output of American industry to be transported to our European allies. Radar negated Germany’s leading technical breakthrough, the V-rocket. Radar gave our pilots and ship captains the ability to detect menaces, to direct fire, and to survive bad weather and night conditions that would otherwise have thwarted or killed them. Loomis also personally dreamed up the pioneering long-range navigation system called LORAN. Perfected in his lab over the original indifference of military agencies, its debut in combat changed everything for American 26
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and Allied wartime navigators. Until the recent arrival of satellite GPS, LORAN continued to serve for decades as the exclusive global positioning system. Fourteen years after World War II ended, Alfred Loomis was awarded patent #2,884,628 for inventing the original system of long-range navigation. From radar to radioactivity Contemporary observers concluded that “radar won World War II; the atom bomb ended it.” As it happened, Alfred Loomis also had a lot to do with that latter triumph. He was a friend and important supporter of Enrico Fermi as Fermi led investigations into nuclear fission. And Loomis was the key champion and lead private funder of Ernest Lawrence’s development of cyclotrons at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to putting his own money behind Lawrence, Loomis made it his mission to convince other donors to back this highly speculative project—eventually sweet-talking a climactic $1.15 million contribution out of the Rockefeller Foundation. A s soon as Lawrence’s cyclotron was funded, Loomis plucked off his philanthropist cap and donned his entrepreneur/financier hat in order to beg and bully America’s leading industrial corporations into finding the large quantities of iron, copper, electronics, and other war-constrained commodities needed to build the giant machine. Lawrence was astonished by the Wall Street titan’s ability to marshal commercial cooperation. The cyclotron was subsequently used to laboriously purify the uranium for the first atomic explosions. L oomis’s broader contribution to the Manhattan Project was the modus operandi he pioneered in his private lab and then expanded on a large scale in the MIT radiation lab he oversaw during the war. The race to create the atomic bomb followed the Loomis formula: collect the best minds without regard to their immediate expertise, give them superb equipment and material support, guard their freedom to experiment, and encourage collegial exchanges of information and shared problem-solving. Nobel physicist Luis A lvarez, who worked in the radar lab and then created the A-bomb detonator for the Manhattan Project, credited Loomis’s interventions for “the remarkable lack of administrative roadblocks experienced by…the builders of the atomic bombs.” Nearly all of Loomis’s top hand-picked physicists were quietly pulled out of his radar lab when the Manhattan Project was launched and sent to Los Alamos or one of the other project sites. Loomis acquiesced because he had long been pushing for exactly this crash program, alarmed as he was by military complacency that viewed atomic weapons as
Spaceflight
Harkening back to the Orteig Prize, the Ansari family and other donors put up $10 million to accelerate private space travel. Their X Prize
SpaceX
philanthropic competition led to hundreds of millions of dollars of investments in non-governmental space-launch efforts. The SpaceX organization, funded by entrepreneur and philanthropist Elon Musk, is one of the outgrowths of the X Prize. Today, this private entity is at the center of U.S. space cargo delivery and future space travel. Other donors like Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are also now subsidizing private innovation in space.
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That success inspired the X Prize Foundation to subsequently offer more prizes for achievements in rocketry, 100-mile-per-gallon vehicles, techniques for cleaning up oil spills, and other causes. Currently active is a $20 million prize for any private team that successfully lands a rover on the moon. The Ansari X Prize dramatically accelerated non-governmental work on space transport. More than two dozen teams invested over $100 million in pursuit of the original award, and the companies created out of the philanthropic competition later received billions of dollars in additional private investment. One of the ventures formed amidst this excitement was the SpaceX organization funded by entrepreneur and philanthropist Elon Musk. In 2012, SpaceX became the first private entity to deliver a cargo payload to the International Space Station. With NASA experiencing serious design failures, cost overruns, and bureaucratic sclerosis, the SpaceX Falcon rocket and Dragon capsule have become crucial elements in U.S. plans for spaceflight over the next generation. Other individuals, like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and entrepreneur Richard Branson, are also using personal wealth to subsidize creation of spacecraft that may become important in the future. There are other philanthropies that have been created to fill gaps after governmental efforts in space have disappointed. We know that if a large asteroid strikes Earth, the results would be catastrophic for humans. There is thus considerable interest among scientists, and many philanthropists, in mapping all asteroids with orbits that could be dangerous, then studying ways of deflecting or destroying them. After a small meteor injured 1,200 people when it exploded over Russia in 2013, Congress held hearings on this topic. These indicated that nonprofit efforts at asteroid defense like those of the B612 Foundation (funded by individual givers, philanthropies like Google.org and the William Bowes Foundation, and firms like eBay and Facebook) could accomplish necessary tasks at about half the cost of stalled government efforts. In the era of Google.org just as in the days of Loomis Laboratories, it is not unusual for government programs to be outrun by entrepreneurial philanthropy. In recent undertakings as various as the decoding of the human genome or the creation of our next generation of vehicles for astronauts, private givers have outstripped official efforts that were thought to be the sole province of federal authorities. National defense is of course the ultimate government responsibility and prerogative. Yet even here, as many inventive patriots have shown, there is ample room for generous donors to come to the aid of their country. P
Collect the best minds without regard to immediate expertise, give them superb material support, and guard their freedom to experiment against deadening government bureaucracy. something to think about for “the next war,” the dawdling pace of government research to that point, and the real possibility of German scientists being first to the bomb. President Roosevelt described Loomis as second only to Winston Churchill in contributions to the Allied victory in World War II. After the war, Loomis helped institutionalize his entrepreneurial style of defense research by becoming an influential founding trustee of the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit established to apply the best scientific ideas to national defense. With funding from the Ford Foundation and other donors, RAND promoted multi-stage rockets, intercontinental missiles, magnetic-core computer memory, the building blocks of the future Internet, and many other innovations. The Loomis imprint can also be seen on DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that picked up the mantle of the Loomis lab and carried it throughout the post-war era. (Alfred Loomis also left behind a flesh-and-blood embodiment of his whirlwind entrepreneurial giving: His great-grandson is Reed Hastings—who as CEO of Netflix and one of the most influential progenitors of charter schools has been a huge game-changer in both business and philanthropy.) Philanthropy’s entrepreneurial advantage Philanthropists have continued to make important contributions to national defense right up to the present. The field of artificial intelligence was inaugurated in the 1950s with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. When government efforts in space reached exhaustion in the 1990s, a group of private donors led by the Ansari family offered a $10 million X Prize that stirred up a supernova of new ideas and energy. M odeled on the Orteig Prize that jumpstarted trans-Atlantic flight, the X Prize sought to initiate private space travel. It promised its award to any non-governmental team that could launch a t hree-passenger vehicle at least 100 kilometers into space twice within two weeks. In 2004, a group bankrolled by philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen was the first to meet the requirements. 28
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Building the Human Side of National Security The human side of national defense is a focus of several donors today. They invest in new scholarship, support i ntelligence-gathering, build cultural understanding, and more. Because turnover in leadership is so frequent and the challenge of managing day-to-day crises so a ll-consuming, government is often poor at setting long-term strategies in national security. Many current funders give year-over-year support to working groups to delve into big-picture goals and gnarly security questions. While some ideas never gain traction, others affect government policy for years to come. In the early ’80s the Heritage Foundation published research on the possibility of building defenses against incoming nuclear missiles. Called the High Frontier study, it was adopted by President Reagan and sparked major new efforts in missile defense. More recently, AEI scholar Frederick Kagan authored a report at the nadir of the Iraq war called “Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq” that made the case for increased troop levels, leading to the successful Surge. Both AEI and Heritage are entirely donor-supported. Grants don’t have to be massive to be helpful in this area. The Stuart Family Foundation, an Illinois-based philanthropy with $11 million in assets, keeps Turkey on the map at the Bipartisan Policy Center with regular gifts. While beltway opinion waxes and wanes on Turkey’s importance to the West, the center pays steady attention. Stuart also supports America Abroad Media, which broadcasts a U.S. perspective on world events in overseas markets and co-produces documentaries, news programming, and debates. Episodes have included a segment on ending child marriage, a town hall on Jordan’s response to the humanitarian crises in Syria and Iraq, and responses from Estonians, Japanese, and Saudi Arabians on the wisdom of U.S. defense cuts. The Jamestown Foundation, originally founded to support Soviet dissidents, published intelligence that, for instance, helped Romania become free. With donor support, the foundation still collects and shares intelligence from authoritarian groups and societies. Foundations and individuals like investor Vincent Viola have funded the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point to track militant imagery and analyze important themes. As informal global networks grow, there is even more opportunity to make connections outside of official stateto-state diplomacy. Ross Perot Jr. and his wife, Sarah, have funded, through the EastWest Institute that he chairs, opportunities for members of today’s Chinese Communist
Party to meet with representatives from the American Republican and Democratic parties. Delegates rotate between the U.S. and China, getting to know each other’s priorities and culture. When diplomacy fails, some donors have taken on life-and-death matters. Ross Perot Sr. spent many millions of dollars supporting U.S. POWs in Vietnam, educating public opinion on the subject, and pressing governments for their release. He became a trusted figure in military special-operations circles, and later used those connections and personal funds to rescue two of his employees unjustly imprisoned in Iran. Other donors invest in the next generation of thinkers, building fields of knowledge one dissertation at a time. The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation’s national security portfolio supports fellows in graduate and post-graduate programs and connects them to top scholars it has identified—Eliot Cohen at SAIS, Stephen Rosen at Harvard, Aaron Friedberg at Princeton, to name a few. Bradley also funds a working group on the use of military history to understand contemporary conflicts, led by Victor Davis Hanson at the Hoover Institution. The Hertog Foundation educates undergraduates through its two-week War Studies Program. The Smith Richardson Foundation supports a strategic array of scholarship ranging from examining the writings of Anwar al-Awlaki to holding West Point summer seminars in military history. The foundation also has
Private givers have repeatedly outstripped official efforts in areas thought to be the sole province of the state. two special initiatives to foster bright young scholars: one is a yearly competition for an extended book grant, and the second is another competition centered on doctoral dissertations in world politics. The George and Carol Olmsted Foundation has for decades funded overseas training of active duty military officers and students at the military academies. Its scholarships let these leaders study culture, history, languages, and other skills useful in security conflicts for up to two years in a non-English speaking country. Former Olmsted Scholars include national security adviser Robert M cFarlane, General John Abizaid, and Navy Admiral Carl Trost. In these and many other ways, funders help Americans navigate a dangerous world with open eyes and imagination. —Ashley May SUMMER 2015
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Chris Flynn
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LABELED
DISABLED A government system rates veterans as incapable, but philanthropy can change that By Cheryl Miller and Thomas Meyer
I
n Fountain, Colorado, Robert Smith drives a truck with a rectangular decal: “Smith Labor Service: For the honey do’s that honey doesn’t want to do.” He erects fences, installs tiles, pulls weeds, builds decks, just about anything his neighbors need. “He is quite the handyman!” a reviewer writes. “He can make or fix just about anything.” Smith began his business with not much more than “a hammer and a tape measure,” but has kept the venture afloat for a year. Smith is a retired veteran of the U.S. Army. He’s strong, with tattooed arms that could wrestle Clark Kent. If you needed to scare your daughter’s boyfriend into making curfew he could probably help with that, and refinish your floor while they were out. But according to the U.S. government, Smith isn’t only a veteran—he’s a disabled veteran, with
Cheryl Miller is a writer in Washington, D.C. Thomas Meyer is program manager of veterans services at The Philanthropy Roundtable and organizer of the Independence Project. Any unnamed veterans in this article were anonymous participants in a focus group conducted in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in preparation for the Independence Project.
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Needing a vision, not a number Smith had no intention of leaving the Army. He enlisted at age 20 expecting to spend his entire career in the military. He was doing well, on his way to a promotion to sergeant major. But after a tough 14-month deployment in Afghanistan—his third in five years—he returned to his base in Fort Carson, Colorado, with new challenges. “I was a pretty angry soldier. I had seen so much death; I always let [my troops] know every time they messed up they were going to get someone killed.” Even at home he experienced new frustration and rage. Paging through family photo albums, he realized that “for the past nine years, photos of me with the kids—you could see a huge change in my attitude.” His wife, Anne, encouraged him to seek help, so he went to his commanding officer. Smith was quickly diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and spent 30 days at an in-patient clinic. But after time was up he still didn’t feel ready to return to active duty. The Army, to his shock, had a solution: He should go into medical retirement. “I felt like I needed help one day, so I said something, and guess what?” he rues. “I’m retired, out of the Army now. I feel like they didn’t give me a chance.” He tried initially to fight his retirement, but realized he was hurting his family by prolonging the inevitable. His military career was over. The Army gave him a year to prepare his exit and find a job that would support his wife and three children. Anne worked on base as a dishwasher, but her paycheck wouldn’t cover the bills. Moving back to F lorida to be with family was a possibility. While he sorted out the options, he was in a holding pattern. Instead of seeking his next calling, the bulk of his time was spent on securing a number—determining his disability rating from the VA. Disabilities in the military are rated in increments of 10 percent, from 0 to 100. This percentage determines 32
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not only the amount of monetary compensation the veteran receives each month, but also his or her access to VA medical care. The higher the disability rating, the bigger the attendant compensation and health benefits. Smith was on medication for his PTSD and attending group therapy sessions. But he also had a painful shoulder, back issues, and a foot injury. Anticipating a cross-country move and possible difficulties finding a job, the pressure was on to clock a disability rating as high as possible. Everything in today’s system pushes a departing soldier in that direction—which is why nearly half of all post-9/11 veterans are now on a track to be officially categorized as disabled. (Among World War II vets it was 11 percent, though the wounded rate then was twice what it is today.) The process for filing is complex—Smith had multiple appointments every day to assemble medical and service records, file a disability application, and meet with medical examiners to evaluate the claims. In his spare time, he tried taking a heating and air conditioning course, but the frequent conflicts between class and his disability appointments made attending school “a nightmare.” Rather than getting set up for success, Smith says “you’re just kind of waiting for your percentage to get out.” The VA ultimately rated Robert as 70 percent disabled, entitling him to a monthly tax-free benefit of $1,600. These funds would provide the Smith family some financial cushion, but didn’t answer his most urgent question—what comes next? The healing penalty Leaving the military was not easy for the Smith family. While he waited for his benefits to kick in, Smith was supposed to collect half his Army salary, but a paperwork error delayed his pay for months. He and his wife paid the most pressing bills but took on credit card debt in the interim. Smith considered starting a carpet-cleaning business, and had a strong lead for a contract, but was unable to afford the startup costs and couldn’t get a small business loan. Adversity didn’t stop him from creating and growing his handyman business, though. In many respects, Smith’s prospects a year later are looking up. He is working. His business is growing. His frustration and anger issues are getting better, so a VA psychiatrist recommended a downgrade of his rating from 70 percent to 50 percent. To Smith the downgrade feels like the VA is penalizing him for improving his situation. A decrease to 50 percent would mean a $600 cut to his monthly check—“a half year’s mortgage payment” or “my entire year’s worth of car payments and insurance.” The fear of losing benefits can be so great for veterans that they can act against their own long-term
Matthew Staver
gloomy statistics and assumptions attached. They require large-scale initiatives to convince the private sector to hire them; they’re at risk for homelessness, drug abuse, legal problems, divorce, and suicide. At the Department of Veterans Affairs, the single largest budget item isn’t for medical care. It isn’t for college education. It’s for sending monthly checks to veterans who have been labeled disabled. One of the many recent vets categorized as disabled, Smith receives regular payments from the VA. That offers a safety net of predictable income as he provides for his family. It also brings with it life-altering consequences. Instead of supporting him in his post-military life as intended, disability payments can actually hold him back.
Robert Smith was involuntarily retired from the Army while trying to get help for his PTSD. The bureaucratic transition process stymied his attempts to restart his life and build a business, but he has managed to earn a reputation as an ace handyman. Here he is in his woodworking shop, doing “the honey-do’s that honey doesn’t want to do.”
interests, sabotaging their future prospects. Jill Wilschke, a Denver therapist who works with veterans, has seen them put off attending college or pursuing employment for fear that the VA would decrease their rating. Smith knows that had he presented a more downcast view of his situation, or even exaggerated—“flip chairs over, cuss doctors out, and tell them it’s hard to live with myself ”—he could have kept his rating or seen it increased. But he wants to be honest with his caregivers. Despite the loss of income, he’s confident that his family will weather the change: “I’m pretty resilient. My wife backs me up; she’s in my corner. We’re going to make it.” A cushion that sucks you in The Smith family’s situation isn’t unique. Since 2000, the number of recipients of VA disability compensation has increased by over 50 percent to at least 3.5 million. A recent Stanford University study found that the proportion of veterans receiving disability compensation has more than doubled just since 2000. And fully 80 percent of the growth in recipients has come from veterans rated at 50 percent or higher—where payment levels severely interfere with incentives for work and independence.
Today’s system was set up with the best of intentions, meant to offer tangible support to those who put themselves in harm’s way to serve our country. But its operation severely discourages meaningful work after military service. Many injured veterans find that it overwhelms attempts at self-reliance and professional success, and creates perverse, unintended incentives for veterans to drop out of mainstream society. Brandon Vance, a U.S. Air Force veteran, knows he does not fit most people’s ideas of a disabled vet. He never went overseas, spending most of his service career working as a medical administrator at bases around Texas. When he decided to leave the Air Force in 1999
Instead of seeking his next calling, the bulk of Smith’s time was spent on securing a number—determining his disability rating from the VA. SUMMER 2015
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show you are too broken to take care of yourself can be toxic. He regrets his lost years of relying on a stipend. “Without that, I would have pushed myself, I would have gone to school, maybe a little earlier. I would have tried to do things to better myself.” Now he has a rewarding career and recently bought his first house. “I still can’t believe where I am today in comparison to where I was,” he says. “It’s utterly night and day.” Finding a job I can do Like Vance, many other veterans emerging from the military miss the intrinsic sense of purpose their service provided. “Our identity is wrapped up in being soldiers,” says one veteran who helps others transition. It requires a major mental shift to define different goals and pursue them mostly on your own, with a risk of not fulfilling them. “It’s a big undertaking. I’ve had a couple of my guys who are self-employed actually withdraw and self-sabotage because they thought, ‘Oh I can’t do this.’” Encouraging vets to take control of their own lives and for them to realize that they have much to contribute to society are crucial to successful navigation of this transition. A Naval Academy graduate and retired Marine Corps lieutenant with blonde, boyish charm, William Reiser has always looked “good on paper.” Until recently, he was pursuing an MBA, because he felt it was the kind of thing that people who look good on paper do. But he found he couldn’t relate to his civilian classmates or the assignments he was supposed to complete. Reiser doesn’t have obvious wounds from his two tours of Afghanistan. But he’s prone to crippling bursts of anger. He has a support dog that helps him deal with the PTSD and depression he experienced after losing one of the young marines under his command in a 2011 firefight in Afghanistan. Like Smith, Reiser has been medically retired from the Marines since last year. His disability rating is 100 percent, entitling him to $2,700 a month tax-free, along with medical and other benefits. Without this money, he thinks he might be homeless—or at least, living with his parents—but he hates the idea of taking a “handout.” Given his high rating, he is also eligible for Social Security disability benefits, which he could collect along with his VA benefits. He has refused those extra payments because “I’m employable. I just have to find a job that I can do.” What Reiser desires most is to be self-sufficient, but the VA system as he’s experienced it seems to sap independence, “making people feel like they’re more sick than they actually are.” The VA does offer services to help veterans prepare for work, like vocational rehabilitation, but these activities are often relegated to a secondary level of importance. One vet in a similar situation recalls being
Chris Flynn
after four years of service, he was initially uncertain about filing for disability. “Probably in the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t something that I necessarily needed to do,” he says. Veterans’ groups and some fellow vets, including his brother, an Army veteran working for the VA, urged him on. So Vance put in a claim for migraines and sinusitis— two of the more common service-connected disabilities reported. His third claim concerned a more serious condition. At a psychological evaluation, an examiner suggested Vance might suffer from depression. He had recently lost his grandmother, with whom he had been particularly close, and he was still grieving her death. The result was a 40 percent disability rating. For Vance, this became both “a blessing and a curse.” The income helped support him as he searched for work, but it also drained the search of direction and energy. For ten years, he bounced from entry-level job to entry-level job, working variously as a bank teller, a medical office assistant, and a telemarketer. With his monthly disability check always there as a fallback, he found himself irked by the various minor annoyances and frustrations of work life—a habit that did not endear him to supervisors. With his extra income, he figured it was “no big deal if I lose this job. I’ll just go find another little job.” Whenever he found himself struggling, he would just quit. In the early 2000s, Vance got on what he calls the “benefit escalator” and petitioned to raise his disability rating—first to 50 percent, and again to 70 percent. To his surprise, both requests were granted. This is common. Once on disability, there are heavily trod paths that encourage vets to continually add to their list of ailments. In fact, as of May 2015, just under two thirds of all 420,000 pending VA disability claims were supplemental claims, a trend that has held steady over several years. While this helped Vance pay his bills, he wasn’t happy. His life seemed aimless. In 2009, after being laid off, he visited his local VA to talk with his doctor, who suggested he give college a try. Though by then his G.I. Bill benefits had lapsed, through the VA’s vocational rehabilitation program he was able to attend community college and later transfer to a four-year university. This time he vowed to use his disability benefits not as a crutch, but as a means to better himself, “to get back to functioning, being a valued part of the community.” He buckled down and thrived at school. When his success there led to a full-time job as an admissions counselor, he was overjoyed. “In the military, we have a purpose, we have a drive, we have a mission to accomplish,” he reflects. The combination of losing purpose and an offer of money if you
openly discouraged by his rehab counselors from pursuing the lines of work that he was interested in. “They’re trying to limit me and say ‘oh, it would take too long,’ or ‘you won’t make as much starting out.’” With doors being closed in his face by the very people who were supposed to help him open them, it seemed like the one avenue left was to push for a 100 percent rating. From the other side, many vets with a high disability rating who sought outside employment believe it counts against them in the application process if they’re asked under what circumstances they left the military. “They’re not supposed to discriminate, but it’s on you to prove that you didn’t get hired” because of a disability, one says. Whatever the whole truth may be, the perception is powerful enough that “there are a lot of people who are afraid to apply for jobs,” says one vet. Finding a job “is hard enough,” says another. Throwing in a designation of “‘damaged veteran who must have issues’ is a real challenge.” Sometimes it’s easier to just not try. This is bad news for everyone. Those disconnected from work tend to spiral down, notes one veterans’ advocate, often turning to substance abuse to numb despair or pass the time. For the nation, the waste of human potential is vast—when young veterans drop out of the workforce or are underemployed, their talents and experiences (which, statistically, exceed those of average Americans) are lost to society and to themselves. Sent a regular check but otherwise left to his own devices, “I don’t know what recovery looks like,” Reiser says. With little institutional support, he is searching for some purpose through a combination of nonprofit activities and talking with some fellow veterans about starting a business. What he really wants is “a way we can stop asking people for stuff and be self-sufficient.”
Independence Project. It will recruit participants from among servicemembers who have recently returned from Iraq or Afghanistan with moderate to serious injuries. Approximately 500 voluntary participants will be randomly sorted into three groups. Members of one group will receive a comprehensive battery of tests to determine cognitive, medical, emotional, and physical states, and a trained case-manager will help them develop a plan for achieving maximal medical recovery and finding meaningful work. To put their recovery plans into action, each will receive a “personal rehabilitation account” of $10,000 to $20,000 that can be spent on anything that improves their employability. A veteran might use his or her account for vocational training, to obtain an occupational license, buy a franchise of a store or restaurant, or purchase equipment for a new business. The case-manager will supply oversight and feedback, but
Those disconnected from work often spiral into depression or substance abuse.
A different alternative, driven by philanthropy Reiser, Vance, and Smith have been dinged by a system that penalizes them from healing, that discourages them from working, that tempts them to coast, that tells them they don’t have to contribute to their society, or take control of their own future. And it doesn’t do these things for a few years. It does them for life. If you hadn’t seen their paperwork, you probably would never think of these men as permanently disabled. The opposite might be true of Daniel Gade. He nearly died after a roadside bombing in Iraq. He endured dozens of surgeries, months and months in hospitals and recovery facilities, and lost a leg at the hip. He walks with a complicated prosthetic. Today, Gade is working with The Philanthropy Roundtable to push for an alternative to traditional disability for veterans—a major experiment called the SUMMER 2015
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the veteran will take the lead in making life choices and investing his or her own fund. To counteract today’s poisonous incentives that cause vets to lose money if they heal and go to work, participants in this first group will receive a wage bonus—an extra 30 cents on every dollar of earned income up to $40,000 per year. Because this subsidy is a fixed percentage, the bonus increases with the veteran’s success. That bonus will draw participants into hard ambitious work early in their recovery, then phase out after two years.
The Independence Project will use philanthropy to create a more promising and humane alternative for many veterans with disabilities. A second group of volunteers will be given the wage bonus, but not the planning support, case management, and cash account for launching a career. The goal here is to find out how much each kind of help contributes to making vets succeed. The vets in both groups one and two will continue to receive the benefits they have already qualified for, but will be asked to not apply for increased disability benefits. This means they will remain eligible for the standard government programs offered to vets, like the G.I. Bill, health care, and h ome-loan guarantees. A third control group will proceed through the existing system with no outside interventions. They will be free to pursue ratings increases and any other standard disability benefits. Their life courses will be tracked to compare to our two experimental groups. High-quality independent monitors will evaluate all data. Defined by your potential, or by your problems? Over a three-year term, the Independence Project will reveal what happens if you pay veterans to heal, work, contribute, and thrive—instead of paying them to be sick, as the existing system does. The Anschutz Foundation has provided a major seed grant for the project. Assuming fundraising from other supporters is completed this summer, this principle-proving experiment will launch in early 2016. Decades of research show that work does much more than bring financial stability. It elevates self-respect, social participation, physical and mental health, and family strength. Those who don’t work show remarkable 36
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tendencies to be sicker, more isolated, and less likely to recover from medical problems or mental blows. These findings are so strong that many countries have radically transformed their systems over the last several decades to emphasize “work first” strategies. The U.S. also experienced a kind of disability revolution over the last generation, at least in attitudes. Much new thinking on what it means to be “disabled” has been codified in new social contracts and laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act. On paper at least, our nation is now pledged to the idea that most disabling conditions still allow the individual to participate in society, to work, to be responsible. People must be allowed and encouraged to recover from disabling conditions, or to compensate via the remarkable new technologies in computers, prosthetics, therapeutic drugs, and so forth, which can allow people who once would have been pushed onto a back shelf to be fully independent. But the U.S. military disability system has not absorbed any of these modernizing lessons. It is based on a three-generation-old notion of the permanently disabled veteran who needs to be pensioned off, rather than drawn into full participation as a citizen. The Independence Project will rigorously evaluate a more promising and humane alternative for many veterans with disabilities. Who wants change, who doesn’t? There are powerful interests that have a stake in keeping today’s disability structure for veterans just as it is. Some advocates conjure up the specter that successes in attaining self-sufficiency could lead to draconian chops in benefits for vets. This flies in the face of the multi-decade stampede in Congress to increase spending on veterans—from $29 billion in 1990 to $161 billion in 2015. It also clearly misses the point of the Independence Project, which is not to cut or deny benefits to veterans, but rather to give veterans choice in their recovery and base policy on hard outcome-based evidence. And many veterans themselves are clamoring for a better system. In focus groups and surveys, over two thirds of vets with disabilities say they would prefer a mechanism like that proposed by the philanthropists behind the Independence Project. Invest in us up front and we will grab our dream jobs, they say. That’s far preferable to the current practice of treating us as irretrievably broken, and trickling us compensation over a long lifetime on the sidelines. Most veterans with disabilities can be the captains of their own lives. They can thrive as independent people, no longer defined by their problems. All we have to do is give them the chance. P
JUST RELEASED
Work works in curing poverty. Here’s how to help.
Available at no charge to Philanthropy magazine readers To order your free printed copy of Clearing Obstacles to Work: A Wise Giver’s Guide to Fostering Self-Reliance, e-mail main@PhilanthropyRoundtable.org or call 202.822.8333 To download an e-book or PDF, please visit PhilanthropyRoundtable.org/guidebook Also available in print at Amazon.com and as an e-book at stores
Cracks are becoming visible in American work habits. Whole subpopulations now have weak attachments to self-supporting labor. This worsens poverty and economic mobility. It also damages well-being in subtler ways—because work plays a vital role in building social connections and boosting self-respect and happiness. Any sensible effort to improve American prosperity today must begin by bolstering work. Alas, government agencies have a very checkered history when it comes to helping those who have struggled in the workforce develop the capacities to do better. Statistically, most government job-training programs are quite unimpressive. There are, however, many charitable programs that have demonstrated real success at leading unskilled persons, single mothers, minorities, released prisoners, former addicts, and other at-risk populations into lasting, transformative employment. This book was written to help donors find those successful models and strategies. Because when it comes to curing deprivation, softening inequality, improving life satisfaction, and strengthening society, work works.
to knock down some rickety risks before they start cleaning up after an Oklahoma tornado.
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Venture for America
Volunteers from Team Rubicon apply elbow grease and body mass
Just What
the Doctor Ordered Purpose-driven organizations help veterans transition to civilian life By Justin Torres
Team Rubicon
Y
oung Americans have been fighting overseas wars on behalf of their nation for the last 15 years. We sometimes see those who come back from this service with physical scars, and are aware that others bear less-recognizable wounds. The more common complaint among former servicemembers, however, is of lost purpose and loneliness. From the structured challenges, tight-knit community, and sense of mission in military life, they are shifting to a civilian life that sometimes feels like “every man for himself.” For most veterans, changing gears is not primarily a problem of illness, or failure, or brokenness. It’s a matter of missing potential. Three rapidly growing nonprofits tackle this issue head-on. They call on veterans to contribute their strength and skills to civilian challenges, just like they did in time of war. These groups reinvigorate a sense of mission and the feeling of being needed. They build bonds among vets, and with allies in the community. Purpose-filled immersions like this benefit former members of the military, their home towns, and our nation. Each group stimulates veterans in different ways. Team Red, White & Blue hosts physical fitness and outdoor activities. Team Rubicon sends volunteers to help at disaster sites. The Mission Continues organizes men and women to serve people in need. The veterans who join these organizations express common explanations of their usefulness and consistent enthusiasm for their effects. Participants say that after leaving the military and entering today’s atomized, often solitary, civilian life, they sometimes found themselves isolated and adrift, missing their former sense of being involved in something Contributing editor Justin Torres is an attorney in Washington, D.C. SUMMER 2015
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Team RWB
A teammate races to the finish for Team RWB at New York’s West Point Triathlon.
bigger than themselves. Every single veteran interviewed for this story was looking for connectedness, personal challenge, and something to devote themselves to. Those, much more than material assistance, may be the most valuable things philanthropists can offer today’s veterans of military service. Let’s run The most immediate feeling of loss from departing the military stems from no longer being around other soldiers, marines, sailors, or airmen. It’s an obvious change, but one with far-reaching consequences. Almost to a person, veterans mentioned how jarring it was to be thrust among people who lacked any sense of their recent experiences. Team Rubicon volunteer Brianne Richter, who took a job at a Home Depot in Illinois after serving in the Air Force, found it difficult to adjust to working alone. “It’s hard to explain to people who never were in the military,” she says, “but everything in the military is about the group. Once I got out, I missed working as a team.” Rachel Gutierrez, a Detroit native who joined the Army in 2000 to “get the hell out of Dodge” and wound up a sergeant in Iraq, says she mourned the complete trust in others that arises from serving together in combat. “These people always have your back,” she emphasizes. “Once you leave, you miss that so much.” Team Red, White & Blue is a direct response to the desire of veterans to rely on each other. It was founded in 2010 by Mike Erwin, a West Point graduate, intelligence officer, and combat veteran who was studying psychology and leadership at the University of Michigan. Erwin realized that the self-confidence and social connection built by collaborating under pressure while striving to accomplish military goals could be replicated in civilian life. He pulled some veterans together into local chapters to engage in strenuous physical activities: biking, running, climbing, rowing, or anything that the chapter members wanted to shoot for. Executive director Blayne Smith was drawn to the organization’s team-building aspect. He had served with Erwin at Fort Bragg in North Carolina and spent three and a half years in the Special Forces with a deployment to Afghanistan. After he left the military in 2009, he got a job as a sales rep for a medical services company in his home state of Florida. The money was good, but he missed the Army. “It was kind of lonely,” he recalls. “I had been a small platoon leader and I really missed leadership…. It was a tough transition for a guy who carried a rifle for the first eight years of his career.” In 2012, he was approached by Erwin, who had spent the past two years building Team RWB from the ground up. The group had only a handful of full-time staff coordinating its 15,000 members in several cities.
The job paid a lot less than sales and came with no insurance, but Smith didn’t need much convincing. “It was pretty obvious to me that I wasn’t going to be okay in the long run doing something I didn’t care about. I knew if I did my best work we could grow it and make it into something special.” The benefits of physical activities are obvious: Exercise is important not only to health but also to one’s psychological outlook. And Smith thinks the advantages go deeper. Team RWB’s strenuous group undertakings draw veterans into community. “I can meet someone for coffee or a beer, but that won’t necessarily break down the barriers between us. If we go on a long bike ride together, or train for a ten-miler together, we’re sharing stories, we’re working with each other,” he notes. “It’s an unobtrusive way for a veteran who is having problems to reach out, put on the shirt, become part of the team—and maybe connect with people who can help through a rough patch.” Shared hardship and shared accomplishment also encourage goal-setting and personal focus: “If you put a race on your calendar, when you finish it with your team six months later it makes you believe you can accomplish anything.” Sean MacMillen, an Army ROTC grad, came home to Pennsylvania after three tours in Afghanistan. He felt lonely, gained several dozen pounds, and struggled with depression. “When you take off the uniform, you lose a lot of that camaraderie with the people you had served with. I didn’t have the trust in people that I used to have with the others in my unit…. I just didn’t know how to live in the ‘real world,’” he says, putting air quotes around the phrase. His involvement with Team RWB changed that. Even though MacMillen was studying public health and training to be a counselor, he couldn’t accept that he himself was floundering. “The hardest thing for a lot of veterans is to admit that they need help,” he notes. At a local trail race, he noticed a group of Team RWB members running together and e-mailed them the next day. After a few months as a member, McMillen volunteered to become the Western Pennsylvania captain; in
He realized the self-confidence and social connection built by collaborating under pressure in the military could be replicated in civilian life. SUMMER 2015
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addition to aiding the distressed, the organization seeks to help veterans “bridge the gap” between military and civilian life by reconnecting them to the larger sense of mission that drove so many to enlist in the first place. As with Team RWB, shared hardship and shared service through Team Rubicon helps build bonds between vets who might otherwise remain disconnected. Jonathan Connors, a native of Jersey City who left the Marines in 1996, grew closer to the generation of veterans who came after him, serving in the post-9/11 wars, thanks to his participation in Team Rubicon. After leaving the military Connors had gone on to earn a master’s degree and work in New York City’s marketing industry. He volunteered with several different groups over the years, but “never quite felt like I was completely invested in what I was doing.” Then disaster struck close to home: Hurricane Sandy ravaged the Jersey Shore where his brother Sam lived. During the several weeks he spent working to help Sam and his neighbors recover from the storm, Connors noticed that he kept seeing the red hats and logos of Team Rubicon members. “In the beginning, I didn’t feel like I was worthy to ask a group like this if I could volunteer,” he says, seeing them as “highly trained combat volunteers and medics” with skills he didn’t think he had. But he was intrigued, and finally signed up. Throughout 2014, Connors took training sessions and participated in local projects and social events before finally deploying to assist in tornado response in the Midwest last summer. He found that the experience broke down barriers that can otherwise divide generations of veterans. Thinking of how young his teammates were when 9/11 happened, he thought of “how much they gave up” during multiple combat deployments. His own military experience was different, yet transferable. “At the base of it, it’s just about the guy on your left and the guy on your right, when you’re doing a muck out for someone whose home was destroyed.” Team Rubicon also excels in that other military practice: pushing men and women into positions of leadership. Jon Chiang was raised in Tennessee, served with the 101st Airborne in Afghanistan, and left the Army in 2012. Chiang traveled with Team Rubicon to the state of Georgia to assist in cleanup after a 2014 winter storm brought down trees and power lines. C hiang initially contributed grunt work. As he took part in more training, he moved up to become a team leader. He helped plan operations during a recent wildfire response in Washington state. “So long as you have the motivation and the drive, the opportunity to lead is there,” he says.
Let’s help At the core of Team Rubicon is the idea of helping, sometimes saving, others. This organization r apid-deploys groups of veterans and first responders to sites of domestic and overseas disasters. It can have skilled volunteers in a hazard zone in less than 24 hours. Each of its groups deploys as a unit, with sub-platoons receiving work orders each day. Rubiconers are armed with personal protective equipment, hand tools, solar-powered communication devices, and mapping equipment. Volunteers are trained, and unit leaders have deep knowledge and experience in disaster response. The nonprofit receives no government funding, relying wholly on individual donations and philanthropic grants. Team Rubicon was founded in 2010 by two Marines, Jake Wood and William McNulty, in the wake of a devastating earthquake in Haiti. The pair raised money and supplies from friends and, with a few companions, flew to the neighboring Dominican Republic. Making their way into Haiti, they crossed the Artibonite, the river bordering the two countries. They considered this shallow stream their “Rubicon,” the crossing of which irretrievably committed them to aiding the people of Haiti. The group spent several weeks in camps considered by traditional aid organizations as too unsafe to visit, treating thousands of homeless victims. Since then, Team Rubicon has mobilized its network of 25,000 veterans wearing its distinctive red hats scores of times in the U.S. and around the world. In operations with code names like “Lost Woods,” “Barbed Wire,” and “Mississippi Mudcat,” they have helped fight forest fires, rescue people and possessions amidst floods, assist in missing-person searches, and respond to all kinds of natural calamities. When a massive earthquake hit Nepal in April, 31 Team Rubicon volunteers were among the first responders. They helped deliver supplies of medicine, Let’s serve food, water, and tents, used former military medics to tend Of course, local communities have serious needs that patients, and surveyed damage aerially with drones. In don’t make headlines the way a flood, wildfire, or 42
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The Mission Continues
his 18-month term, he grew his chapter from 40 members to more than 400. The challenge of leading a busy chapter—connecting veterans in far-flung towns in rural Pennsylvania, organizing fitness and social events, and coordinating with Team RWB headquarters to access training and resources—gave MacMillen a sense of confidence that chased away the demons of his transition (and, as an added benefit, helped him lose more than 80 pounds). When he completed his term as captain, a fellow Team RWB member said in a tribute that MacMillen had put aside his own problems to help others, but MacMillen disagrees. “Actually, what I did was help myself by learning to help others,” he says. “You only keep what you have by giving it away.”
Fellows from The Mission Continues clear ground for a garden and recreation center at a low-income school in California.
urricane does. Even when there is no overt trauma in h sight, veterans can render valuable service right in their own communities, notes Spencer Kympton, president of The Mission Continues. TMC was founded by Eric Greitens, a former Rhodes Scholar (he holds a doctorate from Oxford) and Navy SEAL. After returning from Iraq, Greitens visited wounded veterans at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland. He was inspired to hear man after man tell him that they wanted to continue to serve even if they couldn’t be on active duty any more. Greitens pooled his combat pay with the disability pay of two friends to start a program that would take advantage of this deep spirit among veterans. (For more on Eric Greitens, see the interview on page 14.) TMC runs a fellowship program that pairs post9/11 veterans with nonprofit groups such as Habitat for Humanity, the Red Cross, or Big Brothers Big Sisters. Since the group’s founding in 2007, 1,300 men and women have gone through its fellows program. (Team Rubicon founder Jake Wood started as a TMC fellow.) The group also sponsors “service platoons” in cities across the country, where veterans come together to focus on local problems such as homelessness, environmental cleanup, or school improvement. TMC, says Kympton, “operates from a fundamental belief that vets have a ton of skills that are redeployable” to civilian needs. “They were part of the country’s first all-volunteer combat force.” Many will volunteer to battle other demons. “They have potential to be far more civically engaged than previous generations.”
Kympton knows something about the difficulty of recapturing in civilian life the sense of high mission that can exist in the military. He was born on the grounds of Fort Belvoir, graduated from West Point as valedictorian, then spent eight years piloting Black Hawk helicopters. After leaving the Army, he graduated with honors from Harvard Business School and joined the McKinsey consulting firm—a dream job for many people. Yet he “was really struggling to connect with it, and to develop a sense of purpose,” he recalls. One McKinsey assignment brought him to the D.C. public schools just as hard-charging superintendent Michelle Rhee launched a reform campaign. That gig gave Kympton a glimpse of how civilian service could carry some of the intensity and satisfaction of service in wartime. He ended up leaving McKinsey to help build Teach For America. At one point, one of Kympton’s fellow former officers decided to rejoin the Army after several years of “failing to connect” in civilian life. His friend redeployed to Iraq—and was killed three weeks later. In the crucible of that experience, Kympton decided he wanted to reconnect with fellow veterans. At just that moment, Greitens was looking to expand his rapidly growing organization. Kympton is not alone in finding a lifeline in service. Kelly Land is a Navy vet who was on active duty from 2000 to 2006, then spent three years as a recruiter, only to be pulled back into active duty for one last overseas tour in Qatar, scheduling missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. At one point he walked away from a helicopter crash in SUMMER 2015
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“That’s really the most important thing: not being isolated and alone, but reaching out to others.” which several of his comrades died. That shook him, but because he was still in the military he found a support network that pulled him through. Once he left duty, however, that support network fell away. Land experienced setbacks in his personal and professional life, and a fellow survivor of his helo crash who had stayed in the Navy was killed in a second crash. Amid a lot of stress, Land found TMC. He became a volunteer in the newly formed Houston service platoon, which he now heads. “Instantly, I felt like I belonged,” he says. “That’s really the most important thing: not being isolated and alone, but reaching out to others.” Land’s platoon focuses on health and wellness, especially in a poor area of Houston called Acres Homes, where obesity and diabetes are serious issues. TMC vets have rehabilitated a community vegetable garden, conducted fire-safety training, and helped to revamp a local reading project. Land believes that the support, encouragement, and social connection his veterans offer to each other is as important as the service that platoon members provide to the community. “I want us to become a family, a unit here in the civilian world,” he says. He benefited from his tight-knit group’s concern on his latest “Alive Day”—the anniversary of the fatal crash he walked away from. Over a dozen friends from his service platoon took him to a local bar and grill to mark the occasion. “They were there for me,” he says. Meeting the need If enrollments are any indication, these new organizations have tapped into a tremendous hunger in the veteran community. The Mission Continues, which started in Greitens’s St. Louis home and had just a handful of staff a few years ago, now has a $7 million annual budget, five regional offices, and a plan for 80 service platoons across the country by the end of the year. Team Red, White & Blue has more than 100 chapters and $3 million in annual revenue. Team Rubicon offered assistance in 31 domestic and international operations in 2014, totaling hundreds of thousands of man-hours, and served at 13 disasters in just the first third of 2015. The group raised more than $10 million last year and has a five-year plan to grow its response capabilities. 44
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This rapid growth has been backed by philanthropy. All three organizations have attracted corporate backing, from firms like PricewaterhouseCoopers, Goldman Sachs, A&E Networks, Southwest Airlines, BAE Systems, Boeing, Target, Nike, ConocoPhillips, and Home Depot, which Team Rubicon credits with its most consistent support over the years, both financial and in-kind. Private donors include the Houston Endowment, the Marcus, Ron Conway, Schultz, and Singer foundations, and others. With millions of servicemembers slated to become a new generation of veterans over the next decade, this will be a fertile field for donors. With many donors to veterans focused on very traditional services like job fairs, medical and counseling services, home remodeling, and education, these organizations that encourage wellness and flourishing in new ways sometimes find fundraising a challenge. Team RWB’s Blayne Smith urges donors to keep an eye on average veterans, not extreme cases, and to get to the root of the issues they face upon returning to civilian life. “We should be asking, are veterans happy at home?” he says. “Are they happy in their job? Are they keeping the job for very long? Being physically healthy and emotionally healthy, being involved in their community and in healthy relationships, those things precede” the dispensing of benefits. TMC’s Spencer Kympton also distinguishes between transitional benefits and “reintegration, which we’ve come to learn is a much longer-term endeavor. It involves things that are less observable, like social connection, civic engagement, sense of purpose and meaning. We really believe those things are as important or even more important than the tactical issues” of employment and education. Megan Andros, who was part of West Point’s first post-9/11 class, heads a veteran initiative of the Heinz Endowment, and has encouraged her foundation to embrace the new model. Heinz has supported local chapters of both Team Red, White & Blue and The Mission Continues, and has worked to cross-fertilize the volunteer efforts of both organizations with other nonprofits it funds. Andros agrees that it’s been hard for many donors to break the mold of what a veterans’ service group should be. “The Mission Continues used to have a slogan: ‘It’s Not a Charity, It’s a Challenge,’” she recalls. “Funders would look at that and say, ‘then why should I give you money?’…. It’s harder to raise funds by saying that vets are strong people who have a lot to give.” But the fundamental insight of these three new groups—that veterans are a valuable resource and most often need connection, engagement, and a sense of purpose, more than goodies or counseling or another jobs program—is dead right, according to Andros. “This is something we have to get in front of,” she urges. P
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CHANGING
OF THE GUARD
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Where are the old-line veterans’ charities headed?
American Legion
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f you grew up in small-town America, your main impression of the A merican Legion or the Veterans of Foreign Wars might be linked to Memorial Day. Many a Boy Scout has trekked down on a bright May morning to the dusky basement of the local vets hall, and then the quiet green and gray of the town cemetery, to plant miniature flags on veterans’ graves. The parades we watched or marched in were always led by men in VFW or Legion caps. For others, the Legion means youth baseball. Legion-supported teams play throughout the summer, ending in a national tournament. The Legion organizes oratorical competitions and beloved mock-government opportunities like Boys State and Boys Nation. The VFW has a longstanding “Americanism” program that offers instruction in U.S. history and respect for the flag, and honors educators who teach citizenship. These organizations have long had a patriotic presence in America. And of course they played central roles in the veterans’ community, uniting former servicemen socially in posts across the country. Helping veterans obtain government benefits has also become a large part of their role, a function that has more and more defined their cultural identity. Increasingly, though, the old-line veterans’ organizations seem to belong to a bygone era. Local posts close every week. Nationwide, membership has been fading for years. Take Washington, D.C.’s American Legion Post 8, just a stone’s throw from
By Timothy Carney
the House of Representatives office buildings in the residential part of Capitol Hill. It is a comfortable and friendly place. Yet only a handful of men and women sit at the small bar, most of them older than 50. When I visited recently, not a single Iraq or Afghanistan vet was present. Most clients were not actually Legionnaires, but children of members. Wookie Leong was a rare Legionnaire at the Post 8 lounge. He’s a past commander of the post, serves as its historian, and was recently elected vice chair. His long gray hair is pulled back in a ponytail that shouts “Vietnam vet.” “We’re just trying to survive,” he says of his post. “But you gotta have the people. And we don’t have the people like we used to.” Just outside the Capital Beltway in Maryland, Mark Boles, a Navy vet wounded at Normandy, stands outside American Legion Post 268 and recalls the old days when the Legion Hall lounge was packed. “You couldn’t get a seat,” he says. No more. Membership peaked for these organizations right after World War II, when Legion enrollments doubled from 1.7 million to 3.3 million. After the Korean War, Legionnaires numbered 2.5 million. As baby boomers joined, membership floated up to 3.1 million in 1992. Since then, it’s been a steady drop. In 2013, the Legion reported 2.3 million members and the VFW numbered 1.4 million. Even as 2.4 million veterans have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan, the groups have been losing tens of thousands of participants every single year.
And the numbers on the rolls don’t reflect actual involvement. Leong estimates that only 10 percent of his post’s members are active. The drop is steep enough that the post recently had to amend its bylaws so that if only 15 out of its 300 members attend a meeting, that constitutes a quorum. “That’s not just us,” he says. “That’s all the posts.” Some take comfort in the hope that post-9/11 vets will join when they hit their 30s and 40s, but local posts have yet to see any bump. Other posts claim they have plenty of young veterans on their rolls, but that they’re not participating in everyday post activities. “They sign up, but we never see them,” Leong tells me. Much of the shift can be explained by changing culture. The stereotypical dark smoky bar of the Legion or VFW halls might not appeal to twenty-somethings. Today’s young vets are more likely to be single than their predecessors—and a Legion hall is not the ideal place to meet a spouse. Americans are more transient, reducing the opportunity or desire to grow attached to a local post. Not every post has taken this change sitting down. Some have banned smoking or installed video-game systems. But young people aren’t flocking in. Another factor that has sapped from traditional veterans’ organizations their reason-for-being is politics. Over the years the VFW and Legion have had spectacular success lobbying for more government dollars for veterans. The budget of the Department of Veterans Affairs has rocketed from $29 billion
Timothy Carney is a journalist, and director of the Culture of Competition Project at the American Enterprise Institute. SUMMER 2015
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with due gravity, ‘The American Legion favors it. It is inevitable legislation.’” Most nonprofits have to be extra careful regarding lobbying efforts, but the VFW and American Legion are special cases. They enjoy unique tax treatment, covered by section 501(c)(19) of the tax code. As with 501(c)(3) groups, donations to (c)(19) groups are tax deductible. But (c)(3)s are barred from dedicating a “substantial” amount of their time or money to lobbying, while (c)(19)s face no such restriction. The Supreme Court upheld this privilege in a 1983 ruling, accepting the government’s argument that the special lobbying rule didn’t violate the Constitution because veterans are owed a “special gratitude” by the country. The lengthy list of lobbying triumphs by the Legion and VFW include the 1921 creation of the Veterans’ Bureau, the 1934 passage of pensions for widows of WWI vets, the G.I. Bill in 1944, the Montgomery G.I. Bill in 1984, the 1989 promotion of the Veterans’ Administration into a cabinet agency, the 2008 expansion of education benefits, and heavy federal funding for veteran disability payments, health care, job training, education, and more. History indicates that membership organizations tend to attract their highest enrollments when they find a pressing issue to lobby the government for. The elevation of the VA into a cabinet department correlated with peak membership for both the American Legion and VFW. Once that mountain was topped, the veterans’ service organizations began to decay. Even so, the VFW still brings in about $96 million in revenue, and the American Legion $76 million. About a third of each is comprised of membership dues; the rest comes from advertising, sales, and gifts and contributions.
Government battles The VFW traces its history back to the Spanish A merican War, when small veterans’ groups began to band together and lobby for support from the government that had sent them off to war. The first post opened in Denver in 1899. The Legion was born in the aftermath of World War I. Both groups eventually received congressional charters as official veterans’ service organizations. The VFW deployed lobbyists and lawyers to press government for health care and rehabilitation programs, emphasizing the “sacred obligation” the nation owed to its servicemen and women. Today the VFW claims it is the most powerful voice inside the White House and Congress for veterans. The group also has an extensive machinery to help vets apply for and obtain federal benefits. The Legion also emphasized improved government benefits from its beginning. Historian Richard Jones describes legendary Legion lobbyist Colonel John Taylor: “Donning his spats, swinging his cane, he would march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the marble halls of Congress, stalk into committee rooms, present the Legion case for this measure and for that. If reporters button- Seeking service holed him as he left a closed committee session, asking These organizations are more than middlemen between if the pending bill would pass, he would answer them government and veterans. The VFW statement of 48
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VFW; American Legion
in 1990 to $161 billion in 2015. It now has more employees than any other civilian department in the President’s cabinet. The VFW and American Legion have made government spending a centerpiece of their work. They’ve succeeded beyond what any advocate could have hoped for. Today, however, fatter government benefits are not what typical young veterans are most hungry for. After years of government “never saying no” to veterans, is it possible for a membership group to lobby itself out of relevance?
ission includes: “To foster camaraderie among United m States veterans of overseas conflicts. To serve our veterans, the military, and our communities. To advocate on behalf of all veterans.” The Legion’s founding statement of purpose is more service-oriented, highlighting such aims as “to inculcate a sense of individual obligation to the community, state, and nation,” “to safeguard and transmit to posterity the principles of justice, freedom, and democracy,” and “to consecrate and sanctify our comradeship by our devotion to mutual helpfulness.” “The real genesis of Legion service was in the members and the posts,” writes Jones. He recounts a common tale of one member informing his local post of a sick comrade in town. While the Legion post was fighting for federal benefits and hospitalization it might itself “supply funds, temporarily, for a nurse.” Thousands of members donated their time freely, he continues, “aiding the disabled and their families. Many had given their money.” This mutual support continues today. John Anderson, a disabled vet in Reno, Nevada, hit tough times when his wife had two operations in a short span. His Legion post “paid the rent and helped us back on our feet,” Anderson told USA Today. The halls also provide moral support in an informal setting, a place where vets can get something off their chests. “I don’t push people to talk about their experiences,” Michigan Legionnaire Bill Bishop told USA Today, “but if they do need to talk, they know they can here.” The Legion also runs “Operation Comfort Warrior,” which tries to make life as pleasant as possible for patients at VA hospitals, providing calling cards, video games, clothing, and more. The VFW’s sister foundation gives over $300,000 per year through its “unmet needs” program to “help families experiencing financial difficulties
with mortgage, car loans, utilities, and other payments.” It also spends $500,000 to cover the costs of calling home for soldiers stationed overseas. Other programs it administers includes distributing over $100,000 worth of donated sports tickets to vets and their families. In the past decade, though, a new set of veterans’ groups has taken root, offering very different alternatives to younger vets. (See the previous article.) These groups go much further in mobilizing vets to serve their communities. They emphasize the benefits of immersion in the wider community, in addition to the companionship of other vets. They prescribe service, leadership, taking on new challenges, and forming links to non-veterans as paths to meaning, healing, occupational success, and comradeship after military life. These new groups don’t push government aid; indeed they sometimes warn their members of the potentially debilitating effects of dependency. Instead of marching into Congress, groups like Team Red White & Blue, The Mission Continues, and Team Rubicon scale mountains, build Habitat for Humanity houses, or dig out earthquake victims. “We’re not here to give a handout,” Blayne Smith, Team RWB’s executive director says. “We’re here to challenge them.” While so far these groups are much smaller than the VFW and the Legion, they are growing fast, while the old groups are shrinking. Many signs today point to a changing of the guard. That’s the way civil society works sometimes. Groups with long, rich histories miss a cultural turn, or simply complete their agenda, and suddenly there is a fresher, more relevant alternative on the ground attacking problems in new ways. The old veterans’ organizations have served honorably. But the lounges and the lobbying that have been their signatures hold much less interest for today’s retired servicemembers. P SUMMER 2015
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Venture for America
War, Peace, and
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Philanthropy Bringing the spirit of America to combat zones By James Carafano
G
eneral Jim Mattis, who commanded the First Marine Division during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, had just returned to the U.S. with his troops for a much-needed break. His marines were resting, buying presents, and getting ready for Christmas leave. Then to everyone’s surprise an order from the Pentagon arrived: they were heading back to the land of the Tigris and Euphrates. An insurgency had broken out in Iraq, and Mattis knew that in this next stage of war they would be fighting a different way—without front lines or conventional opponents. In the heart of the Sunni Triangle they would have to quell a violent combination of foreign fighters, Saddam loyalists, terrorists, spies, quislings, tribal chiefs, and smugglers, all hidden amid innocent families in a densely populated area northwest of Baghdad. The First Division’s motto is “No better friend, no worse enemy.” The marines would need to emphasize the “friend” part more in this next tour of duty. As Mattis raced to prepare, his chief of staff interrupted him. “Sir, there is a guy out here I think you need to talk to.” It’s not every day that a civilian with no credentials and no introduction can talk his way through a Marine base and into the commanding general’s office. But Jim Hake is not an everyday civilian. In terms of background, the two Jims could not have been more different. Commissioned in 1972, Mattis was a grizzled Marine Corps “lifer” who had fought two wars in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. Hake was a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who had co-founded and sold one of the first Internet media companies, then co-founded
another firm that paved the way for today’s mobile apps. Mattis was a no-nonsense master of military virtues; Hake was an experimental business builder. What united the two was 9/11. The attacks had profoundly disturbed Hake, and he shared the general’s view that “we are in the middle of a violent global argument between the voices of intimidation and inspiration.” Both men anticipated that U.S. troops would face difficult obstacles in the Sunni Triangle. Mattis’s marines were first-class fighters, but his mission required much more than combat. Winning the battle of competing values would require building community services, working markets, and a vibrant civil society. Hake told Mattis his idea: He would create an entrepreneurial, philanthropic organization that would help U.S. military forces achieve their non-combat objectives. It would raise money online and hire retired military men who would accompany active troops and diplomats into disputed neighborhoods to help them identify needed goods and services. After an ultra-quick review process, the nonprofit would deliver the desired commodities for distribution by the troops. It would be a decentralized, fast, targeted effort, focused on solving problems and building goodwill. Structured like a well-run business, this charitable effort could speed its assistance to the battlefield faster than any cumbersome government entity could. In more ways than one it would represent the Spirit of America—which is what Hake called the group. Mattis left for Iraq with Hake’s number on his speed dial—and put it to good use. One of the more unusual calls came in 2006, at the height of
James Carafano is vice president of national security and foreign policy research at the Heritage Foundation. SUMMER 2015
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the Anbar Awakening. The local tribes were beginning to reject al-Qaeda and Mattis knew it was a moment brimming with opportunity. He had a chance to win the support of the local community, but he needed a powerful gesture to help bridge the distrust between his commanders and the Sunni chiefs. He knew that in the local culture a sword has deep symbolic meaning. When a sword is exchanged, disagreements and retribution are put aside. Accepting a sword is a signal of trust and friendship. It was exactly what he needed. Mattis had plenty of armor, but swords were another matter. He couldn’t use taxpayer funds to buy gifts, let alone $600 Marine officer ceremonial swords. But he knew someone who could get them if asked. He contacted Hake, who raised the funds through Spirit of America to buy and deliver a dozen swords. Two kinds of vets to the rescue Since 2003, Spirit of America has embodied the initiative, generosity, and helpfulness of the American people. Following U.S. forces and State Department officers into some of the toughest areas of the world, it delivers private assistance intended to complement their work and advance U.S. interests. Field personnel work alongside deployed troops to understand local conditions, identify high-priority needs, and decide what kinds of specialized aid could be brought in to help achieve security objectives. The nonprofit keeps a cadre of cultural and technical experts on call for whenever specialized advice is needed. It coordinates all final actions with U.S. military and diplomatic officials. “The skills of our field representatives are key,” notes manager Isaac Eagan. All of Spirit of America’s field representatives are U.S. military veterans who previously served on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan, giving them the experience, skill, and maturity to act safely in risky places. “They have to be able to assess and develop relationships, think about problems from an entrepreneurial perspective, leverage local resources, and, above all, be flexible.” Field reps are authorized to commit to some projects on the spot. Other proposals are submitted to Spirit headquarters for 24-hour review. Yet others are posted on the group’s website and carried out if and when they get crowdfunded. As the examples mapped and described suggest, some of the projects are very simple: books for a school, blankets for a hospital. Other efforts are quite complex. For example, in the west African Islamic nation of Mauritania, the U.S. government was frantically working to contain extremist influence as 30,000 refugees poured over its border from a civil war in adjoining Mali. To protect Mauritania’s precarious herding economy, the U.S. government built holding pens to vaccinate livestock. Nice gesture, but it provided little help because there 52
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were no veterinarians to wield the syringes. A U.S. Army team in the area saw the problem and asked its Spirit of America representative for help. Spirit provided funding and equipment to bring in 11 African veterinarians to diagnose and treat livestock problems at the newly built holding pens. It also partnered with the Mauritanian national veterinary center and the French pharmaceutical company Merial to underwrite a regional deworming program. Within just a few months the healthier animals were yielding substantially more milk and meat, and to top it off the new vets were making money. Prosperity and security have improved across the region, and the extremism and violence seen in Mali have not flared up in Mauritania. Helping the needy, our soldiers, and the nation Spirit’s projects are funded entirely by private donors: 18,000 individuals and a number of foundations have provided $24 million since the program began. This has allowed the group to invest in humanitarian projects directly aligned with U.S. security objectives in places like Afghanistan, Colombia, Djibouti, Guyana, Honduras, Iraq, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, the Maldives, Pakistan, Peru, Syria, Tajikistan, and Yemen. Spirit of America uses a tiered-giving model that mixes major gifts from philanthropists, foundation grants, and donations raised for specific projects from grassroots supporters. Website project pages detail what is needed and how much it costs. For the work in M auritania, for example, the site showed that $86 bought deworming medication for 50 cattle, $318 bought startup equipment for one veterinarian, and $1,121 paid for two weeks of training. Recently, hundreds of donors contributed over $140,000 to provide rubber boots for children who had escaped the horrors of the Islamic State by fleeing through the desert. Just $2 would protect a youngster’s feet from the winter cold and the raw sewage in refugee camps. Initiated at the request of U.S. soldiers in Iraqi Kurdistan, the gift had a humane impact while also demonstrating to the Kurds that America valued them as allies. Jill Fagerstrom, one of the boot donors, has supported dozens of Spirit of America projects since 2010. Each one’s very specific purpose, requested by servicemembers on the scene, “gives me a concrete idea of what the gift accomplishes,” she notes. Donating makes her “feel connected to the world,” she says, but also “links the people helped and the U.S. It’s a way of saying, ‘You’re there and we’re here but we haven’t forgotten you.’” Spirit of America guarantees that gifts will be used exactly as specified. If a project doesn’t come together, the gifts are refunded. “People should know where their
Spirit of America
An Afghan girl pulls on a water pump installed by Spirit of America at the request of Navy SEALS working near her remote mountain village.
money goes,” argues Hake. “It builds trust and it’s the right thing to do.” This guarantee was put to an early test. In April 2004, Mattis’s marines sought help to establish several television stations in Anbar Province that would be owned and programmed by Iraqi citizens. The idea was to provide a local alternative to Al Jazeera, whose views were fueling anti-American resentment that endangered U.S. troops. Spirit of America agreed to provide the needed video production and editing gear. After the project was written up by the Wall Street Journal, there was an enormous donor response: $2.4 million poured in for the project. But the gear needed cost only $100,000. “We offered $2.3 million in refunds to 1,000 donors. We also let people reallocate their gifts to other projects, if they wanted,” Hake explains. “Almost everyone—99.6 percent—chose to reallocate their funds. One supporter told me he had been giving to charities for 30 years but this was the first time anyone ever offered him a refund.” Spirit of America also accepts less restricted donations through topical funds, such as one for counterbalancing ISIS. And field representatives are authorized to commit immediately to time-sensitive projects if they are judged to be vital and cost less than $2,500. This has been done for things like a $1,500 water pump for a mountain village in Afghanistan and a $300 dinner bringing together tribal leaders in west Africa to discuss security problems created by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. Philanthropists who support the organization’s larger mission of advancing America’s security and values fund Spirit of America’s field operations and organization expenses. Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus,
for instance, recently made a $1 million gift to cover operating expenses. John Phelan, a managing partner at MSD Capital, is a regular contributor to Spirit of America. “My grandfather was a Marine in World War II who landed at Normandy,” Phelan reports, and “my dad fought in Korea.” He views his spending on Spirit of America as a way to back America’s volunteer soldiers “while they are in harm’s way.” He thinks it also serves the national interest. “The future of war,” he says, “is about winning people, not territory.” Taking sides Traditional humanitarian groups hold that nongovernmental organizations operating in conflict zones should stay scrupulously independent. The Red Cross established this concept in 1921 as one of its core principles. The United Nations later insisted that all of its humanitarian missions would be characterized by neutrality, impartiality, and operational independence. The idea is that aid should never be distributed with political, economic, or military objectives in mind. “These principles are not primarily moral values, but rather a means to secure access to those who suffer the brunt of conflict and violence and to enhance the effectiveness of aid,” said Angelo Gnaedinger, d irector-general of the International Committee of the Red Cross, in 2007. The Spirit of America model is intentionally different. “This is not conventional charity. It is not neutral. Everything is done in support of U.S. troops,” says Hake. “We advance human security and well-being. But taking a side breaks new ground in international assistance.” SUMMER 2015
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Jenny McAvoy of the humanitarian coalition I nterAction argues that non-neutral charitable work can have undesirable effects in conflict zones: “Punishment of vulnerable people, widespread suspicion of humanitarian organizations, denial of access to affected populations, targeted attacks on humanitarian workers, manipulation and diversion of aid to serve political goals.” Alas, all those issues already bedevil even the most “neutral” aid efforts today. From ISIS to the Lord’s Resistance Army, militant groups refuse to tolerate even adamantly “impartial” humanitarian intervention. Nadia Schadlow, who directs foreign-policy giving at the Smith Richardson Foundation (one of Spirit of America’s supporters), argues that the space for “neutral” aid is actually relatively narrow. “Once any long-term effort to alleviate suffering begins, it becomes political,” she points out, so “not taking sides” is often more a theory than a practical reality. Spirit of America isn’t the only private organization that takes America’s side in conflict zones around the world. America Abroad Media is a nonprofit supported by numerous donors like the Carnegie Corporation and the Stuart, Diana Davis Spencer, and Starr foundations. It produces for broadcasting partners in conflict zones programming that encourages free inquiry and
for “improper solicitation of gifts,” Mattis, the Army chief of staff, the commandant of the Marine Corps, and the head of Special Operations Command appealed to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. Panetta signed off on a new rule that legalized private support of military operations around the world. Since then, Spirit of America has expanded into Asia, Africa, and Central America, where it works alongside Army Green Berets to offer humanitarian assistance in “pre-counter insurgency” situations. Small interventions are beautiful While Spirit of America claims it both produces humanitarian results and increases the success of U.S. troops overseas, its long-term effects, like all “nation-building” efforts today, are still uncertain. Some observers see its savvy technical aid as a vast improvement over traditional foreign assistance. Others wonder whether giving rubber boots to refugees can really counteract ideologies of terror and extremism. With the U.S. facing the most complex and volatile security situation it has seen since the end of the Cold War, and U.S. Special Operations troops now working quietly at the village level in 81 countries (exactly the scenario Spirit of America is built to help with), this is far from an academic issue. America’s opponents
“This is not conventional charity. It is not neutral. Everything is done in support of U.S. troops.” a lternatives to extremism. The 501(c)(3) National Strategy Information Center promotes democratic processes in poor countries. For instance, its anti-corruption programs teach practical ways of reducing bribery of police officers and soldiers, treating citizens respectfully, and building community bonds. Traditional humanitarian boundaries can’t safeguard relief workers today, argues Hake, citing recent beheadings of aid workers by ISIS. “Terrorists put us all at risk. By helping our troops defeat them, Spirit of America makes it safer for neutral organizations to do their work,” he asserts. Certainly the leaders of American interventions abroad appreciate the group’s accomplishments. General Mattis recently described Spirit of America in the Wall Street Journal. “It is agile. It is responsive. It has truly saved lives. It has been worth its weight in gold to us.” Mattis and several other generals had to take action in 2012 to protect the charity from bureaucratic threats to its operation. After Centcom lawyers told Hake that “what you’ve been doing since 2003 is actually a violation of military ethics regulation” and could get soldiers prosecuted 54
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nderstand the importance of public opinion, and groups u like the Taliban, the Islamic State, and Latin drug lords use combinations of aid, propaganda, and public services to try to cement their power. It is likely that our future security challenges will be bottom-up, community-oriented problems in tribal societies with weak governments. Local solutions instigated by small actors can be very effective in such situations. A nimble philanthropic organization like Spirit of America that operates at the “retail” level with careful attention to detail can often be more effective than a government-run entity. Meanwhile, Spirit offers everyday American donors who care about the U.S. and its place in the world a direct and immediate way to help. “As Americans,” General Mattis notes, “we have never accepted that government has all the answers.” This is true even in areas like security and foreign policy. Philanthropists concerned about the war of ideas raging overseas today needn’t be bashful; there are now places where they can play a crucial role in expressing the values of freedom and fair play in a tumultuous world. P
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President, Hillsdale College Former President, The Claremont Institute Recipient, U.S. Army “Outstanding Civilian Service Medal” Founding Chairman, California Civil Rights Initiative
James W. Ceaser
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Harry F. Byrd Professor of Politics, University of Virginia Director, Program for Constitutionalism and Democracy, University of Virginia Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution Academic Chairman, The Jack Miller Center
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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Author Founder, AHA Foundation Fellow, The Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University Visiting Fellow, American Enterprise Institute
Photo credit Tess Steinkolk
www.bradleyfdn.org
Larry P. Arnn
General John M. Keane, U.S. Army, Retired
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Chairman, Institute for the Study of War Chairman, Knollwood Foundation Trustee, Fordham University and The George C. Marshall Foundation Former Acting Chief of Staff and Vice Chief of Staff, U.S. Army
THE LYNDE AND HARRY BRADLEY FOUNDATION PRESENTed THE AWARDS AT A CEREMONY ON JUNE 3 AT THE JOHN F. KENNEDY CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS.
Founded in 1985, The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation is devoted to strengthening American democratic capitalism and the institutions, principles and values that sustain and nurture it. Its programs support limited, competent government; a dynamic marketplace for economic, intellectual and cultural activity; and a vigorous defense, at home and abroad, of American ideas and institutions. Recognizing that responsible self-government depends on enlightened citizens and informed public opinion, the Foundation supports scholarly studies and academic achievement.
FROM BIG
SUCCESS TO LOCAL
SUCCOR Walter Bibikow/gettyimages
By Carrie Besnette Hauser and Walter Isaacson
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Walter Bibikow/gettyimages
How one donor found satisfaction in helping a unique community
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national housing downturn, at one point in 2011 the s leaders of educational organizations, we’re lowest-priced single family home in Aspen was listed often asked about impact. How do we know for $559,000; it was in a trailer park.) we’re making a difference? Whether we’re teaching first-generation college-goers or inspiring thought Calaway grew up a child of the Great Depression, leaders and business people, the question is the and knowing the dichotomy between wealth and poverty made him want to help bridge the gap. He gets to same: How do we know that the information seeded know his community by having lunch at the Valley in minds works its way through people’s hearts and View Hospital cafeteria, the Colorado Mountain changes lives for the better? Demonstrating success is never easy, but sometimes College Spring Valley campus dining hall, and a local pub called the Pour House that now has a spea particular example can illustrate it. For both of us, one cial corner table designated as “Jim’s office,” where of our proud illustrations is Jim Calaway, a donor leader he talks with students and doctors and waitresses. for each of our institutions. Born to poor tenant farmers, Calaway finished high school at age 15, became the first person in his family to graduate from college, completed Enthralled by ideas It was the Aspen Institute that brought Calaway to law school at the University of Texas, and was a Houston the Colorado mountains in the early 1970s. He started oil and gas tycoon by his early 30s. He lived the big attending its seminars and purchased a condo in the area life of penthouses, private planes, and butlers. Life was to be closer to events and conversation. He met Connie good—but somehow empty and unfulfilling for Jim. Hill, a student of the Aspen Music Festival and School, Around age 40, he shifted into a new gear—one in and married her. It was only a matter of time before the which his success was measured by how well he could Calaways moved to the Roaring Fork Valley for good. share his wealth. He was influenced in part by sevJim’s philanthropy shifted eral lengthy conversations with a when his residence did, movnew minister. “I came to realize ing mostly to locally rooted that expanding my philanthropic c auses—“smaller organizations activities could be both meaningwith heart.” He helped renovate an ful and fun,” Calaway recalls. The ditched the boat, old elementary school into a catamore he gave, the happier he was. drove a Prius, “I sold my house and downsized, lyst for community development. He was one of the founders of the ditched the boat, drove a Prius, and began living a Thunder River Theatre Company, and began living a more simple more simple life.” life. It was refreshing.” a local cultural hub. He raised Giving became a source of money for a new Colorado Animal Rescue Shelter that has since cared happiness, purpose, and commufor and placed 12,000 animals. nity connection. “You don’t see too many U-Hauls behind hearses,” he quips, “so why not He also joined the board of the group that drew him to his new home: the Aspen Institute. With his own edugive it all away while you can enjoy doing so?” At age cation having been career-focused, he dove into Aspen’s 84 he now lives in the small, earthy mountain town of Carbondale, Colorado. His neighborhood elementary cultural programming. He even began taking liberal arts courses “for the pure joy of learning.” His initial class school is mostly full of children whose parents work in at Colorado Mountain College, a two- and four-year the tourism or service industry upriver in Aspen—where houses regularly sell for $20 million. (Even amid the degree-granting institution with 11 campuses spread
“I sold my house and downsized,
Carrie Besnette Hauser is president of Colorado Mountain College. Walter Isaacson is president of the Aspen Institute and namesake of the Isaacson School for New Media at Colorado Mountain College. SUMMER 2015
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across the Rocky Mountains, turned into a passion for institutions that make quality education available to everyone. “While living in Aspen, I often chatted with kids working in the restaurants, stores, and hotels,” says Calaway. “I learned many of them felt education was out of reach financially. Around that time, I became aware of the vital role of community colleges, and specifically CMC. It’s a unique jewel offering a wide range of certificates, associate and bachelor’s degrees, and life-long learning for transplants like me. I began giving scholarships for local kids to attend. I would meet with the students I supported each semester and was so impressed with what they were learning and how their lives were changing through education. I felt a great sense of pride in providing the resources for kids to get their degree. So scholarships became a pillar of my charitable giving.” Calaway helped put together an alliance between Colorado Mountain College and the Aspen Institute. The new media school, partially hubbed at the college’s Aspen campus, for instance, is able to have its students interview national and world leaders who come to the annual Aspen Ideas Festival, the X Games, and other
popular events. He has also asked philanthropist friends to support both organizations. One couple pledged a million-dollar gift for student scholarships and program development at the school last year. Calaway encourages donors to avoid anonymous giving. “When someone’s name is on a building or a program, it influences others to join in,” he explains. Valley View Hospital’s Calaway-Young Cancer Center is but one example of his tenacity in recruiting matching donors who agree to lend their names to projects if he commits to doing the same. “One year, we were expanding and renovating the athletic facility at our Aspen campus that Jim had initially funded,” remembers Aspen Institute executive vice president Amy Berg. “Another set of donors wanted their names on the new building. We asked Jim if he would relinquish his naming rights. He immediately agreed. What could have been an awkward conversation turned into another example where Jim recognized the larger cause.” “Over my 84 years, I have developed my own philosophy,” says Calaway. “Help others. Cherish all living creatures. Be kind. For me, that is the essence of life.” P
Growing Aspen In 1939, Elizabeth Paepcke stopped by a small, out-of-the-way village in Colorado named Aspen. Wowed by the natural beauty, ski trails, and abandoned Victorian homes, she prodded her husband to come see it. Chairman of the Container Corporation of America, Walter was a busy man, but in 1945 he finally made time for a visit. Aspen would never be the same. Paepcke saw unbounded potential in Aspen. The skiing was unparalleled. The Rockies setting was majestic. The town was in shambles from the Depression, but that wasn’t going to stop Paepcke. Aspen would have a renaissance, and he’d make it happen. To create jobs for local residents, he formed Aspen Skiing Company. He bought up land for resorts and homes, made plans to invite prominent speakers for cultural enrichment, and erected an opera house. His third element of appeal was natural beauty, which he counted already in the bag. Meanwhile the University of Chicago was up to something. With Germany in ruins after World War II, university chancellor Robert Maynard Hutchins wanted to use the
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two hundredth birthday of the German poet Goethe to encourage a post-Nazi humanist revival in that crucial country. Hutchins asked fellow Chicagoan Paepcke for financial support. Paepcke was glad to give it—if the gathering was held in Aspen. So in 1949, a 20-day gathering began under a tent in a Rocky Mountain meadow. The headliner was German theologian, missionary, and philanthropist Albert Schweitzer. Playwright Thornton Wilder was in attendance, as was pianist Arthur Rubinstein. Over 2,000 people came, and many of them signed a petition asking for another gathering to think about deep questions in life. The Aspen Institute was born. Today the institute holds seminars for leaders at campuses in Aspen, D.C., and Maryland. Conferences range over topics in education, health, energy, national security, and other areas. Still, the word “Aspen” mostly calls to mind its marquee summer event, the Aspen Ideas Festival. The Ideas Festival in its current form was started in 2005. For ten summer days,
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participants gather in Aspen to hear daily lectures and debates, take in films, concerts, and exhibitions, and drink from a cornucopia of knowledge and news. A mix of donors makes it possible. Even with philanthropic support, Aspen’s costs are far beyond average American budgets. With that in mind, the Bezos Family Foundation, established by the parents of (and early investors in) Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, has created programs to spread Aspen-like idea festivals across the country. Every year the foundation sponsors 30 students and educators to attend the Ideas Festival as Bezos Scholars, then channel the big ideas and inspiration of their week in Colorado into a local version of the festival in their own school or community. The foundation offers seed funding to help make it happen, and since 2005 this initiative has launched over 150 local ideas festivals. More recently, the Bezos Family Foundation and the Aspen Institute have partnered to create the Aspen Challenge, which brings the ideas-festival formula to students in even more cities. —Ashley May
ideas Why Work Is the Best Charity for the Poor Poverty is one part economics, one part psychology—work helps both BY DAVID BASS
The U.S. is the richest nation in history. To see members of our society languishing in poverty, therefore, is distressing. Many of our official responses to low income, unfortunately, offer only short-term help—and even make problems worse in the long run. Government offers checks and food stamps. Charity offers hot meals and shelter and donated goods. These efforts meet temporary needs. But they seldom lead to lasting improvements in the lives of strugglers, and short-term aid can become a trap. What if we’re looking in the wrong place for cures to poverty? If we search out what it is that banishes need and fills wants for most people, the answer is obvious: Work. That is the poverty solution that happens all around us, every day. That’s why The Philanthropy Roundtable has just created a guidebook to help charitable providers lead people who are currently living at the economic margins into mainstream success and happiness through work. Of course, work is much more than just a mechanism for reducing poverty. More than any other nation on Earth, the United States has a rich tradition of insisting that hard work is ennobling. In our country, even the most mundane occupations have been viewed as bringing honor to the laborer. And this wholehearted embrace of work has helped every succeeding generation of Americans enjoy a brighter economic future than the one before it. These twin benefits of the American work ethic—material betterment and a sense of personal value—have sometimes been lost sight of in recent years and are no longer experienced by all of our citizens. Amid new ideas of entitlement, guaranteed outcomes, and expanded notions of retirement and disability, there are large and growing pockets where the
virtues of work are no longer understood or appreciated, or where residents have become entangled in dribbling payment programs that make active employment almost impossible. Moreover, specific jobs used as steppingstones by many people in the past have disappeared because of technological change or economic globalism. There are spatial mismatches, skill gaps, and missing habits, attitudes, and experiences that separate workers from work. Of the 26 million persons of working age (18-64) who fell below the poverty line in 2013, nearly two thirds didn’t hold a job for even one week during the year. So simply going to work is the first step they (and their dependents) most need. Among the 11 million prime-age persons who were poor though they did work, some lacked the requisite skills to support themselves, but most put in too few hours to sustain a household. Diligent work is not something innately wired into human beings. It must be taught, cultivated, and practiced. It is a skill set, like any other, that must be pursued. Offering employment tools and productive attitudes toward work and self-support is a fertile field for donors. Good charitable organizations do a better job at linking the disadvantaged with careers than government agencies. They are more personal and less bureaucratic. They have no guaranteed budgets and only survive if they produce results. They often look far beyond initial job offers to seek ways of life that will be durable for the people they help. Unlike government agencies, private civil-society groups are free to address issues of character, personal behavior, virtue, and habit without risking a lawsuit. Many of these organizations bring moral insights to their job training as well as community values SUMMER 2015
and faith angles, knowing that they have no coercive powers over clients who voluntarily choose to participate. Their offerings are often about a renewed life, a second chance, days of purpose—not just a job. In our new guidebook we highlight scores of local nonprofits that have strong records of helping marginal populations become happily employed. We describe what succeeds and what doesn’t when it comes to producing results with populations that particularly struggle with work: single mothers on assistance, released prisoners, the homeless, substance abusers, the disabled, the unskilled, and disconnected youth. These are some of the hardest-to-reach populations in the U.S. right now. But we outline nonprofit programs that succeed with each of them. Such charities offer donors a chance to set major life improvements in motion, altering entire family trees for the better. Benefits of a work-filled life Everyone needs income to survive, but meaningful work is about far more than the paycheck. Work establishes the daily rhythms of life. It dictates when we rise from bed, when we eat our meals, how we schedule our weeks, how we interact with our families. Work provides important structure for our lives. Work also forms the backbone of much of our social interaction. This has become increasingly true in recent decades as Americans have slid away from many David Bass is author of Clearing Obstacles to Work: A Wise Giver’s Guide to Fostering Self-Reliance, just published by The Philanthropy Roundtable. 59
ideas forms of traditional community and civic participation, leaving the workplace as their primary locale of social engagement. “A job gives you a sense of purpose for waking up every day,” says Sandy Schultz, CEO of the WorkFaith C onnection, an organization based in Houston, Texas. “Having a job helps people to see that they are valuable. It’s hugely significant.” Peter Droege, e xecutive
poor people need and what poor people themselves actually want are often different. Outsiders tend “to emphasize a lack of material things such as food, money…medicine, housing, etc.” Meanwhile, poor people often describe their condition “in more psychological and social terms…. in terms of shame, inferiority, powerlessness, humiliation, fear, hopelessness, depression, social isolation, and voicelessness.”
help because broader life changes are not achieved. An impossible family situation, creditors on your back, a lack of reliable transportation, no connection to social capital, few educational resources, lack of role models, lack of financial knowledge, a negative worldview—addressing these will make success much more likely. Too many of the impoverished are in survival mode rather than advancement mode. A
A job is the on-ramp into mainstream society. Unfortunately, after you’ve been withdrawn from work for a while, it can be tough to find a path to return. Good charities can help enormously. director of the addiction-recovery program Step 13, says, “We’re much more than what we do for a living, but the fact remains that work is ennobling.” Ever yone benefits from honest work—not just the employee who gets paid, not just his company that gains value. Diligent work allows many people to profit from the services, products, ideas, or advancements produced. Good work is built around solving the problems of others and reaping a reward for doing so, and thus helps society as a whole. For many, work is a cause beyond themselves, even a life calling. This can be as true for simple jobs as for complex ones. Work gives everyone a chance to put a proud personal stamp on the world. When they are separated from work, the poor lose more than just money for food, shelter, and clothing. They suffer deficits of purpose, emotional well-being, and social connection. They get cut off from clearly defined goals and aspirations. They lose a prime means of generating and feeling respect from others. These things can’t be compensated for by government income transfers or charitable gifts. This itch must be scratched by devoting oneself to productive, fulfilling labor. Philanthropists can play a key role in making this happen. Authors Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert note that what outside observers believe 60
Carla Javits, president of the C alifornia-based venture-philanthropy fund REDF, which specializes in supporting work for the most difficult-to-reach populations, such as the homeless and at-risk youth, has encountered this herself: “When you ask the people we’re helping why they are so excited to have a job, you’d think the first thing they would say is the paycheck—because we’re talking about people who are extremely low-income. Yet they almost never give that as their first answer. It’s almost always dignity, self-respect, participation, team, and community…. “In the United States, we believe in the power of work. If you’re left out of that, you feel like you’re left out of the whole society. Many people who have fallen out of mainstream society come to a moment in their life when they’re ready to make major personal changes to get back in and be part of that American dream. A job is the ticket back in—it’s your on-ramp back into the mainstream of society. Unfortunately, after you’ve been withdrawn from work for a while, it can sometimes be really tough to find a path to return.” The struggle for donors is this: Too many poverty-alleviation efforts provide material relief without addressing these deeper issues. Even charitable organizations that place the impoverished in jobs sometimes end up providing only stopgap PHILANTHROPY
c haritable support structure can help solve or soften concerns that could otherwise get in the way of finding and holding a job. Work builds an intangible quality of character that few other activities can: self-respect. Philanthropist and entrepreneur David Weekley identifies that as one of the distinguishing aspects of good work. “From what I’ve seen, giving people a hand up rather than a handout is the only way to create self-respect and permanent improvement in people’s lives, rather than temporary improvement.” In emphasizing the long-term importance of work, it’s not our intention to dismiss or ignore charity work that provides immediate material relief to the poor—such as food pantries, rescue missions, and homeless shelters. After all, it’s hard to get a stable job when you’re hungry and don’t know where you will sleep that night. Many donors consider it a religious or moral imperative to supply relief in the face of sharp need. “But it’s not either/or—teach a man to fish or give a man a fish,” says Hugh Whelchel, executive director of the Institute for Faith, Work & Economics. “If you try to teach a man to fish and he’s starving, then he’s going to eat the bait. So there has got to be this immediate relief where we help people get stabilized. But that’s got to be followed very quickly by a way to help him begin to use the gifts and opportunities that God has given him to provide for himself.”
Some common traits of excellent work programs How does a donor move beyond stabilizing the poor into helping them become proudly self-reliant? Among the many successful charities profiled in our new book, there are some common traits. Here are eight characteristics that many effective work-bolstering charities share: 1. They focus on participants anxious to change their lives. People firmly set in a dependence mindset or in self-destructive behaviors will rarely be changed even by the best programs. There are plenty of strugglers hungry for dramatic change in their lives; find them and assist them in making the hard adjustments. “We can help someone get a job who wants a job, regardless of their past. But we can’t make somebody want a job,” says Schultz. “If someone doesn’t want to be here and doesn’t want employment, there is little we can do for them.” 2. They offer practical training that f ills a marketplace need. Training must prepare workers for actual jobs that are unfilled locally today, not imaginary future jobs. “The Achilles’ heel in workforce
oundation. “Employers can’t find enough F good people on their own, and they come to trust these programs to deliver a flow of reliable candidates. The reputation of the employment program is based on making sure that its training is relevant and works.” 4. They emphasize job retention and advancement. Employment-challenged populations—high-school dropouts, single mothers, minorities, etc.—experience significantly less job stability, retention, and movement up the ladder than other groups. Adroit training groups realize the gravity of this. They make job placements but don’t stop there—showing workers how to hold onto work, scout opportunities for advancement, and prepare themselves to step up. “For many folks, it’s not just about getting a job. It’s about keeping a job over the long term,” says Maria Kim of the successful Cara program in Chicago. Incentives to ensure that graduates of workforce programs stay in touch are useful in this regard. The Women’s Bean Project—a social enterprise based in Denver—pays its graduates $50 to check in every six months. Today, the
moral, and psychological dimensions, self-image, and character development. Agencies of the state cannot push people in these areas, but voluntary groups, varying to reflect the range of human needs, can pull levers that would be inappropriate for a government agency. They can apply insights of responsibility, right conduct, personal value, religious faith, and the like. The result: changed hearts, changed minds, changed behavior, changed outlooks on life. 6. They provide missing community and social structure. A community that supports strivers, elevates hard work and success, and redirects failure can make all the difference. Job strugglers often have fewer people and networks in their life they can fall back on. Nonprofit programs that offer consistent tough love can help in this area. 7. They often use models that produce revenue. Although not mandatory for success, a model that brings in revenue will make a program much more sustainable and expandable. Donors are attracted to nonprofits that have earnings, not only because that makes them
Work involves a lot more than economics. One reason nonprofits are better for pulling disconnected individuals into the workforce is because they have greater freedom than government entities to work with the whole person. evelopment has been insufficient focus on d preparing people for real, existing work in our employer community, and sometimes a failure to be sure people are ready for those jobs,” says Javits. 3. They always think about what employers need. Improving an employer’s bottom line via productive workers, reduced training costs, and reduced turnover will bring job-offering companies flocking; they can’t hire strictly out of charity. “Effective employment programs are like brokers,” explains Donn Weinberg of the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg
rganization’s alumni follow-up rate is 80 o percent, compared to an abysmal 20 percent when it simply said “please” without the financial enticement. 5. They recognize spiritual and p sychological needs. Work involves a lot more than economics, particularly among struggling populations. One of the many reasons private nonprofits are better mechanisms for pulling disconnected individuals into the workforce is because they have greater freedom than government entities to work with the whole person—including spiritual, SUMMER 2015
stronger financially but because it is a market signal that their product is valued by customers willing to pay for it. 8. Many operate their own businesses. There are benefits beyond cash flow in operating a revenue-generating business under the nonprofit infrastructure. These ventures give strugglers a safe place to learn work skills, providing a valuable track record of employment that can then be taken to the next job opportunity. And they become laboratories where charities learn what really works and what doesn’t. P 61
ideas Policing Philanthropy?
Why a new federal bureau for investigating charity is a terrible idea BY JOANNE FLORINO
Every few years, a charity scandal in the news provides the opportunity for critics to argue that the federal and state bureaus responsible for monitoring the charitable sector are not doing their jobs, and to call for deeper government oversight of all private philanthropy. The irony is that these arguments grow loudest when bad actors are exposed by existing rules and mechanisms of oversight. The latest loud example is a May New York Times op-ed by Inside Philanthropy founder David Callahan. He offers a long list of proposals for tighter oversight of charities by regulators, riddled with inaccuracies and dangerous ideas. The piece was timed in response to recent charges brought against four cancer charities, and also to ongoing reports on fundraising and record-keeping at the Clinton Foundation. Callahan’s proposed restrictions on giving and his calls for a greatly expanded role for government are nothing new, but should be answered by philanthropists, because they would both jeopardize the independence of American civil society and undercut the generosity that supports so many vibrant free institutions. While every undertaking will always have its share of miscreants, to suggest America’s nonprofit sector is “like the Wild West,” as Callahan does, is laughable. The IRS and state charity officials demand both accountability and transparency when it comes to matters like compensation, fundraising, grantmaking, institutional structures, and a host of other nonprofit management concerns. National organizations like the Association of Fundraising Professionals, the Council on Foundations, and the National Council of Nonprofits promote codes of conduct and examples of best practices. State and regional associations of funders and nonprofits provide guidance. There are numerous ombudsman organizations like GuideStar, GiveWell, CharityWatch, and Charity Navigator. The press observes and 62
reports heavily on nonprofit activity. This are many hospitals and arts organizations that have policy interests, and the category model hardly resembles the O.K. Corral. Callahan’s calls for more government of “former public officials” is both vague intrusion stem from an essential presump- and broad. Does that apply to a small-town tion of public authority over private giving. community center whose director is a forHe labels the donations of generous Amer- mer county legislator? Readers who see anonymous giving as icans (totaling over $358 billion in 2014) as “public money.” He mischaracterizes the tax a virtuous act might well wonder when it exemption and the charitable deduction as became a vice. Many faiths praise the quiet giver who seeks no recognition. Individual government “subsidies” for giving. This is exactly backwards. The tax donors choose anonymity for many reasons, exemption protects the independence of humility among them. There are also strong historical reaprivate institutions of civil society from government manipulation and interfer- sons for protecting donor privacy. When ence. The charitable deduction recognizes President Andrew Jackson was inflamed that donations given away for the public by abolitionist successes he tried to good provide no tangible return benefit use postmasters to expose abolitionto the donor, and must be excluded from ist donors to public ridicule, pressure, the donor’s income. The charitable deduc- and threats. Maintaining the privacy of tion is unique among all other deductions donations to public charities guarantees in this regard, and its presence in the tax that our most controversial civil society code reflects the central importance to our institutions—precisely those that are free society, since the nation’s earliest years, working “to sway public policy”—can of voluntary donations of time and money. exist in a safe space where their donors (See “It’s About Freedom, Not Finances” in are free from harassment. This priority has been affirmed by our Summer 2013 issue.) Scholars Evelyn Brody and John Tyler the Supreme Court in its 1958 ruling note in their Philanthropy Roundtable in NAACP v. Alabama, holding that the guidebook How Public is Private Philan- Fourteenth Amendment protected the thropy? that “foundations and other charities group’s right to keep its membership list are not inherently public bodies, and their confidential. Revealing that information, assets are not ‘public money.’” These orga- the majority wrote, “is likely to affect nizations are obligated by the tax code and adversely the ability of [the NAACP] judicial rulings to provide social benefit and and its members to pursue their collecto follow rules which guard against private tive effort to foster beliefs which they gain. But legal precedents make clear that admittedly have the right to advocate.” “the inherent private character of these Undermining this constitutional right to organizations” entitles them to “autonomy privacy and free association would erode essential freedoms and cultural vibrancy. and independence.” Callahan also complains that too Callahan calls for measures to eliminate privacy in voluntary giving. He says donor much giving is defined as charity. Some disclosure should be mandatory for groups “independent” measure of public benefit that work in the policy arena or are led by should be used to narrow what is accepted former public officials, though he appears comfortable allowing anonymous gifts to Joanne Florino is vice president for public hospitals and arts organizations. But there policy at The Philanthropy Roundtable. PHILANTHROPY
as legitimate giving. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how that could lead to a narrowing of civic freedom, and even pressure on independent organizations that annoy established authorities. Our tax code provides a liberal official definition: “The exempt purposes set forth in section 501(c)(3) are charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, and preventing cruelty to children or animals. The term charitable is used in its generally accepted legal sense and includes relief of the poor, the distressed, or the underprivileged; advancement of religion; advancement of education or science; erecting or maintaining public buildings, monuments, or works; lessening the burdens of government; lessening neighborhood tensions; eliminating prejudice and discrimination; defending human and civil rights secured by law; and combating community deterioration and juvenile delinquency.” The broad discretion provided by the tax code reflects the variety of charitable choices Americans have traditionally made. To advocate for a hierarchical treatment of nonprofits, and gatekeepers who will decide what is allowed in civil society, is an alarming break with our long history in this crucial area. Providing differing levels of tax exemption and deductibility depending on an organization’s perceived value to a distant bureaucrat is to radically shrink civil society and expand government control. Exactly who will be making those judgments, and how will the “public” in “public benefit” be defined? If government chooses the winners and losers, how can we ensure a place for causes deemed politically or socially unpopular? Ironically, Callahan’s next criticism is that there is not enough charity. He recommends that the mandatory payout rate for private foundations be increased from 5 to 10 percent, complains that donor-advised funds have no payout requirements, and casts doubt on the value of building endowments. Nowhere does he mention that donor-advised funds had an average aggregate payout
rate of 22 percent in 2013, nor does he note that such funds are now the country’s fastest growing philanthropic vehicle precisely because they make it so easy and convenient to be generous. A mandatory distribution payout rate of 5 percent for private foundations has been part of the tax code since 1981. Recent studies by Foundation Source and Foundation Center confirm that many foundations substantially exceed the minimum requirement. Indeed, there are many good arguments for foundations to spend themselves out of existence roughly within the lifetime of the donor to safeguard charitable intent and to maximize impact on social problems. But there is also a place in American society for institutions that exist to support their chosen causes in perpetuity. This is not a choice that should be enforced on foundations by the government. Callahan argues that there should be “a better accounting of whether philanthropic dollars are effectively spent.” The implication is that such assessments are not being done. That is emphatically false. When giving money to things as various as encouraging math, reducing family disintegration, preserving classical music, or reducing the isolation of the elderly, assessment does not lend itself to a one-size-fits-all solution. In any particular year, givers experience a broad spectrum of great successes, acceptable outcomes, and disappointing failures. Most donors care a lot about efficacy and look closely for evidence that they are making a difference. Is it likely that Callahan’s “threat of regulation clearly in the background” will stimulate a higher quality of giving? More likely, demands for clear, quick, concrete results will discourage philanthropists from funding new ventures, from taking chances on unknown individuals, from tackling difficult problems. More risk-averse grants to safe, established organizations are hardly what we need. The current role of federal and state charity oversight officials is to ensure compliance with the existing regulations that have been very successful in making fraud and self-enrichment rare SUMMER 2015
in a huge sector that supports more than one out of every ten workers in the U.S. Managing existing rules is a big job, and one that demands ideological neutrality and professionalism. Adding tasks like assessment of the social value and effectiveness of charities would guarantee that subjectivity, favoritism, and corruption would work their way into charitable regulation. Recall that Steven Miller resigned as acting IRS commissioner in 2013 following the revelation that the agency was selectively targeting certain groups. With the much wider licenses to meddle that Callahan calls for, controversy and a constriction of civil society would almost be guaranteed. Callahan calls for “a new federal bureau to police this sector.” This is an old and dangerous idea. With some notable exceptions, including during the current administration, the Internal Revenue Service has for most of its history been guided by a culture of professionalism, philosophical impartiality and respect for privacy in its administration of tax laws for exempt organizations. A seemingly independent regulatory agency would be more likely to be subject to political pressure and manipulation from interest groups within the nonprofit sector itself. We depend on those who regulate our institutions of civil society to apply the laws in ways that promote citizen engagement, not discourage it. We rely on them to allow free discussion and free action with minimal intrusion, because anything more would be fraught with politicization and favoritism. Do we want a citizen-driven civil society—messy but rich and inventive—or one which must constantly be approved by official overseers? Any essay on charity regulation which opens by describing charitable assets as “public money” and ends by begging for a new policing agency will give many A mericans shivers. The right to choose how and where we make our gifts, even unpopular ones, is fundamental to our exceptional philanthropic freedom. Attempts to subject charity to a wide range of official processes and approvals can only go awry in the ugliest of ways. P 63
books The Other One Percent
A philanthropist champions those who defend the country BY AN DRE A SCOT T
Following September 11, 2001, the United States experienced the longest period of warfare in our country’s history. More than 2.6 million American soldiers have been deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere for 14 years now. Yet social disconnection from our military is more prevalent than ever before. We honor veterans and servicemembers at public events. But how much do everyday Americans know about the lives they lead? In For Love of Country: What Our Veterans Can Teach Us About Citizenship, Heroism, and Sacrif ice, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and Washington Post associate editor Rajiv Chandrasekaran argue that it is imperative for U.S. citizens to become more engaged with our troops. Schultz felt this himself when he addressed a room full of cadets at West Point and realized how detached he was “from these fellow citizens who have dedicated years of their lives to defending the freedom I hold dear.” He’s now embarrassed to say that at the time of that speech he didn’t know anyone in the armed forces. He had never even been to a military base. He had never spoken to a soldier in uniform. But, he has lots of company among other Americans. Today’s civilian/military divide is felt from the other side as well. A recent Washington Post and Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that 55 percent of veterans say they feel “disconnected with civilian life in America.” For Love of Country was written to help address this separation. It offers lay readers an inside look at the lives of men and women serving in today’s military. Book proceeds go to the Schultz Family Foundation’s Onward Veterans fund, which aims to strengthen the health, employment, and families of servicemembers transitioning back home. (Schultz has made supporting veterans the main focus of his philanthropy, along with efforts to expand educational and economic opportunity for other young adults.) Meet orthopedic surgeon Bill Krissoff, whose heart sank as soon as three marines in their dress blues showed up at his doorstep one Saturday morning. They grimly informed him that his 25-year-old son, Nathan, a Marine Corps first lieutenant deployed in Iraq, had 64
For Love of Country: What Our Veterans Can Teach Us About Citizenship, Heroism, and Sacrifice By Howard Schultz and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
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been killed by a roadside bomb buried in a dry riverbed on his way back to base from a village near Fallujah. Krissoff ’s world crashed around him. After a few weeks, however, he had to head back to his work of treating sore knees. He suddenly found this unfulfilling. “Why,” he thought, “am I spending my time hearing people complain about nothing?” So he called a recruiter. He was told “no” several times, but thanks to a word from President Bush, he was allowed to enlist in the Marine Corps medical battalion. Training was tough, but words from a letter his son had written during his own training gave this father strength. “Honor, sacrifice, integrity aren’t just fairytale phrases,” Nathan wrote. “They’re earned every day in sweat, tears, blood.” Krissoff was eventually deployed to Iraq, becoming, at age 62, the oldest American serving on the front lines. He treated orthopedic injuries in a hospital less than ten miles from where his son had been killed. He went on a second combat deployment in Afghanistan, where he performed or assisted in more than 225 serious surgeries. “In most cases, fathers inspire sons,” he said. “In this case, sons inspire Dad.” Sergeant First Class Leroy Arthur Petry was on a “rare daylight mission” pursuing al-Qaeda when his Army platoon was attacked by insurgents in 2008. Gunfire tore through both of his legs. Petry was trying to seek cover when a grenade landed near some of his fellow Rangers. With blood seeping from his legs, Petry lunged for the grenade and was able to throw it away from his comrades as it detonated. The explosion ripped off his right hand and filled him with shrapnel, but he saved his companions. “These are my brothers—family just like my wife and kids—and you protect the ones you love.” The father of four received the Medal of Honor from President Obama. He was the second living recipient since the Vietnam War to be given that five-pointed gold star. His selfless act, the President said during his medal ceremony, illustrated “the strength, the devotion that makes our troops the pride of every American.” For Love of Country also shares stories of how veterans contribute to American society after the military. Army officer David Oclander was at his desk in the Pentagon when a news item about a boy shot dead on a basketball court in Chicago caught his attention. He was astonished to discover that more children were homicide victims in Chicago in a typical year than servicemembers were killed in Afghanistan. Though Oclander had no teaching background or credentials, he decided to trade his Army career
for a school on Chicago’s west side with a poor and rough student body. His military discipline helped him thrive as a teacher and as co-leader of a popular group at the school that combines CrossFit workouts with war history. Amid gangs, drugs, and violence he is inspiring students to learn and better themselves. Another veteran drawn to teaching was Air Force Colonel Michael Gaal. In 2013, he was accepted into the Superintendents Academy established by philanthropist Eli Broad to train education reformers. Last year Gaal started as chief operating officer of the Education Achievement A uthority, an entity that has taken over 15 of Detroit’s lowest-performing public schools for improvement. This demanding assignment fits well with Gaal’s military ethos. “We’re trained to run toward the sound of gunfire and chaos,” he says. “Why would anyone want to go into the education sector and not take on a big challenge?” Thanks to stories like these, this book is a solid and inspiring read. It aims to build understanding and support for the one percent of Americans who currently step up for military service. “Our volunteers,” write the authors, “have given the rest of us a remarkable freedom, but that freedom comes with the responsibility to understand their sacrifice, to honor them, to appreciate what they can offer when they return home, to care for those who are wounded, and to mourn those who have given us their last full measure of devotion.”
How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World By Steven Johnson
Andrea Scott is associate editor of Philanthropy.
Something Out of Nothing Stories on the sources of prosperity BY J OHN ST EE LE G O R D O N
It is said that necessity is the mother of invention. And invention is the father of philanthropy, because it creates the wealth that enables great generosity. Now a dazzling new book uncovers philanthropy’s grandparentage. In How We Got to Now, science writer Steven Johnson opens the hood of the engine driving wealth creation and pronounces ingenuity to be the source of our modern prosperity, including our philanthropy. After centuries where life was “nasty, brutish, and short,” the overwhelming majority of people in developed countries now enjoy existences that are long, SUMMER 2015
comfortable, and secure. Johnson parses out how this happened by telling histories of six fundamental elements: glass, cold, sound, cleanliness, time, and light. Let’s consider glass. A naturally occurring substance, glass is created when silicon dioxide (sand, essentially) encounters intense heat from some source, such as a meteor strike. The heat melts the silicon dioxide, and when it returns to solid form it forms a substance that is translucent. At first, the comparatively rare naturally occurring lumps of glass were treated as jewels. The journey from jewel to modern commonplace is a long, fascinating, and serendipitous one, often going down unexpected pathways. The ancients, especially the Romans, learned how to make glass and used it for jars, drinking vessels, and even window panes. But these items were strictly for the rich. Only when Venetians learned to make glass wholly transparent and colorless in the thirteenth century did it begin to change the world. Glassmakers noticed that a lump that was curved on one side had the effect of magnifying things. Some forgotten genius put thin disks of such glass into a metal frame and spectacles were born—with a transformative effect on the economy. Because people tend to become nearsighted as they toil at close work, and farsighted as they age, glasses greatly expanded the working lives of painters, tailors, scribes, and other important workers. With the arrival of printing in the fifteenth century, which greatly reduced the cost of manufacturing books, literacy began to spread much more widely and the demand for spectacles greatly increased. So, of course, did the number of spectacle-makers. Some of these experimented with lenses in hopes of finding other things they could do besides correct vision. In 1590, it was found that two lenses used in conjunction could make objects that were too small to see with the naked eye quite visible. This opened up a whole new, microscopic world that no one had expected existed, just as the scientific revolution was getting underway. Two decades later, another arrangement of lenses produced the telescope, an invention that Galileo promptly used to revolutionize astronomy. In the nineteenth century, lenses made possible both photography and the movies. In the twentieth, woven glass—fiberglass—was used in applications too numerous to mention. A particularly clear glass (looking through half a mile of it, Johnson tells us, would be like looking through an ordinary windowpane) has replaced copper wire as a means of transmitting information over long distances. 65
books That’s not all. Around 1400, Venetian glassmakers discovered a new use for their clear glass. They coated one side with a mixture of tin and mercury to make a highly reflective surface, creating the glass mirror. For the first time in history, people could see clearly what they looked like. And the mirror served much more than human vanity. It made self-portraits possible and allowed artists to discover perspective, revolutionizing the art of painting. It induced a greater awareness of the self and moved the center of gravity in society away from the collective and towards the individual. In his other five chapters, Johnson likewise shows how the serendipitous nature of innovation changed the world again and again. Some of the entrepreneurs’ names we remember; others we’ve forgotten. But all were motivated by combinations of curiosity, profit-seeking, and humanitarian vision, and all provided their fellow citizens with opportunities to flourish. Take Frederic Tudor and John Gorrie, rivals in the provision of cold to warmer climes. Tudor was a businessman who failed and failed and failed again to profitably transport ice from north to south—until he succeeded lavishly. His triumph was a fabulous trifecta of entrepreneurship: taking three “worthless” side effects of the New England economy—frozen waterways, sawdust, and empty outbound merchant ships—and combining them into a cheap product. Gorrie was a doctor in the swamps of Florida intent on soothing his malaria-ridden patients. Ice blocks hung from the ceiling of the hospital helped for a time, but hurricane season disrupted their delivery. And so he resolved to make artificial cold. He invented a working refrigerator. Lacking business acumen, and stymied in part by his competitor Tudor, he never sold a single one, though. Yet of course his idea lived on. This book describes how ideas and techniques leap from one mind, one usage, one time and place, into new locales, changing with every hop, and sometimes transforming the world in ways their progenitors could never have imagined. It even touches on some niche inventions sponsored by contemporary philanthropists for specific purposes—the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s “Reinvent the Toilet Challenge,” the Long Now Foundation’s clock designed to tick 10,000 years. It’s a timely reminder that comfort and prosperity were not part of earth’s default settings—they are the product of human curiosity and toil. That’s what makes us wealthy, and generous. John Steele Gordon is a Philanthropy contributing editor. 66
{books in brief } The Paradox of Generosity
time or interest in charity as they pursue financial triumph, a weekHILARY DAVIDSON end home by the beach, and a deck for evening wine hour. Finding Another day, another pile of evithemselves isolated from relatives, dence on the personal benefits of friends, and their local community, giving to charity. In The Paradox of Generosity, Notre Dame sociologist they are not wholly satisfied with life, but doubt there is anything Christian Smith and graduate stuthey can do about it. dent Hilary Davidson present the For families like this, the remarkably detailed answers of authors surmise happiness is generous and miserly people who something “beyond the horizon’s they interviewed on questions of line-sight—not something to reallife satisfaction, physical health, and mental adjustment. Their data ize in the present. The compass show that givers are kinder to their points that guide thinking are neighbors, find themselves in betmaterial success, financial security, personal opportunities.” But the ter health, report having a strong life purpose, and generally describe researchers conclude from qualithemselves as “very happy.” tative research that “none of these Does this mean that generosity will guide them to true satisfaction stokes satisfaction in life? Or is it and fulfillment in life, just a hunger practiced by those who are already for more.” well-adjusted? Using game theory The generous lives described in to analyze how causes and effects their book are not always happy in a interact with one another, the traditional sense either. One woman authors find that well-being and experiences persistent headaches generosity echo back and forth and and fatigue while grieving the death reinforce each other. of her father and recovering from a To get a grip on that human heart attack. However, she says she complexity, the authors conduct 40 is at peace and chooses to focus detailed interviews with generous on the positive parts of life, such as and ungenerous households. We close relationships with family. “For meet one family who don’t have the last three years it’s been lots of physical things for me,” she says. But despite her circumstances, she tells the authors, “I’m pretty content.” Her comments, without skipping the pain, disclose a spirit full of faith, hope, and love. All in all, Smith and Davidson provide robust evidence for the truism that “giving we receive, grasping we lose.” They find that gifts, not possessions, correlate with the strength and contentment that make life worth living. —Ashley May BY CHRISTIAN SMITH AND
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National Forum on K-12 Philanthropy
On March 10 and 11, donors gathered in New Orleans for the Roundtable’s 2015 National Forum on K-12 Philanthropy. Philanthropists reflected on the state of public education in New Orleans ten years after Hurricane Katrina. Attendees enjoyed a performance from the KIPP Central City Academy Band, toured Alice Harte Charter School, and heard “Big Idea” pitches at an evening visit to an incubator school.
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2 left to right: 1. Students at Alice Harte Charter School 2. Doug Foshee, Sallyport Investments 3. KIPP Central Academy Band 4. John White, Louisiana Superintendent 5. Phyllis Taylor and Byron LeBlanc, Patrick F. Taylor Foundation
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GeorgeLong.com
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Annual Summit for Leaders
left to right: 1. Tim Delaney, National Council of Nonprofits; Andy Finch,
The Roundtable’s Alliance for Charitable Reform hosted its sixth annual Summit for Leaders in Washington, D.C., on March 18. The audience heard three panels on protecting philanthropic freedom. In the first, four speakers delivered defenses of the charitable deduction, then audience members voted for the most persuasive message. Next, Congressional staffers offered inside perspective on what lies ahead in tax reform. Finally, a group of donors presented stories about the rich benefits of local philanthropy.
Association of Art
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Museum Directors; Steven Woolf, Jewish
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Federations of North America 2. Barbara Harman, Catalogue for Philanthropy 3. Mason Rummel, James Graham Brown Foundation 4. Mark Warren, House Ways and Means Committee 5. Jeff Hamond, Van Scoyoc Associates; Brent Christopher, Communities Foundation of Texas
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Taryn Wolf; Andrea Scott
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RELIGIOUS
GIVING... Salvation Army • famine relief • Catholic schooling • religious hospitals • Habitat for Humanity • disaster assistance • fostering and adoption • Christian colleges • homeless ministries • Bible translation • sacred music • Birthright Israel • soaring cathedrals • overseas child sponsorship • Prison Fellowship • pregnancy resource centers • Templeton Prize • abolition of slavery • 12-step addiction programs • Fellowship of Christian Athletes • college faith groups • Young Life • Jewish Federations • LDS welfare system • church soup kitchens • YMCA • missionaries abroad • Goodwill Industries
… CHANGES THE WORLD
Learn more at PhilanthropyRoundt able.org/almanac/religion