Philanthropy Fall 2014

BEETHOVEN IN THE BARRIO • POT PHILANTHROPY • SHOULD DONORS SUE? A PUBLICATION OF THE

14 Jon Hunstman • 2013 Eli and Edythe Broad • 2012 Bernie M arles Koch • 2010 Roger Hertog • 2009 Philip and Nancy Ansch uett Cathy • 2007 Frank Hanna • 2006 Richard and Helen DeVos n Carson • 2004 David Robinson • 2003 John Templeton • 2002 ambers • 2001 John Walton • 2014 Jon Hunstman • 2013 Eli an oad • 2012 Bernie Marcus • 2011 Charles Koch • 2010 Roger He ilip and Nancy Anschutz • 2008 Truett Cathy • 2007 Frank Hann chard and Helen DeVos • 2005 Ben Carson • 2004 David Robinso hn Templeton • 2002 Raymond Chambers • 2001 John Walton • nstman • 2013 Eli and Edythe Broad • 2012 Bernie Marcus • 20 ch • 2010 Roger Hertog • 2009 Philip and Nancy Anschutz • 20 2007 Frank Hanna • 2006 Richard and Helen DeVos • 2005 Ben C vid Robinson • 2003 John Templeton • 2002 Raymond Chamber alton • 2014 Jon Hunstman • 2013 Eli and Edythe Broad • 2012 2011 Charles Koch • 2010 Roger Hertog • 2009 Philip and Nancy 08 Truett Cathy • 2007 Frank Hanna • 2006 Richard and Helen D n Carson • 2004 David Robinson • 2003 John Templeton • 2002 F A L L

2 0 1 4

An update on America’s gold-medal givers

The Philanthropy Roundtable extends its sincere thanks to the following foundations for

The Ahmansontheir Foundation • ofS.ourD.2014 Bechtel Jr. Foundation • H. generous support Annual Meeting: N. and Frances C. Berger Foundation • GFC Foundation • M. J. Murdock Charitable Trust • Triad Foundation • The Ahmanson • Triad Foundation • S. D. Bechtel Jr. Foundation • H. N. and Frances C. Berger Foundation • GFC Foundation • M. J. Murdock Charitable Trust • Triad Foundation • GFC Foundation • The Ahmanson Foundation • S. D. Bechtel Jr. Foundation • H. N. and Frances C. Berger Foundation • GFC Foundation • M. J. Murdock Charitable Trust • Triad • The Ahmanson Foundation • S. D. Bechtel Jr. Foundation • H. N. a nd Frances C. Berger Foundation • M. J. Murdock Charitable Trust • Triad Foundation • The Ahmanson Foundation • S. D. Bechtel Jr. Foundation • H. N. and Frances C. Berger Foundation • H. N. and Frances C. Berger Foundation • Triad Foundation • The Ahmanson Foundation • S. D. Bechtel Jr. Foundation • H. N. and Frances C. Berger Foundation • GFC Foundation • S. D. Bechtel Jr. Foundation • M. J. Murdock Charitable Trust • Triad Foundation • The Ahmanson Foundation • S. D. Bechtel Jr. Foundation • H. N. and Frances C. Berger Foundation • GFC Foundation • M. J. Murdock Charitable Trust • Triad Foundation • The Ahmanson Foundation • S. D. Bechtel Jr. Foundation • H. N. and Frances C. Berger Foundation • GFC Foundation • M. J. Murdock Charitable Trust • Triad Foundation • The Ahmanson Foundation • S. D. Bechtel Jr. H. N. and Frances C. Berger Foundation • GFC Foundation • M.

JUST RELEASED

A Wise Giver’s Guide to Cultivating Great Teachers and Principals We must raise the quality of teachers if we hope to improve schools Available at no charge to Philanthropy magazine readers.

To order your free printed copy of Excellent Educators: A Wise Giver’s Guide to Cultivating Great Teachers and Principals e-mail main@PhilanthropyRoundtable.org or call (202) 822-8333 To download an e-book or PDF, please visit PhilanthropyRoundtable.org/guidebook

Never mind fancy facilities, new technology, top curricula, or more school spending—research shows that the intelligence, skill, and dedication of the instructor is two to three times more important to student outcomes than any other contribution.

Yet credentials, degrees, years on the job have little to do with classroom excellence. Fascinating investigations have recently given us clearer pictures of what a successful teacher looks like. As a result, leading schools are beginning to hire, fire, mentor, and pay teachers differently.

This book is for public-spirited donors who want to foster educational excellence by strengthening our teacher and principal corps. It uses the latest research and reform experience to offer practical advice on multiple fronts.

table of contents

14

28

20

2

42

PHILANTHROPY

features

departments

14 S uing for Reform

4 Briefly Noted

An education donor went to court; will other givers and other causes follow?

By Ashley May

20 B eethoven in the Barrio

The Youth Orchestra of the Americas is bringing symphonic beauty to new audiences, thanks to Hilda Ochoa-Brillembourg.

By Caitrin Nicol Keiper

28 Campus Crusades

Philanthropically supported groups that help students grow in their faith are being enthusiastically embraced by young participants—but also threatened by opponents.

By Liz Essley Whyte

36 D rug Donors

While some philanthropists fought for decades to legalize marijuana, others are gearing up to address the undesirable consequences.

By Justin Torres

42 Champion Givers

A 15-year update on the winners of the William E. Simon Prize for Philanthropic Leadership.

By Naomi Schaefer Riley

Aid for Assyrians. A monk’s secret to

schooling. Anonymous animal lovers.

Rescuing an orchestra.

7 Nonprofit Spotlight The Center for Urban Families is helping fathers step up.

8 Interviews Howard Dahl The founder of Amity Technology discusses his giving to rehabilitate the former Soviet Union and assesses the ongoing situation with Ukraine.

Christopher Oechsli The president of Atlantic Philanthropies reflects on Chuck Feeney’s legendary generosity, the value of bricks-and-mortar giving, and how to recover donor intent.

59 Ideas

Don’t Surrender the Academy

The case for donors to get involved with schools of education.

By Frederick Hess and Taryn Hochleitner

62 Books Four Brothers and the Apocalypse A biography of the Koch family offers a fascinating window into their life and philanthropy.

By Tom Riley

64 President’s Note Why Utah is the charitable capital of the world.

By Adam Meyerson

FALL 2014

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

Adam Meyerson PRE SI D E N T

Karl Zinsmeister

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

Caitrin Nicol Keiper E X E C U T IV E E D IT O R

Andrea Scott

A SSI STA N T E D IT O R

Taryn Wolf

A RT D IR E CT O R

Ashley Edokpayi Morgan Sweeney I NTE RN S

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

C O NTR IBU T IN G E D IT O R S Philanthropy is published quarterly by The Philanthropy Roundtable. The mission of the Roundtable, a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt educational organization, is to foster excellence in philanthropy, to protect philanthropic freedom, to assist donors in achieving their philanthropic intent, and to help donors advance liberty, opportunity, and personal responsibility in America and abroad.

All editorial or business inquiries: Editor@PhilanthropyRoundtable.org Philanthropy 1730 M Street NW, Suite 601 Washington, DC 20036 (202) 822-8333 Copyright © 2014 The Philanthropy Roundtable.

All rights reserved.

Cover: Vstock / gettyimages

3

Relief supplies sent to Iraq by the Assyrian Aid Society.

Albert and Winifred Sami.

Personal Giving Following Hurricane Andrew in 1992, Zoo Miami was in desperate straits. The sprawling tropical park had been ravaged by the cyclone, with many animals displaced and some habitats totally destroyed. Amid efforts to save the zoo, communications director Ron Magill was approached by an unassuming older gentleman who handed him 4

College Endowment Disparities A recent study by the Sutton Trust reveals that university endowments in the U.K. badly lag U.S. counterparts, and that the fundraising gap is widening. Harvard’s endowment alone is more than the total PHILANTHROPY

Bongiorno Productions Inc.

Mutual Aid for Christians in Iraq In June, the Islamic State overtook Mosul—the second largest city in Iraq and home to many ethnic and religious minorities, including hundreds of thousands of Assyrian Christians. Mosul is now governed under sharia law. All Christian institutions have been destroyed or taken over. About 200,000 Assyrians have fled their homes.

Amidst this crisis, a small mutual-aid group is offering lifesaving help. The Assyrian Aid Society was established in Iraq in 1991, and simultaneously in America, where at least 350,000 Assyrian immigrants are prospering, concentrated in Detroit, Chicago, and northern California. The society has long operated 61 schools in northern Iraq where children learn the rich history of Assyrian Catholics (stretching back to the earliest years of Christianity), and a dialect of Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus.

In the current crisis, the AAS has converted its rural schools into refugee camps where thousands of families have been sheltered and kept alive. The society’s work in Iraq has been fueled by $20,000 a week wired from a U.S. bank account to a Lebanese bank, where AAS members withdraw the funds and buy provisions from Turkish sources. Someone takes a photo or video to show proof of purchase and receipt, and then supplies are distributed throughout the region, concentrating in areas not yet accessible to international agencies.

AAS runs its operations at very little cost.

One full-time staff member serves as an office manager, while its 17 board members and dozens of volunteers donate their time. Long supported by individual contributions from the Assyrian diaspora, AAS has also recently begun receiving donations from U.S. churches wishing to help these endangered representatives of one of the original branches of the Christian faith. —Ashley May

an envelope, requesting that his donation remain anonymous, then disappeared. Expecting $25 or so, Magill was stunned to discover a check for $90,000.

A year later, the gentleman sent another $100,000.

He continued his giving for years, eventually donating $800,000 to the zoo during his lifetime.

The mystery donor’s name was Albert Sami, a retired businessman who moved to Miami with his wife, Winifred, to open a tool store. Growing up penniless in New York in the 1930s, Albert worked as an ice delivery man to support his mother and sister.

He felt sorry for the horses that pulled the carriages, seeing them endure extreme heat and cold and even collapse with exhaustion. He vowed then that he would do something in his life to protect animals.

An early investor in the media company Wometco, Albert had struck stock-market gold, but he and Winifred saved carefully and spent almost no money on themselves. When Magill first wrote to thank them, he was invited to the Samis’ home, and grew close to the couple over time. As he describes in a moving tribute in the Miami Herald, “As the years went on, [they] became part of my family. Their wisdom and guidance were illuminating. I could not get over how simply they lived without any sign of extravagance. No computer, no cable or satellite television, not even a garbage disposal.

They had one television, an old Zenith tube set with no remote. There were drawers in the garage filled with countless old screws, washers, and what looked like broken parts from machines long gone. Still a saver, after all these years. Everything could be reused.”

The Samis’ house was filled with notepads and knickknacks that arrived as thank-you gifts from the many charities they supported. Their biggest beneficiary became the zoo, because they were confident Magill would disburse the funds responsibly. Albert “didn’t trust governments or boards to dole out money properly. He said that it wasn’t organizations that inspired him to give, but rather people within them.”

In 2007, Albert passed on, and Winifred followed not long after: Both of them died in Magill’s arms. They left their $2.3 million estate to the zoo, enabling major reconstructions, an endowment, and new programming.

The seal of anonymity broken at last, Miami residents are finally hearing the story of “two of the dearest” philanthropists in south Florida. —Ashley Edokpayi

AAS; The Sami Estate

briefly noted

of all U.K. universities combined. Only Oxford and Cambridge have endowments over £1 billion, while the U.S. has 42 such institutions.

From 2004 to 2011 the British government ran a matching grant program to encourage voluntary giving to university endowments, with the particular hope of encouraging giving beyond Oxford and Cambridge. During that time, British universities raised £580 million and received £143 million in matching funds, but while the Oxford and Cambridge endowments accounted for 70 percent of all university totals in the U.K. in 2002, by 2012 that had grown to 79 percent. Meanwhile, the proportion of U.S. endowments held by its two wealthiest universities, Harvard and Yale, held steady at around 13 percent. Despite the economic downturn, Sutton estimates that the average U.S. university endowment has increased by 24 percent over the last decade. —Ashley May Monks in the Inner City Poverty. Unemployment. Billions of dollars spent on schooling with dismal results. The seventh highest murder rate in the United States. Newark, New Jersey, is afflicted. Yet amidst all this there is an oasis of school success. While most of the city’s students never even finish high school, St. Benedict’s Prep, a 146-year-old school serving 550 low-income minority boys, boasts a nearly 100 percent college acceptance rate. And it’s run by monks.

Their secret? The monks say they recognized long ago that “inner-city kids need special elements

Monks at St. Benedict’s Prep.

not found in traditional schools.” And many of these elements are spelled out in a 1,500-year old monastic manual, the Rule of St. Benedict, that the sixth-century Italian monk codifed to guide his monastic order. In the new documentary The Rule: Want Inner City Schools to Finally Succeed?, which premiered on PBS in September, husband and wife filmmakers Jerome and Marylou Bongiorno give us an inside look.

Many of the students come from broken families and have significant emotional issues. “It’s ludicrous for you to continue to talk about algebra or English when a kid’s got a broken heart,” says one monk. So these needs are addressed. One of St. Benedict’s Prep’s most potent intervention tools is Leahy House, where boys can stay to stabilize their living environment, silence outside noise, and focus on their internal needs. Another program for personal development: Freshmen embark on a five-day, 58-mile Appalachian Trail hike, where they learn camping skills, living in community, persistence, and the maturity required to be a man.

There are no metal detectors at St. Benedict’s, no school bells, no locks on the lockers. Assemblies, homeroom, and other aspects of the school day are student-led. In a city culture where the monks say no connection between hard work and success is present, these boys are learning otherwise. As self-proclaimed “monk in the ’hood” Brother Patrick Winbush says, “when young men come to St. Benedict’s Prep, they’re not just coming to any old school, they are coming to a monastery. And they learn the Benedictine values—because they need it.”

Bongiorno Productions Inc.

AAS; The Sami Estate

Q&A WITH A MAD WOMAN Ave Maria University recently unveiled its plans for its first performing arts theater, a project whose success is brightened by the fact that Myra Daniels is chairing its fundraising. From her first business venture as a girl selling party favors, Daniels went on to build a pioneering advertising firm and then become president of the legendary Draper Daniels Inc. (model for the TV show “Mad Men”). The ingenuity and entrepreneurship that Daniels applied to advertising have made her a success in philanthropy as well. She was the founder and longtime CEO of the arts center that is home to the Naples Philharmonic Orchestra. Now considered one of the most financially stable orchestras in the U.S., the philharmonic was struggling when Daniels took charge of a fund drive that raised $100,000 in five days. A few years later her

charge occupied a new hall and was debt free.

On behalf of Philanthropy, Peter Atkinson spoke recently with Myra Daniels about ads, giving, faith, and her current projects.

Q: How did your advertising experience help your philanthropic work?

A: In advertising, we were always sell-

ing an idea, a concept, a product. And, in a funny way, philanthropy is like that, too.

You are creating an excitement about a worthy cause or a community need. You are selling the idea that we can all work together to make this community, and this world, a better place. That’s the best kind of salesmanship, and the best type of product.

FALL 2014

That’s the principle we used to sell our community on building the Philharmonic Center for the Arts and the Naples Museum of Art. At first I just took a telephone book—back in the days when people still used telephone books—and put a dot beside every nth name and started making calls.

On one of my first calls, I said, “Hello, I’m Myra Daniels. I have an idea that I think will change the lives of people in this community, and I’d like to talk about it.” And the woman on the other end said, “Okay, I guess so.” At the end she said, “Well that’s very interesting. I can give you 25.” I didn’t know it at the time, but it was not $25 she was offering. It turned out to be $25,000! And we went from there.

This woman was Frances Pew Hayes, who had a family foundation. And she later 5

compelling. I think it will change the students’ lives there. I know it will. And it will benefit the whole community, as well. This is my creed, really: See a need. Do your research. Know that the need is clear. Feel comfortable about it. And do a lot of praying.

There’s such talent at Ave Maria! Tom Monaghan, the founder, had approached me earlier to help, maybe five or six years ago, but Ave Maria wasn’t quite ready then. It had too many other needs. Now it’s ready, and we have a great start. It will make a big difference and put the college on the map for its arts programs.

said to me, “I have a couple of ‘mil’ that hasn’t been spent this year, and I’ll give you that.” And she meant millions! She became sold on the idea, and so did the rest of the community.

Q: Were many of the donations that size?

A: They were all sizes. We accepted donations from

people of all ages and all backgrounds. That was the wonderful thing about it. There was one child who met me in the grocery store one day who recognized my face from our television ads. He said, “You’re the woman on TV.” And I said, “Maybe.” He said, “You were selling bricks for $100. I’d like to buy one, but I don’t have that much money.” I said, “Well how much do you have?” It turns out he had $1.29. I said, “Well, I’ll take a dollar and let you keep the change. And you’ll be a good example to your friends.” I did put a paver with his name on it in front of the Philharmonic Center. It was teaching him something.

Q: You’re also involved with building the Mother

Teresa Museum at the university. Does the model of Mother Teresa influence you in philanthropy?

A: Tremendously. She’s a real hero to me. Mother

Teresa was also a good saleswoman. What she got from people was fantastic. But she gave the way we should give, too—without wanting anything for it—and that was her secret. I think she was the greatest humanitarian among women during my lifetime. And I don’t know that I’ve ever met anyone quite as selfless.

Q: How did you transition from advertising to philanthropic work?

A:

Q: Faith has influenced your philanthropy.

A: I’ll give you my secrets. I believe that I have been

Advertiser extraordinaire turned philanthropic organizer Myra Daniels.

Q:

You retired from advertising to work on the Philharmonic Center, Ave Maria University, and the Salvation Army.

A:

I couldn’t do the work I’m doing in philanthropy if I didn’t have the experience I had in advertising.

But I didn’t ever really think of it as retiring. In fact, I don’t believe in retiring! I think whenever you close one door you should open another. Or, to use a different analogy, each step in your life and your career should be a stepping stone to the next—not a stopping point.

Whenever I go into anything, I really have to believe in it. And if I believe in it, it never dawns on me that I won’t have all the help I need to get there. That may sound a little screwy to you, but I ran a big business in Chicago on that theory—and I’ve lived my life that way.

Q: You said at Ave Maria University’s scholarship

dinner that building the university’s new theater is your most important project. Why?

A: Because the need is great and the students are 6

guided and guarded and governed. I believe that fervently. And I’m not ashamed to ask for that guidance.

People used to say I talked to myself when I was driving. Well, I was doing my thing. I used to say, every day, “Guide me, guard me, govern me, God.” And He or She did. I’ve never found anything that I couldn’t solve if I took in that intangible that we think we can’t understand. The great mystery, the great power—it’s hard to explain to someone, but it’s there.

PHILANTHROPY

Vanessa Rogers Photography

I’ve always been involved in giving, from the time I was five years old. I got an allowance back then, and my grandmother said, “I’m going to give you 50 cents.

How are you going to share it?” And I said, “I don’t have to; it’s mine!” And she said, “Give it back, then. You think about how you can share it.” So I thought about that and the next day I said to myself, “Well, okay, I’ll give a dime away.” Then I thought, “There are two kids in class who look like they never have any money, so I’ll give two dimes away.” So I got to school early and I put the money in little envelopes and I wrote on the front, “To a friend, from a friend.”

And then I sat there, and pretended I was working at my desk. And this little girl came in, and she opened her desk to get her pen and saw this envelope. She opened it, and there was a dime. She turned to me and said, “Did you see someone come in here?” And I wasn’t lying—I didn’t see someone. So I said, “No.” I got so much joy out of it that the next time I got my 50 cents, I gave three dimes away. And then I gave four. And my grandmother was very pleased. Afterward I remembered I didn’t know how to spell “friend.” I’d spelled: “To a fiend, from a fiend!”

I still think philanthropy is best when nobody knows what you do.

nonprofit spotlight

Ex-con Joe Jones has helped 27,000 Baltimoreans train for jobs and support their families through programs like STRIVE and the Baltimore Responsible Fatherhood Project.

James C. Durrah II

CENTER FOR URBAN FAMILIES Joe Jones remembers what it was like to grow up fatherless. His dad left when he was nine. For the past two decades, the Baltimore native has guided local fathers so that other children can be spared that experience.

After recovering from his own drug and criminal problems, Jones worked for a Baltimore program directing pregnant women to prenatal care and drug-treatment. Often, he recalls, “the guys who got them pregnant were around, and they wanted to be involved.”

Supporting those fathers became his passion.

Jones persuaded his supervisors that to stem infant health problems and other bad outcomes, expectant dads had to be involved.

He spearheaded a pilot project to teach city staff about the legal, housing, and employment issues facing these men. After several years, Jones spun off the fatherhood program, establishing it as an independent nonprofit called the Center for Urban Families.

As Jones developed the center’s programming, he found a shortage of ideas in the field regarding how to help men who had stumbled in their lives. “Our belief is that men should be fathers, protectors, go to work or war, and if they fall down, they should get up by their bootstraps.

The notion that men are human and can fall short is something society has never

embraced beyond child support and incarceration. We have tried to change the notion of the nurturing value of men, as contributors to their families or communities.”

He sought out child psychologists, pediatricians, and other experts for advice on teaching fathers about responsibility.

Those findings informed the curriculum for the Baltimore Responsible Fatherhood Project, which helps fathers build better family relationships. Other CFUF programs help participants complete their GEDs or receive job training.

One of these, the Baltimore chapter of the international program STRIVE, teaches “attitudinal skills” needed to be successful in the workforce. Half of CFUF’s clients have been involved with the justice system, and as Jones points out, “the kind of skills that help you survive in jail, like a rough exterior” are different from “the skills you need on the job: punctuality, attitude, all the things you need to be a team player.” He compares the rigorous four-week, full-time program to boot camp: “At the end of boot camp, you’re a soldier. In this case, we want them to be soldiers prepared for the world of work.”

The program has helped match nearly 700 graduates with jobs in the last two years.

Jones is proud that the organization has successfully moved its graduates into entry-level jobs at an average of $10-$11 per hour, substantially more than Maryland’s $7.25 per hour minimum wage.

CFUF began with a staff of eight and has grown to 38 full-time employees, some of FALL 2014

whom graduated from its programs. In 2009, it completed construction on a new 32,000foot complex that includes training space. Its $4.5 million annual budget is supported by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation, the Open Society Foundations, and others. It has also begun cultivating more individual donors. Some CFUF alumni contribute as they are able; for every $1 graduates give, a matching donor gives $5. Those funds are then invested in alumni services.

Marcus Dixon, the father of ten- and three-year-old sons, recalls being at CFUF in 2010 to job hunt, having “an arrogant attitude that I didn’t really need their help; I just needed them to show me where the jobs were.”

Seeing a STRIVE graduation firsthand transformed his outlook. A man a generation older with a master’s degree remarked that STRIVE “was better than any college course he ever had or took. I couldn’t comprehend that, ” Dixon says. “I thought if you were a college graduate you were signed and set.

But to hear someone involved say otherwise completely caught my attention. And that’s when the ball really started to roll.”

Dixon enrolled in STRIVE and joined CFUF’s fatherhood training program. He went to a weekly support group with other men in the same position, eager to learn how to play a positive role in their children’s lives. Dixon had not previously encountered a program before that would assist him in his efforts to support and be with his sons, rather than dismiss him for the ways that he had let them down.

“If you don’t see your kids and don’t provide for them, you’re a deadbeat father,” he says. “But you’re not a deadbeat father if you take the steps to see your children.” With the help of CFUF, Dixon got a job and a scholarship to train as a pharmacy technician. “I made a promise to myself that I was going to do everything I needed to do to better myself and make a future for my children.”

—Melissa Langsam Braunstein 7

HOWARD DAHL

Howard Dahl is a third-generation manufacturer. His grandfather’s company created the Bobcat loader. His father and uncle ran a business that produced four-wheel-drive tractors. As a young man, Dahl wanted to guide a company that would help poor farmers and alleviate worldwide famine, but “global poverty was a bigger task than I could handle, so I put my energies into creating a sustainable business,” he told Inc. magazine. Today he runs Amity Technology, which started selling harvesting equipment for sugar beets and now builds a range of advanced agricultural implements. The company, based in Fargo, North Dakota, has found much of its business in the former Soviet Union, and Dahl has made scores of trips there and reads at least one book on Russian history every year. His philanthropy reflects this: He has given millions to colleges in Moscow and Lithuania, and for support of Ukrainian orphans.

Shaped deeply by his evangelical Christian faith, Dahl’s donations also extend to U.S. higher education, youth ministry on Indian reservations, development in Africa, Fargo arts organizations, and more. Howard and his wife, Ann, attempt to give away 75 percent of their income and live on the remaining 25 percent. He also gives his time to several boards: it was while he was in the nation’s capital for a Trinity Forum board meeting that Dahl sat down with Philanthropy for a lemonade and conversation about the various ways he tries to translate his business success into social good.

Philanthropy: Let’s start with what brings you to D.C. today. The Trinity Forum brings business leaders together to discuss Western civilization’s big ideas, religion, and great works of literature. How did you get involved?

Dahl: I met the founder of the Trinity Forum, Os Guinness, in 1974. He’s a friend I respect enormously because of his commitment to religious freedom and excellence in all thinking. There are so many aspects of what the Trinity Forum represents that I find worth supporting. It’s the intersection of three areas of life: the best of great literature, leadership principles, and faith.

8

One Trinity Forum seminar that I remember especially was on the seven deadly sins and how they affect all of our lives. It meant spending a couple of hours talking about each of the deadly sins and reading from great literature and Biblical references, and then having a rich discussion.

Philanthropy: Do you believe businessmen need to think more about these issues?

Dahl: I certainly do. Our actions flow out of our deepest convictions. Someone committed to truth, justice, and right thinking will see things differently than someone who says “my only goal in business is the bottom line.” If you’re running a manufacturing business, you have lots of warranty issues that come up. You have your official warranty policy, but the first question you ask is: What is the right thing to do versus the most profitable? For the good of the company long-term, “the right thing” is always the best place to start. What is just, what is fair, what is true are healthy questions for any businessperson to ask.

Philanthropy: How does your faith influence your work?

Dahl: The golden rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

I’ve never found that inapplicable, to any moment or any day of my life.

Philanthropy: It sounds like business and philanthropy go hand-in-hand for you, and that much of your work would fall under the category of “social enterprise.”

Dahl: My company is doing a project in Dagestan in the Caucasus Mountains where the Boston bombers’ parents live and where one of the bombers was radicalized, where many policemen and moderate Islamic clerics have been killed in the last few years.

It’s a very difficult area. We’re trying to do an agricultural development project there, putting in irrigation systems, vegetable and grain storage buildings, along with machinery, training, and technology. It’s seemingly impossible to do what needs to be done. I’ve made decisions to extend them credit that probably don’t make a lot of sense. But I have such a sense of wanting to help.

PHILANTHROPY

I just came back from Siberia where I was honored by the government of the Kemerovo Oblast for helping to create an agricultural machinery manufacturing business there, Agro, that has become very successful. I call it my mini-Marshall Plan.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, there weren’t many people going there to help.

I felt that the situation was so desperate that even if our company never made any money but could make life better for them, it would be a really good thing. It was almost embarrassing to hear them give me thanks for helping them develop something that is not only good for their 200 employees in the region, but sustainable and profitable.

Communities have got to have an economic foundation that’s real and viable. That’s what we’re able to create with this company.

Philanthropy: You recently took a sabbatical to read old journals and think about where to spend your time in the future.

Can you tell me more about that and why you did it?

Dahl: To quote Socrates, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” It was a time of deep reflection on what I should be doing with my time: Are there any corrections I should be making? There were some wonderful ideas that came out of the sabbatical. During that month of reflection, I cut off all business e-mails and phone calls.

I read my old journals; they went back 40 years. I have journaled weekly for much of my life, though for some years it’s become infrequent. During critical times of my life, I did it on a daily basis. It was helpful to read them.

Some simple ideas came out of it. For example, our company had always given a birthday gift as a company, a $50 check in the mail to the spouses of employees.

We’ve done this for years, but I thought, “Why don’t I write a personal note with it?” So I began writing personal notes, and the response has just been unbelievable from employees and spouses. I’ve had so many notes back from them.

The sabbatical was just a real simple, personal time, but a number of wonderful

Dan Koeck

interview

little ideas like that emerged, as well as a sense of commitment: Yes, I’m doing what I should be doing, and the business that I’m involved in is worthwhile.

Dan Koeck

Philanthropy: What can you tell us about the Russian-American Institute, the American-style Christian liberal arts college you’ve supported in Moscow?

Dahl: John Bernbaum, the current president of the institute who was doing some work with the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, went over around 1994, and the Russian minister of education said, “Please come and start a liberal arts college in Moscow.” Ann and I supported it financially, and it flourished for many years. We sent about 300 wonderful young men and women into the workplace who were bilingual and had a deep sense of the value of a liberal arts education, all computer literate, and all with strong Christian faith. They thrived. And we had a number of initiatives with the Russian Orthodox Church that led to special relationships between our school and leadership in the church.

But for a variety of reasons the institute had to cease operating as a four-year undergraduate program. The institute had a great social work program, and we’ve spun that off in conjunction with the Russian Orthodox Church. We’ve sold our building and are using the proceeds to continue strategic initiatives that can foster bridge-building between our two countries at this critical time. With that coming to an end, we’re rethinking our giving in the former Soviet Union, which has been a big part of our life.

Howard Dahl founded an agricultural equipment manufacturer to help improve food production and alleviate famine. He gives three quarters of his income to charity.

Sea of Azov, in 1994, and picking up a magazine with an article about the ten leading businessmen of Rostov. These business leaders in a city of one million all had answers to questions like “Who is your favorite poet?,” “Who is your favorite composer?,” “Who is your favorite novelist?” I thought: “If you ask those questions of average American busiPhilanthropy: You also support Lithuania nessmen, they’d say: ‘Poet? Composer?’”

Christian College. Why do Eastern Europe Philanthropy: You’ve spoken about the and Russia need the liberal arts?

Dahl: Having a broad understanding of tragic history of mismanagement and the world is so enriching, but most Soviet neglect that has left people impoverished and post-Soviet education has been strictly in Russia. discipline-focused—for instance, an Dahl: There’s a terrible crisis of trust. in-depth study of chemistry, mathematics, Russia needs to be repairing the brokenness of spirit, the damage to self-esteem. or psychology.

However, historically there has been a The risk-averse culture—middle managrich appreciation of music and opera and ers are afraid to make a decision because ballet and literature among Russian leaders. they might make a mistake—also has I remember going into Rostov, a city on the moral aspects. Developing leadership, FALL 2014

building a culture with the freedom to make decisions without fear of getting squashed—there’s just such a need. Some companies are making progress, but the situation is not good. Every government employee, customs official, or policeman is used to making adequate money by taking bribes. Corruption makes it really difficult to have a healthy, trusting culture.

Philanthropy: What do you think about the situation in Russia right now, with the annexation of the Crimea and ongoing tensions in Ukraine?

Dahl: There is a narrative in Russia suggesting that all the Ukrainians who want to align with Europe are Nazis or fascists. When I was in Siberia recently the propaganda had taken hold of people: They really think Mr. Yanukovych was overthrown by fascists. But in Ukraine, the facts about public opinion 9

interview are clear. The extreme right parties have only about 2 percent support.

Every Ukrainian I know speaks Russian; many use Russian at home. So this propaganda that the Russian-speaking people in Ukraine are in danger—it’s just amazing that it’s been believed by so many in Russia.

The reality is that Crimea was for a long time a part of Russia, and in 1954 Khrushchev gave it to Ukraine. Many of the people in Crimea are Russians by background, so if you did a legitimate vote in Crimea, you probably would find more than 50 percent that say they prefer to be part of Russia.

But of course there was no legitimate vote.

The bottom line is that Putin does not want Ukraine to become part of the European community, so he’s going to continue making life difficult for Ukraine.

Philanthropy: Does all this surprise you in any way?

Dahl: It does not surprise me that Putin doesn’t want Ukraine as part of Europe and free of corruption. What does surprise me is the snipers on the roof shooting so many on Maidan Plaza, and the subsequent violence.

Yanukovych was corrupt, and Ukraine was even more corrupt than Russia. Yet Ukraine had freedom of speech, and people there could hear both sides of every issue on television or in newspapers, whereas in Russia the media is far more controlled. The irony is, Russians in eastern Ukraine have more freedom to speak out than they would if it became part of Russia.

Philanthropy: Do you see these events affecting your business or philanthropy?

Dahl: They significantly affect our business. There’s very little credit in Ukraine, and so our orders are way off in Ukraine, and likewise in Russia.

As for philanthropy, Ann and I will continue with a number of projects in the area. For 16 years we’ve been supporting a group in Krasnodar in south Russia connected to Young Life, a Christian youth ministry, and the National Prayer Breakfast movement. They work with orphans, and have mentored lots of young people, some of whom come to the National Prayer Breakfast every year. It is a wonderful group.

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Philanthropy: What is Russian philanthropic culture like?

Dahl: It’s almost nonexistent. It’s starting, but there’s been no heritage of giving. We had a hard time raising money from Russians for our Russian-American school. Even very wealthy Russians don’t like to make contributions. But we had an opportunity to influence one of our dear friends, a successful Ukrainian businessman, after telling him about our philanthropic work. He and his wife are now paying for 270 orphans to go to college. They personally select and meet with them. It’s just thrilling to see. After he learned about philanthropy, he said, “I want to do that as well.” There are more and more Russians and Ukrainians who are thinking about philanthropy, but there’s no tradition.

between seventh and twelfth grade were involved in the Young Life program, and there was something like an 80 percent reduction in suicides on the reservation.

Now they’re working on the Turtle Mountain Reservation, and looking at the other two reservations in North Dakota.

Philanthropy: You also do some local arts giving. What drives you to that?

Dahl: There are four classical disciplines to philosophy—metaphysics, the study of what is real; epistemology, what is true; ethics, what is good; and aesthetics, what is beautiful. All four dimensions are important. We’ve got a fine local art museum that we support, and we sponsor a concert for our symphony orchestra every year. I served as chairman of the North Dakota Council on the Arts for Philanthropy: You’ve contributed to Tim a couple of years and was president of our Keller’s City to City initiative. Do you symphony board, where my wife now serves. think cities need more churches?

We are passionate about the arts.

Dahl: We think the world of Tim Keller.

His capacity to speak truth to hip, urban Philanthropy: What’s the biggest mispeople in a loving manner is very rare. His take you’ve made in your philanthropy, and desire to see what is going on in Manhattan what have you learned from it? go to other urban centers of the world— Dahl: We’ve made some loans to friends Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, São Paulo—is and family and when they were unable to something we are very excited about. pay them back, it created some real tensions. So now we don’t make a loan to any Philanthropy: You’ve given to endow a friend or family member without treating chair at the University of North Dakota it as a gift, because we don’t want to hurt a to foster entrepreneurship. What have the relationship. We tell them that this is a gift, results been thus far? and if you’re ever able to pay it back, what Dahl: My brother and I wanted to honor our we’d ask you to do is make a donation to a father who was a great entrepreneur and was charity that we consider of value. on the first advisory board for the universiSecond, we sometimes gave to groups ty’s Center for Innovation. We’re looking at without understanding the final outcomes. eventually creating a college of entrepreneur- There have been many unintended conseship. Students are involved in managing an quences of giving to development work in angel fund, investing real dollars in real com- Africa and other poor countries. We want to panies. I have seen tremendous young leaders make sure it’s not just meeting immediate emerge. It’s releasing the creative juices that needs but is sustainable. We like our gifts to young people have. not just plug a hole in a dike, but help make life better for people on a long-term basis.

Philanthropy: Tell me about your interest in Young Life on Native American reservations. Philanthropy: What philanthropic Dahl: There had been a tremendous num- accomplishment are you most proud of ? ber of suicides amongst young people in Dahl: That my three children, who are the Standing Rock Reservation south of now all adults, also have a sense of stewBismarck. An Episcopal priest began work- ardship, a belief in giving. One of our sons ing there in conjunction with Young Life. is living in the Middle East, helping Syrian Almost half the kids on the reservation refugees right now. P PHILANTHROPY

interview CHRISTOPHER OECHSLI One of the most successful billionaire entrepreneurs and generous philanthropists in history, Chuck Feeney famously wears a $15 watch, doesn’t own a house or car, flies coach, and often uses plastic grocery bags to carry around his belongings. Born into a working-class Irish-American family in New Jersey in 1931, he was one of only two students in his high-school class to go on to college. After serving in the Air Force, he attended Cornell Hotel School on the G.I. Bill, and soon parlayed his education and overseas experience into a novel business creation: the “duty-free shop” where luxury goods are sold to travelers tax free while they are between international boundaries. His Duty Free Shoppers company brought him enormous fortune. In 1984 he convened a secret meeting and signed it all away.

Atlantic Philanthropies, the foundation that his gift created, was one of the largest in the world and the most unknown. It doled out strictly anonymous grants to support university buildings, research, and scholarships around the world—with a special emphasis on Cornell, which Feeney credits with opening the world of opportunity to him, and on Ireland, where Feeney built up Galway University and others.

Atlantic also erected medical facilities around the globe (including $270 million to the UC–San Francisco­Medical Center).

It encouraged peacemaking in Ireland and other conflict-ridden areas. Though many of Feeney’s major investments have been in buildings and infrastructure, to this day his name doesn’t appear on any of them. In addition to his love of anonymity, his other penchant is for distributing his money quickly to achieve maximum influence; Atlantic Philanthropies will give out the last of its money in 2016, after spending nearly $7 billion on a range of charitable causes.

Atlantic Philanthropies periodically involved itself in liberal political causes, sometimes dramatically. Its $26.5 million investment in the passage of Obamacare would have been off-limits for most foundations, but since Atlantic was incorporated in the Bahamas, it was not bound by U.S.

strictures against lobbying by foundations.

In 2011, it changed course on this front— returning to Feeney's signature large-stakes, infrastructure-building philanthropy via a massive gift to Cornell that was wholly practical and non-ideological. New York City was about to decide a competition among leading universities to establish a powerhouse new tech university and business incubator in the city, and Feeney pledged $350 million to help Cornell come out on top. In the process Feeney edged out his foundation’s executive director, who had steered much of the organization’s “social justice” giving, in favor of trusted longtime colleague Christopher Oechsli. Philanthropy recently sat down with Oechsli to discuss Feeney’s legacy.

Philanthropy: For 15 years, the foundation you now run, one of the largest in the world, was utterly secret. That must have been an unusual experience.

Oechsli: It avoided the distractions of publicity. It allowed Chuck Feeney to exercise his desire to see things firsthand without too much attention. People didn’t know who he was—he kept a low profile, and it allowed him to learn a lot. It was also important that the giving was not about gaining recognition but about doing something effective and worthwhile.

Philanthropy: What’s striking about him is not only his classic American up-by-thebootstraps story, but also that he seems not to have been distracted by everything that came his way because of it.

Oechsli: Empathy is at the root of his recognition that there was something more to be done with his wealth than to consume it himself. His character was shaped in many ways—his education, his family life, seeing those in need around him, his own situation as somebody who was given opportunity through the G.I. Bill. It’s clear that Cornell played a formative role in his experience. He always thought that his contributions to Cornell should enhance opportunities for others.

Above all, what stands out about him is his modesty, his respect and sense of fairness for everyone he came into contact FALL 2014

with. That was one of the benefits of being anonymous: He could be a human being on a human scale. Having wealth was not the end-all and be-all to life.

Philanthropy: What are some of the joys and challenges of giving while living?

Oechsli: Chuck says it’s a lot more fun to give while you’re alive than to give while you’re dead. Philanthropy has been a primary and important part of Chuck’s life, and the satisfaction he has derived from it spills over to those who work with him.

But there is a sense of urgency. There is an intensity that comes with it in the sense that your time is limited, and what you’re trying to accomplish is sometimes complex and not easy to address. To have limited time to succeed is a challenge.

Chuck has never been one to rest on laurels. But there are rare moments where you catch him taking in what has been accomplished, often from very modest things. Watching his reaction to a child who has gone through a cleft palate surgery and seeing that child smile and gain confidence is as high a reward as I’ve seen Chuck respond to. He takes great pleasure in seeing an Irish music concert in a facility at Limerick that’s built principally with his funds and adorned with a mosaic by the Irish artist Desmond Kinney. I have seen him beam at a sports facility at a university just to know what it’s done for the students.

I’ve seen him walk through a national pediatric hospital in Hanoi and derive satisfaction from seeing that these babies and kids who would otherwise not have care are getting good care. One of the pictures that resonates most for me is of Chuck leaning over the shoulders of Vietnamese students in a library computer lab he funded. That personifies what gives him satisfaction.

Philanthropy: He gave away his fortune long before the Giving Pledge. But when Bill Gates first approached him to join, he was reluctant.

Oechsli: His initial thought was, “How can I pledge to do something I’ve already done?

Is it fair to put my name in that position?”

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Philanthropy: Do you know of other donors who have been inspired by Chuck’s personal example?

Oechsli: Amit Chandra, who heads Bain Capital in India, speaks about wanting to be like Chuck Feeney. I hear indirectly from wealth advisers that clients often have read about and are interested in Chuck’s experience. My sense is that there is an increasing interest in engaging in philanthropy in a significant way in your lifetime. That idea has its roots in Andrew Carnegie, Chuck’s early inspiration, who famously said, “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.”

We’re in the process now of talking with others about what Chuck’s experience and reputation bring to the world of philanthropy and how we can enhance that in ways that encourage others to give. It’s a tricky balance because we are very respectful of Chuck’s modest character.

Philanthropy: Here in New York City ground was just broken on the new Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island. Winning the contest to create a major center here for technology and business education was huge for Cornell, and Chuck Feeney’s last-minute gift of $350 million had a lot to do with it.

Oechsli: Chuck became aware early on of the competition. It was big, and Chuck likes big things. One of the comparative advantages of having significant wealth is that you can consider those kinds of projects. It was his willingness to support the Cornell initiative that ultimately contributed to its winning the bid.

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Chuck had always felt that Cornell should have a stronger presence in New York City. Cornell engineering is a top-ranked program. They also have a huge challenge ahead of them. It’s certainly a big bet.

Chuck’s big bets have often been associated with geographic locations he knows, understands, and can interact with, and where there is some composite of people, circumstances, and opportunities that present a significant upside from the investment.

You see that in Ireland where Chuck invested over $1 billion. You can see it in Australia where we have $500 billion invested in technology and building a knowledge economy, or in Vietnam with over $350 million. There is a geographic focus to the bet, a cluster of initiatives around a location that in the aggregate are quite large.

Strong leaders and a philanthropic environment that’s on the upswing are important. It’s not unlike catching the wave in business, being in the right place at the right time. The big-bet philosophy is about moving resources into areas where the opportunities are most promising.

Philanthropy: Chuck Feeney has a strong interest in capital facilities. What are the attractions of paying for bricks and mortar?

Oechsli: It’s easy to dismiss buildings as static, old-fashioned philanthropy—a monument to self. But when you think of buildings and Chuck and Atlantic, you think of investments associated with a promising group of people in a dynamic environment. We don’t just lead first with the building and find a place to plop it down; we erect buildings when there’s a real sense that a certain place and the people in and around it can benefit from them. And not one building is named after Chuck or Atlantic. One third of our grantmaking to date has been to capital projects, but two thirds has been in people, programs, and opportunities, which closely complement those buildings or link to the activities inside. Chuck has always felt that buildings are just a superb resource to advance opportunity. And they’re a tangible manifestation of giving while living—you can see them take shape as well as see what happens in and around them.

PHILANTHROPY

Chuck Feeney’s $350 million gift helped Cornell win a competition to build a major new tech university in New York City.

This rendering shows what the campus, currently under construction on Roosevelt Island, will look like.

Philanthropy: In Ireland, his gifts transformed the higher education system in the span of a few years.

Oechsli: Chuck had gone to Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration, and so he was interested in tourism and the hotel industry, and so some initial investments were made in that area from the business side.

After he became more closely acquainted with Ireland and saw its upside, its potential, and its needs, Chuck’s experience at Cornell led him to gravitate to the higher education sector. And then, as others in Ireland gave him advice and worked with him, they were able to think of ways to invest in big, big ways in making Ireland a knowledge economy.

There were many times where Chuck would put propositions on the table that were quite surprising to people who just weren’t ready to think that big. Leading in that way can be very satisfying. It breaks ground and creates initiatives that otherwise wouldn’t exist.

Handel Architects

But there came a point where he saw the momentum, the commitment of others to the idea, and he felt that it was an appropriate time to lend support.

Chuck encourages people to get engaged in actual giving during their lifetime, rather than just pledging. He will admit to being a very impatient person and wanting to see things happen sooner rather than later. He has enormous respect for Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett and the efforts they are making to promote philanthropy. Promoting philanthropy to others is one of our critical missions as we conclude our work.

Handel Architects

Philanthropy: There’s more of a culture of philanthropy here in the United States than in many parts of the world. Are you seeing any signs of change in the foreign countries where Feeney has been a big giver?

Oechsli: We hope we’re seeing change.

Philanthropy is commonplace in the U.S., although there should be more of it here. We have also sought to encourage philanthropy in Ireland. Chuck has been very active in promoting philanthropy in Australia, and the press there and in Ireland have been focusing increasingly on the impact of his and others’ philanthropy in those places. Vietnam is in a nascent stage. We have been working in South Africa to promote philanthropy and encourage giving. We’ve funded organizations that are good resources for those thinking about philanthropy.

Recently we helped launch the Bermuda Community Foundation, the first such foundation on the island.

Philanthropy: Atlantic Philanthropies experienced some major staff upheaval in the past few years. What happened?

Oechsli: One of the challenges of any foundation with a living donor is coping with his or her entrepreneurial spirit that is dynamic and not much bounded by structure. An organization—a typical foundation—by nature needs to plan, predict, and organize around strategies, budgets, and targeted outcomes. This easily lends itself to a less dynamic or responsive approach than that of an entrepreneurial individual donor, and there are inevitable tensions. For a period, Atlantic fell out of tune with its donor’s approach, and there were difficult issues.

It can be tricky to ascertain and work with the donor’s intent. But it’s still probably easier to do so if the donor is still with you and active, as with Atlantic. Donor intent involves not just the fields of philanthropy to be taken up, but also the values, motivation, and preferred approach applied in each field.

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Chuck’s values are very much about opportunity, dignity, and fairness, and you can interpret and apply those in different ways.

Philanthropy: Given that room for interpretation, how does a foundation keep in step with its donor’s intent? And how can a foundation recover the donor’s vision after it has started to drift away?

Oechsli: By refocusing on how a donor hoped to make a difference. You have to be a student of the donor. The donor’s intent consists of a range of elements— what motivated him, why did he want to give, what are the approaches, what are the values. Chuck is also big on results; he always says, “Well, what have we got to show for it?” The donor sweated to earn this money—don’t waste it. It’s important for the enterprise and the donor to keep interacting. That’s challenging, but it is the dynamic tension that creates the best prospects for effective philanthropy. P 13

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Marilyn Nieves / gettyimages

SUING for REFORM An education donor went to court; will other givers and other causes follow?

By Ashley May

Marilyn Nieves / gettyimages

A

s a sophomore at Cesar Chavez Learning Center in Los Angeles, Beatriz Vergara had a captivating history teacher last year. This teacher nurtured in her a love of the subject, instructing with enthusiasm and drama while fostering an encouraging class environment. Beatriz now finds history interesting and, daresay, fun.

But Beatriz didn’t always like going to class. She used to have a history teacher who let students smoke marijuana in the back of the room, spent the majority of instruction time on his laptop, and hinted the Latino students would grow up to “clean houses for a living.” In a middle-school science class, she never asked questions because she was afraid of her teacher, who at times called female students by rude nicknames.

With an ambition to become a nurse, Beatriz realized she was falling behind. “It made me feel bad about myself,” she said in sworn testimony for the California Superior Court for the County of Los Angeles, “but it also made me work harder” to defy their expectations.

“A teacher is supposed to encourage you and motivate you and not put you down,” she continued. “If you have a bad teacher you’re not going to want to go to school, you’re going to probably drop out.” Speaking of her siblings, she said, “I want them to have a better future. I want them to stay in school. I want them to have teachers that actually care for them so they can get somewhere.”

Determined to get somewhere, Beatriz and eight other students filed a civil lawsuit, Vergara v. State of California, with the help of a new organization called Students Matter established specifically to improve schools through targeted litigation. Founded by Silicon Valley entrepreneur David Welch, Students Matter recruited A-team law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and media company RALLY to organize a case against California’s sclerotic tenure rules— which make it almost impossible to dismiss even the most terrible teachers. Prohibitions Ashley May is strategic communications specialist at The Philanthropy Roundtable.

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Conviction that sustains David Welch grew up in Severna Park, Maryland, where he and his six siblings attended a large public school. “I had a number of exceptional teachers. I’m a very scienceand engineering-centric guy so I remember my science teachers with a lot of fond memories of their passion

A long succession of legislative attempts to reform teacher tenure in California failed. One donor and nine students took up the same cause—and won.

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and drive,” he says. After high school he earned a B.S. from the University of Delaware and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Cornell.

In California he co-founded a manufacturer of optical telecommunications equipment called Infinera in 2001, and he now holds more than 130 patents in optical-transmission technologies. From TV to phones to the Internet, “everything comes along a fiber-optic cable,” Welch explains. “And we make the equipment that plugs into that fiber-optic cable to send the bits around the world.”

The brokenness of American public education had troubled Welch for a long time. “Education is one of the key pillars of our society, and ultimately it’s the gift you need to give to both your children and everyone’s children,” he says. In 2001 he and his wife, Heidi, dipped their toes into ed reform by looking at how they could support the public-school system through new teaching models and technology in the classroom. In the process he came to realize that the public system “was doing a disservice to huge tracts of children everywhere, but predominantly children at risk or in large urban areas.”

After a decade of working within the system with no discernible results, Welch says, “we felt the only path forward was to use litigation as a mechanism to have a fact-based, non-rhetoric conversation about whether the educational system is really serving children.”

After founding Students Matter in 2011, he began by gathering facts. Talking to superintendents, teachers, charter-school operators, and other educators and reformers, one point that was driven home time and again was the importance of teacher quality. And the tragic reality was that “often you’re unable to do anything about it, because the laws and the policies that have been adopted in California as well as in other states inhibit the ability to ensure high-quality teaching.”

After having dinner with the student plaintiffs in their homes and learning about their experiences, he was confident that they would win in court. “I always believed we were right,” he says. “My lawyers laugh at me when I say that, and obviously I understood that there was risk to it. But I believe our education system is built for the purpose of serving our children, and the laws we addressed run completely counter to giving the best education possible.” He takes the ruling as recognition that “these laws do infringe on the rights of children, and there’s no reason why they need to. I was also pleasantly surprised that national public sentiment reinforced our beliefs.”

The fight is far from over for Students Matter.

Governor Jerry Brown has already filed an appeal of the ruling, which could take as long as three years to work its way through the California legal system. Welch

Students Matter

against firings, rules demanding that teachers be laid off solely by seniority without any reference to the quality of their performance, and other contract provisions that effectively give teachers permanent employment disproportionately harm low-income and minority students, argued the resulting suit, and directly violate California’s constitutional guarantee of equal access to education.

In a trial lasting two months, the court heard from L.A. Superintendent John Deasy, Harvard economist Raj Chetty, teachers, student plaintiffs, and countless education experts on both sides. A media campaign outside the courtroom raised the profile of the cause.

This June, the court ruled decisively in favor of the plaintiffs: There is “no dispute that there are a significant number of grossly ineffective teachers currently active in California classrooms,” wrote Judge Rolf Treu. “All sides to this litigation agree that competent teachers are a critical, if not the most important, component of success of a child’s in-school education experience. All sides also agree that grossly ineffective teachers substantially undermine the ability of that child to succeed in school,” he went on. “The evidence is compelling. Indeed, it shocks the conscience…. All Challenged Statutes are found unconstitutional.”

California was one of the earliest states to pass a teacher-tenure law, back in 1921, and legislative attempts to reform tenure have always been batted down by the teacher unions. Two efforts in the legislature by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger were defeated, and Governor Pete Wilson failed in three previous tries. Schwarzenegger even crafted a ballot initiative and called a special election to vote on it, but it lost by a 55 to 45 percent vote in 2005. It is estimated that the California Teachers Association spent at least $50 million to defeat the initiative, raising annual teacher member fees by $60 for this special purpose.

Nine years later, one donor and nine students took up the same cause—and won.

Students Matter

cautions other donors interested in impact litigation that “it’s a process that takes time. You’ll have to sustain your conviction on what’s right and stay with that. It’s not something you’re going to solve in a month or even in a year. But when you get a court that reaffirms basic beliefs, you can make a tremendously long-term impact on society.”

Media matters Felix Schein, president of RALLY, is a former producer and reporter at “Meet the Press,” “NBC Nightly News,” and other shows. He welcomed the opportunity to work on the Vergara case because “in the traditional political debate there is a lot of back and forth about the status quo…. What we miss is the question of what ought to be, and what is right.” RALLY put out press releases and fact sheets, developed rapid-response messaging to answer attacks, arranged media opportunities for its experts, and made heavy use of social media. The case ended up being widely covered by national news outlets.

Students Matter made a substantial investment in research, to be used both by the lawyers and by the media campaigners. “In the court of law facts are ultimately what matters and prevails,” says Schein. “We spent a lot of time trying to find folks who could provide research and data and evidence in the trial. And we went to great lengths to share that.”

Lining up representatives from the education establishment to speak in support of Vergara was one important task. Among those to come forward were the Oakland Alliance of Black Educators, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, former school superintendents in Sacramento City and Oakland, and sitting Los Angeles superintendent John Deasy, who, in a strange twist, was a vocal supporter of the plaintiffs even while his district was originally named as a defendant in the case (although dismissed before the trial).

In the first two years of the case, Students Matter spent $3 million on legal fees, the media campaign, research, and community outreach. Welch provided most of these funds, with additional contributions from Eli Broad, the Walton Family Foundation, and a few other donors.

Representatives from the two major California teacher unions, co-defendants in the case, argued that Students Matter was warping the political process with personal money. Schein counters that “it’s often true that new and untested approaches hinge on a seed funder. Solutions to these hard problems don’t just happen, someone has to get in its face and decide to do something innovative.” This “doesn’t attract traditional funders.”

Beatriz Vergara believed she was being held back by incompetent teachers. She filed suit.

What stood out about Welch, Schein says, “was that he was willing to take a risk on something that was untried…. He embodies the ethos of Silicon Valley, which is to look at things from different angles…. If you’re finding that one path isn’t the right path, you’re always willing to explore additional paths. In that way we were quite nimble.”

Their campaign’s goal was even broader than winning the lawsuit; it was to change the public debate about education reform. Schein says they were aiming to “bring attention to an issue that has had little traction FALL 2014

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David Welch put up time, energy, and several million dollars to challenge rules which make it nearly impossible to get rid of ineffective teachers.

Further illustrating the way this subject scrambles traditional political alliances is the fact that other backers of PEJ include both former Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs and Bush aide Jay Lefkowitz. “We are long past the day when this was a partisan issue,” says Brown. “It’s a moral issue, it’s a civil rights issue.

And people are seeing it that way on both sides of the aisle.”

Brown doesn’t argue that litigation is the only way to reform education, but this case was “born out of the frustration of parents who have watched their politicians fail to act year after year. And when they reach a point

Lauren Kallen

Bringing the show to New York The success of Vergara has inspired the Partnership for Educational Justice to pursue a clone lawsuit in New York. PEJ was founded by former journalist Campbell Brown, who used to work with Schein at NBC and hosted her own show on CNN, and in the past few years has become active in school reform. While education laws differ from state to state, New York and California both guarantee equal access to education, and the pernicious effects of teacher tenure are similar in both places.

So in July, seven New York families filed suit charging that their local public-school policies on teacher discipline and dismissal unfairly impede students from receiving a “sound, basic education” as guaranteed by law.

Plaintiff Keoni Wright has twin daughters who, placed with different teachers, had radically different experiences in kindergarten, which has “made teacher quality a huge issue for me,” he wrote in the New York Daily News. “One has a teacher who always seems to go the extra mile. She works hard to understand my daughter as a person and pushes her to learn and grow. My other daughter has a teacher who appears to do the bare minimum. Yet under the system we have for evaluating teachers, the two get treated the same. They’re paid the same, based only on the number of years they’ve worked and the number of advanced degrees they have. The quality of the work they do every day is irrelevant.”

While Wright v. State of New York wends its way to court, Brown is using media platforms to educate the

public about the need for reform. “It’s very important to win, but even launching litigation can potentially bring about change at the legislative level,” she says. “Suddenly constituents are saying to their politicians, ‘why haven’t you done anything about this?’ Getting this issue front and center is critically important.”

Like Students Matter, the Partnership for Educational Justice is also considering filing a second suit, as board chairman and super-lawyer David Boies leads a team reviewing opportunities in other states where collective bargaining agreements and district regulations block improvement of teacher quality. Boies famously faced off against Vergara counsel Theodore Olson in Bush v. Gore, but on this topic they are allies.

Students Matter

in the legislature over the last three decades. Now that we have seen the facts in a court of law, and heard about the outrage of a system that is failing our kids, momentum is growing in California and elsewhere to build a common-sense system.”

In this sense, Welch’s team already considers its work a success even with the legal appeal pending. Compared to two years ago when the case was filed, “today we are in a different world” in terms of public awareness, Schein says. Welch is pleased to see that “the impact has clearly already been national.”

The next step in California is preparing for the appeal, and advocating new laws for the legislature to consider. Meanwhile, RALLY and Students Matter have already teamed up for a new case on the opposite coast: Davids v. State of New York, in which eight students are suing for relief from teacher-tenure and other public-school employment rules that limit their right to a quality education.

“In Vergara our goal has been to create a model that others can replicate or innovate on,” says Schein. “Litigation has long had a role in shaping and influencing public policy, it’s not a new approach. I think what’s different is that more people are turning to it.”

when they feel they have no choice, then the courts are their only avenue…. The teacher unions have enormous political power and have essentially controlled state legislatures and prevented any attempt to reform these laws. There have been bills sitting in Albany for years but there has been a powerful, powerful political force preventing action. Litigation is trying to break through a deadlock.”

A broader tool for donors willing to battle Education isn’t the only area where donors are using litigation to chip away at unwholesome public policies.

“We’ve put more and more resources into litigation in recent years because that’s where we can make prog-

Inspired by Vergara’s success, Campbell Brown is spearheading an effort to reform New York’s policies

Lauren Kallen

Students Matter

on teacher tenure, discipline, and seniority.

ress,” says Kim Dennis of Searle Freedom Trust, which primarily funds public-policy research. A number of Searle-funded cases have gone to the U.S. Supreme Court and were decided in the plaintiff ’s favor. Among other advantages, Dennis notes, these kinds of grants “are easy to track—how far does the litigation go through the courts? Does it go up to the Supreme Court? Do you win? Do you lose?”

At the Goldwater Institute in Arizona, longtime litigator Clint Bolick leads a legal team that works to complement the organization’s public-policy research.

Focused on state-level litigation, his work includes

defending school choice, property rights, and free enterprise, in addition to challenging corporate subsidies and various public-employee union practices. He has helped set up litigation centers in several other states, and says that “state courts and state constitutions are really the virgin territory for conservative public-interest law groups.” Meanwhile, the Left has long been aggressive in seeking court action to enforce its views of social good.

To some donors, impact litigation entices as a golden key to unlock policy reforms that have been obstructed in legislatures. But other voices warn against the lure of judicial activism. “I understand the impulse of using the courts,” says Fordham Institute president Michael Petrilli, “especially in a state like California where the politics on education are so bad. The Vergara outcome might lead to actual change in the classroom that would have been impossible by working through the legislature. But there’s a big risk that this is going to bring the courts further into decision-making over our school system, and they have a terrible record.”

Michael McShane, an education scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, echoes this warning.

“On the merits, what Vergara and its copycats are arguing about are things we should probably work to get rid of,” he says. “But it’s still important to realize what the unintended consequences might be…. Courts are good at doing some things and not good at others. That’s why we divide power between branches.”

But for Bolick, the courts are an integral part of any policy reform. “Judicial action in defense of constitutional rights is no vice,” he says. Vergara “is a great example of the type of impact litigation that deserves philanthropic support. Where legislatures are controlled by special-interest groups, litigation can be the only viable option to vindicate schoolchildren’s rights.”

He also points out that reformers can’t stay away from litigation even if they want to: “Philanthropists must understand that any significant education reform accomplished in the legislative arena will be challenged in court. So a sound legal defense must be part of the legislative strategy.”

As Vergara makes its way through appeals, and the Davids and Wright cases proceed to court, with others possibly on the way, one thing is certain: There is a battle on. The field is open. The question is which philanthropists will join the fray. P

“Litigation has long had a role in shaping and influencing public policy.

Today, more donors are turning to it.”

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At a retreat held at the University of Illinois Newman Center, recent grads who will lead Catholic FOCUS chapters on campuses around the country gather and pray in preparation for the coming

FOCUS

school year.

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PHILANTHROPY

Philanthropically supported groups that help students grow in their faith are being enthusiastically embraced by young participants—but also threatened by opponents

By Liz Essley Whyte

FOCUS

W

hen Karl Johnson was a student at Cornell, he longed to be able to connect his studies with his Christian faith. “I didn’t find much help at the university, where religion was often treated as some sort of very private affair, so personal that it’s usually not talked about. And on the other hand, those connections were often not made in the churches, at least not the ones I was familiar with,” he says.

Later, while working at his alma mater, Johnson again wondered how students might connect what they were learning in class with Christian theology. He had an idea: a central place where students could gather to discuss these matters, hear from knowledgeable speakers, ask important questions about ultimate realities, and learn to integrate mind and soul.

When he shared his idea with friends, a local pastor told him about an organization that already existed at the University of Virginia.

So Johnson called up Drew Trotter, who was heading the Center for Christian Study in Charlottesville, Virginia. Trotter was doing much of what Johnson had envisioned, and gave him tips for how to get started at Cornell. Shortly after,

in 2000, Johnson started Chesterton House, as a part-time pursuit alongside his full-time job.

The nonprofit offered a resource library, hosted discussions of current films such as The Matrix, and sponsored lectures on things like science and faith—a topic that drew 500 students and faculty.

Five years later, two faculty members donated the money that allowed Johnson to take on full-time management of the group. Since then, the organization has grown five-fold; it now operates on an annual donated budget exceeding $500,000.

Chesterton House (named for the British journalist and Christian writer) proved to be just one piece of a growing movement. Similar study centers were popping up across the nation, at schools like the University of Florida, Yale, and Duke. In 2009 Trotter, Johnson, and others formed the Consortium of Christian Study Centers (CCSC). It now has 16 member centers, and Trotter is expecting more growth.

The consortium, with a $260,000 annual budget provided by philanthropy, helps the affiliated Liz Essley Whyte, a contributing editor to Philanthropy, is a journalist in Washington, D.C.

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Carrie Alley Photography

and the life of the mind. Chesterton House rents a historic Tudor mansion to house 18 men, and also has a women’s residence. Johnson jokes that the men’s house is a “cross between a fraternity and a monastery.” Living together, he says, lets outsiders see what a Christian community looks like. “There’s an inherently corporate aspect in Christian witness. It’s in living together in community that we make our faith known to others.”

Renting housing facilities comes with costly payments and uncertainty, so the Chesterton House board recently decided to raise money to purchase homes—a dream now on its way to being fulfilled, thanks to help from donors Greg and Susan Gianforte, whose son attends Cornell and is closely involved with Chesterton House. The couple—who sold their company RightNow Technologies to Oracle for about $1.5 billion in 2011— offered the study center $1 million for the purchase of the men’s house, and have pledged another $1 million to purchase a women’s home. campus groups find speakers The Gianfortes say they and staff, doles out advice, and believe in what Chesterton is opens channels of communicadoing, and wanted to support it. tion among their leaders. “The “Christian intellectual thought people that give to me are being has a very, very strong tradition encouraged by the fact that this in academia, if you study hisis a movement. This is sometory. And I think it’s important thing broader,” says Trotter. that that voice continue to be heard on college campuses.

Bridging faith That’s the role Chesterton fills, and reason by bringing speakers in from Study centers aim to support various viewpoints, to make their universities’ goals for eduthe discussion on campus more cation, says Trotter, by showing robust,” says Greg Gianforte.

At Cornell’s Chesterton House, Christian students students how what they learn in Johnson says the Gianclass relates to Christian thought deepen their faith by living in fellowship together, in fortes’ gift will help students through the ages, bringing “a what founder Karl Johnson (above left) calls a “cross apply what they learn at Chesbetween a fraternity and a monastery.” robust Christian intellectual traterton House to their daily dition to campus, a different level lives. “Although we are very of engagement with Scripture and academic disciplines.” oriented toward Christian scholarship,” he says, ChrisThey are meant to be “co-curricular”—parallel with what tianity “touches on all aspects of life. We are shaped and students are learning in class. Recently Chesterton House formed by everyday habits that include things like eating became fully “curricular”—students can take classes in the- and sleeping. Having a residential facility was one way ology and Biblical studies at the House that are accredited to put into practice these ideas about the way in which

by Gordon College, a well-regarded Christian school in spiritual formation actually happens.”

Massachusetts, and the credits can then be transferred back Despite its rapid growth and the new opportunity to Cornell. to own student residences, Johnson acknowledges that Some of the study centers are simply gathering Chesterton House is still a “small project.” “This is a places for students to meet and learn. Others now offer huge university. There are 20,000 students here. We’re residences for students who share interests in Christianity housing 1/10 of 1 percent of the student body,” he

Carrie Alley Photography

Banishing Religious Conviction InterVarsity, an evangelical Christian college ministry, has 23 chapters within the California State University system—23 groups of students praying, worshiping, and studying and counseling together. But starting this school year, their gatherings will be very different: Unlike other campus groups, they won’t be able to reserve meeting rooms for free. They won’t be able to set up booths at official welcome events for freshmen. And they won’t be able to use any campus-owned bulletin boards to advertise their meetings.

That’s because, as of this fall, Cal State is stripping InterVarsity’s status as a student organization.

Fresh school policy says that student groups can’t discriminate against students who want to participate—and religious groups can’t have religious requirements for their leaders. If an atheist wants to oversee Bible studies, or a worship leader’s personal behavior doesn’t meet the group’s ethical standards, InterVarsity can’t ask him or her to step down.

The nondiscrimination rule is pushing InterVarsity off campus. The group estimates it will need to raise an additional $13,000 to rent rooms for meetings at just one Cal State campus this year. “The university is sending a clear message: ‘We do not welcome students with deep religious convictions,’” says Greg Jao, a national field director for InterVarsity. “I think it undermines the university as a place of free inquiry.”

Other groups—including an African-American Christian group and an Asian Christian group—are likewise being pushed out of the California system. And from Bowdoin in Maine to Rollins in Florida, similar pushes against religious conviction are forcing faith groups

off many other campuses. A third of the 35 religious groups previously active at Vanderbilt University refused to sign a new nondiscrimination policy, so the administration pulled their campus recognition.

InterVarsity says it has faced problems like this in the past in a few places, but the run-ins have escalated since 2010, when the Supreme Court ruled that the Hastings College of the Law, a small public school, could require the Christian Legal Society to accept students of all faiths as officers, or lose recognition from the school. Many religious groups are happy to have non-believers attend their gatherings; that is the starting point for evangelism. But a religious group, many say, must have the right to restrict its leadership to people who share particular beliefs. That, after all, is the core of their identity.

Gay and lesbian students were at the center of the court’s decision on Hastings. The religious group wanted voting members to adhere to prescribed standards of sexual behavior. In the two years after the high court suggested that was inappropriate, InterVarsity alone had its official status challenged on more than 40 campuses.

And the controversy is likely to grow—ensnaring many other ministries, including FOCUS and Christian Union—as campus activists and administrators are emboldened by the Supreme Court ruling.

“At some campuses, particularly in the bluer states, where maybe the administration is a bit more radicalized in their bias against Christian organizations, I think you’ll see an increasing number of steps taken to enforce these policies,” says David French, a lawyer who has been defending campus ministries since 2000.

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Cal State says its new rule “is really to limit the risk that the campus would take for other types of lawsuits,” according to Michael Uhlenkamp, director of public affairs for the California State University chancellor’s office. In order to protect religious liberty, though, some colleges have exempted faith groups from requirements imposed on other student organizations in the name of tolerance and diversity. The Christian Legal Aid Society cites the University of Florida, University of Minnesota, University of Texas, and University of Houston as locales that have decided to allow student religious groups to retain principles of identity and leadership requirements that would otherwise be banned by mandatory nondiscrimination pledges.

As the conflicts continue, French sees an opportunity for donors to get involved. “You may see in the future some real efforts to provide a level of financial independence from the university that allows these groups to continue ministry without having to worry about the heavy hand of the administration,” French says. After Vanderbilt stripped its religious organizations of recognition, the groups that owned off-campus buildings were able to continue gathering for worship.

Meanwhile, with the help of nonprofit law firms and advocacy groups like the Becket Fund, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and the Alliance Defending Freedom, religious groups on many other campuses have been able to stay put—for now.

If universities continue to push evangelical groups off campus, advocates like French and Jao worry, the trend will tarnish American higher education. “It will send a strong message,” says French, that “ideological diversity and pluralism are no longer welcome.”

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These Columbia students are part of Christian Union, a group with chapters at

Phil Anema / Christian Union

all eight Ivy League universities.

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PHILANTHROPY

Phil Anema / Christian Union

says. Yet Chesterton House and its counterparts in other Christian study centers are giving some young people the chance to explore questions of truth, love, and meaning, and the camaraderie they need to maintain their beliefs in a sometimes hostile environment.

“For some students, for a few students, this will make a huge difference.”

Truth and love The study-center movement is just one of a fresh crop of Christian ministries now springing up at America’s universities—even as older Christian groups like the Navigators, InterVarsity, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and Campus Crusade for Christ (now known as Cru) continue the work they started decades ago: evangelizing and creating Christian community among college students. Campus Crusade, for example, has been bringing the gospel to young people since 1951 and is now one of the largest evangelical organizations in the world, ministering not only to 64,000 college students, but also to members of the military, politicians, sports teams, and more. The CCSC and two other new groups, however, are offering new takes on traditional campus outreach. And their rapid growth is fueled by enthusiastic financial backers eager to see young people include God in the formative years of their lives.

On a warm spring evening at Virginia’s George Mason University, students are eating barbeque, playing beanbag and volleyball, talking, laughing. It’s a typical college scene, except that these public-university students—around 100 of them—have just taken the time to celebrate a Mass together, in the midst of their final exams. The worship service is notably laid-back. During the homily, students help the priest find a word he can’t think of, and the Reverend Peter Nassetta offers a brief hagiography in millennial style: “St. Joseph rocks.” Students wearing T-shirts printed with sayings like “Remember the Unborn” and “Livin’ on a Prayer” sing the kind of praise songs one expects to hear at a megachurch, not a traditional Mass.

This is FOCUS, a Roman Catholic outreach group modeled on Campus Crusade. The Fellowship of Catholic University Students deploys missionaries, many of them recent college graduates themselves, to help students wrestle seriously with questions of faith. In 2009, a little more

than a decade since its inception at Benedictine College in Kansas, the group was active on more than 50 campuses. It has since expanded to 99.

Lindsay Butkus, a 22-year-old senior at the cookout, plans to join FOCUS as a full-time missionary this year, a role in which she will share the gospel with nonbelievers, encourage believers to grow in their faith, and train student leaders to help others understand Christianity. FOCUS missionaries must raise a minimum of $1,700 of monthly support from fellow Christians and friends, then commit to ministering on campuses for at least two years. Butkus has already led Bible studies for the group, starting in her freshman year. “I’ve really enjoyed my time here, and I’ve seen how the Gospel can affect people’s lives,” she says.

“College is just such a crucial time; students are open to learning and exploring. They’re looking for truth, and they just need it to be presented to them.”

FOCUS will feel familiar to anyone who’s been exposed to evangelical ministries like Campus Crusade, but it ’s new territory for Catholics. When Butkus’s father went to college the people ministering to students were not laymen but priests and nuns, often working at the Newman Centers that dot many campuses as official Catholic ministries. At universities like George Mason, FOCUS is teaming up with the Newman Center to add to the roster of volunteers counseling and encouraging students. “Our focus is evangelical, and we are thriving at our best” when sympathetic chaplains invite FOCUS to their campuses, says Craig Miller, chief operating officer of the organization. But FOCUS missionaries do things that traditional college chaplains do not—like leading small-group Bible studies in dorm rooms, or forming deep friendships with student peers. “We are all made for love. And that love is only going to be found fully in relationship with God,” says Carrie Wagner, a FOCUS missionary at George Mason.

Angela Telthorst, the group’s director of philanthropy, says that more faith workers, priests, monks, and nuns are coming out of FOCUS these days than any other entity in the Catholic Church—400 since its beginning, and almost 100 just this year. And the group is growing quickly—about 20 to 25 percent annually, says Miller. Its operating budget will

“In college, students are open to learning and exploring. They’re looking for truth, and they need it to be presented to them.”

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It’s not just evangelical Christian groups that are growing at colleges. Chabad on Campus, a Jewish organization, has grown from about 30 U.S. centers in the mid-’90s to 250 now. The bulk of that growth is thanks to seed funding from philanthropist George Rohr, the founder and president of private equity firm NCH Capital. Another 26 centers in European cities have taken off in recent years, many of them underwritten by British philanthropist David Slager, who became acquainted with Chabad while a law student at Oxford. “I do not remember a word [from law school],” he has told Chabad leaders. “But I do remember the [Chasidic thought] I learned at Chabad.”

Chabad on Campus serves as a home-away-from-home for Jewish students, seeking to deepen their connections to their heritage and faith. “We’re trying to increase more active goodness and kindness in the world,” says Rabbi Menachem Schmidt, the president of the organization. “We’re trying to increase Jewish pride.” The group also spreads the teachings of Chabad, a Hasidic movement associated with Orthodox Judaism.

The centers are known for their Shabbat dinners and family-style activities; each center is co-led by a rabbi and his wife who live near campus and minister to students full-time.

“Since the home is the center of Judaism, the whole idea is to expand the influence of that home as much as possible,” says Schmidt. Chabad houses hand out menorahs at Hannukah, offer informal seminars on Jewish thought, and come together for large conferences with hundreds of other Chabad students in their regions. The couple leading each new Chabad house start out with a small grant from the larger umbrella group, but soon after must raise their own funding.

Chabad is still dwarfed by the biggest college Jewish organization, Hillel, which works on more than 550 campuses and was first founded in 1923. And plenty of smaller Jewish groups—such as the Jewish Learning Center Initiative—also help students maintain their Jewish rituals and heritage while in college. All of these groups use a crucial period of students’ lives to foster religious identity that can last a lifetime. “These institutions are a bulwark of the encroachment against tradition that many college campuses foster,” says Mark Gottlieb, senior director for the Tikvah Fund, who also describes them as “countercultural forces, especially Chabad.” People come through the door “because they’re looking for an inspiring religious experience and can wind up being engaged by the ideas on a more profound level.”

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PHILANTHROPY

approach $40 million in the 2014-2015 fiscal year, and donors have been backing that growth. The funds raised by individual missionaries are matched by group-wide donations that cover the costs of curriculum development, national meetings for students, training for missionaries, a mobile app for students and leaders, and an administrative staff. That’s where donors like Carol AuClair have stepped in.

AuClair is a careful, thoughtful philanthropist.

When she met a friend of a friend for coffee and some information on a new nonprofit in 2009, she wasn’t expecting much to come of it. But “within ten minutes I was terribly, terribly excited about what he was doing,” she says. At the end of that first meeting, she signed a check for $10,000. Since that sit-down with founder Curtis Martin, AuClair has become more and more involved with FOCUS, giving the group more than $100,000 to use where most needed, and now serving on an advisory council. She was drawn to the ministry initially, she says, because Curtis’s story of coming to faith reminded her so much of her own spiritual journey.

When AuClair was a Catholic newlywed in the mid-’70s, hungry for more spiritual knowledge, she sought out Bible studies and found them in Protestant churches. She became a born-again Christian and practiced her faith for 20 years. In the meantime, she and her husband had two children and built their own business, Sherikon, from a spare-bedroom enterprise to an 800-employee company responsible for more than $15 million in contracts in 1998. But her husband died in a plane crash in 1999, leaving her to run the company on her own for about two years before selling it. Around this time, she says, she heard God call her back to the Roman Catholic Church. Now she’s eager to see young people embrace the faith she holds dear, feeling confident that if they do, the world will be changed for the better.

“Somebody really needs to be talking to these kids when they’re at a crossroads in their life, when they’re making decisions,” she says. “You can’t go wrong if you get hold of an individual and introduce that person to God. Once these young people learn that God loves them and is there for them, that really will make a difference.”

Ivy-league disciples While FOCUS is bringing a Catholic perspective to the popular Campus Crusade model, another fast-growing group—Christian Union—is trying a different approach.

Phil Anema / Christian Union

Fortifying Faith

Phil Anema / Christian Union

Instead of asking missionaries to raise their own support and transferring them from campus to campus periodically, Christian Union raises funds tied to particular schools rather than individuals. If a donor gives to Christian outreach at a specific campus, the funding largest student groups of any kind on campus. At Harvard, with 200 participants, it is one of the largest student stays there.

But what’s most distinctive about this ministry, groups as well. Though most of the students are already founded in 2002 by Cornell alumnus Matt Bennett, is believers when they become involved, about 30 students that it brings the evangelical message to overwhelm- in each of the last two years converted after getting ingly secular Ivy League students. In his dozen years involved with the group, says Bennett.

“We frequently cannot handle as many students working for Campus Crusade at Princeton, Bennett watched as many of the school’s alumni reached influ- as we wish we could,” he says. Last year the ministry ential positions in their professions. “I thought…we operated on a $7 million budget. Even though Bennett is raising more money need people who have the every year, so far he has “not values of Jesus Christ who been able to keep up with are leaders in so many the demand.” places in society,” he says.

Most of his donors are Christian Union is Ivy League alumni who now operating on the wish they had had a similar campuses of Princeton, campus ministry in college.

Columbia, Cornell, Yale, W hen Angela Lamb, a Har vard, Dar tmouth, Cornell graduate and derBrown, and the Unimatologist on the faculty versity of Pennsylvania. at Mount Sinai Hospital Bennett says his group in Manhattan, read about is focused on leadership C h r i s t i a n U n i on , s h e development, rather than e-mailed Bennett immedievangelization, though it ately to find out how she evangelizes as well. He could help. She has since wants to see more Ivy given about $10,000 to League graduates become the group.

Christians, but even if “I really think you they don’t, he wants them have to meet leaders and exposed to Chr istian shapers of communit y teaching. “Even for those where they are,” she says. who don’t become ChrisChristian Union is built upon Bible study among friends, “A disproportionate numtian, if they would adopt like these two students on Dartmouth’s quad. ber of people in leadership some of these incredible ranks of medicine, law, values from the Scriptures, it would mean an enormous amount of good business, government have stepped through the doors of these institutions.” for the nation,” he says.

Bennett agrees. “If we want to see the nation Christian Union’s primary method of transmitting Christ’s moral teaching is Bible study. Staff lead change for the better, people who are in leadership groups of eight to ten students through a book of the in culturally influential institutions have to have the Bible each semester. They also have two specialty right values. That’s why we do what we do.” P courses: one for freshmen on sex and spirituality, and another for seniors on vocations. The group also coordinates one-on-one mentoring, a weekly lecture series, book giveaways, and conferences.

At Princeton, Christian Union now has 500 students—or about 10 percent of undergraduates—involved in its programs in some capacity, making it one of the

“You can’t go wrong by introducing young people to God. Once they learn that God loves them and is there for them, that really will make a difference.”

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DRUG Donors

While some philanthropists fought for decades to legalize marijuana, others are gearing up to address the undesirable consequences

By Justin Torres

ike a dam giving way, public policy transformations often progress slowly—and then all at once. So it is with the movement to decriminalize marijuana. The fringe opinion of 20 years ago has gone mainstream: Public support for “medical marijuana” now regularly approaches 75 or 80 percent in opinion polling, and out-and-out legalization of the drug has begun to attract small majorities overall, and lopsided majorities among younger respondents.

This change in opinion is linked to changing law enforcement and statutes. Starting with California in 1996, 23 states now permit use of the psychoactive agent in marijuana, THC, in various forms with a doctor’s perscription, and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has stated publicly that prosecuting medical marijuana users “will not be a priority” for federal law enforcement. Seventeen states, the District of Columbia, and several dozen localities have decriminalized the possession of small amounts of marijuana, keeping anti-pot laws on the books while reducing penalties to those akin to a citation. And in 2012, Colorado and Washington

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passed laws permitting the sale and recreational adult use of marijuana.

This revolution in policy and opinion is no accident. Some of the most powerful donors in America have poured tens of millions of dollars into networks that have used sophisticated activism, research, and legal advocacy to alter opinions and flip laws. The success of these donors is a case study in how an idea backed by philanthropic dollars can eventually root in the public mind and instigate dramatic social change. But with that success comes new questions: How will Americans be affected by this change? What should concerned donors do to soften its effects? Is funding a counterrevolt possible?

Soros’s success The story starts with financier and philanthropist George Soros. Since 1994, Soros has poured nearly $80 million into research and advocacy in support Justin Torres is a contributing editor to Philanthropy.

Liz Essley Whyte contributed reporting to this article.

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Atypeek / istockphoto

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Atypeek / istockphoto

of marijuana legalization and other rollbacks of drug law, including ending criminal sentences for non-violent drug crimes. In a recent article in the Financial Times, Soros lambasted the federal “war on drugs” as “a $1 trillion failure” that has created a massive black market and shifted the burden of enforcement onto fragile production and transit countries like Afghanistan and Mexico.

According to an in-depth report by Kelly Riddell of the Washington Times, Soros’s Foundation to Promote Open Society donates roughly $4 million every year to the Drug Policy Alliance and its electoral arm, Drug Policy Action, each of which supports decriminalization and legalization efforts, as well as fighting incarceration, and projects such as needle exchanges and distribution of overdose antidotes to reduce the harm done by drug use.

These organizations led the Colorado and Washington legalization efforts, and laid much of the groundwork for medical marijuana. Soros also supports work by the American Civil Liberties Union in favor of marijuana legalization, and the Marijuana Policy Project, which organizes policy change and state ballot measures.

Soros’s efforts were more or less matched by Progressive Insurance chairman Peter Lewis, who first tried pot in his 30s and called it “better than scotch.” The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws estimates that Lewis spent $40-$60 million to support drug legalization from the 1980s until his death in 2013. Soros, Lewis, and various nonprofits associated with them provided 68 percent of the funding for the group that mobilized the legalization initiative in Washington state, and two thirds of the funding for the organization that pushed pot legalization in Colorado.

These formal funding relationships buttress a series of informal connections in the Soros drug-policy universe. For example, Drug Policy Alliance president Ira Glasser is a former executive director of the ACLU. And Marijuana Policy Project co-founders Rob Kampia, Chuck Thomas, and Mike Kirshner formerly did advocacy at the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

Birth of an industry As public attitudes have been softened, an entire cannabis industry has risen rapidly. Growers, distributors, dispensaries, marketers, financiers, consultants, technologists, and cannabis-related investment funds are popping up to cash in on a now above-ground lucrative trade.

These providers have even organized a trade group, the National Cannabis Industry Association.

If anything epitomizes the way marijuana has gone corporate, it is the NCIA. There is none of the patchouli and tie-dye of yore about this group. Describing the first-ever Cannabis Business Summit held in Denver

this past June, spokeswoman Taylor West (formerly of the venerable political mag National Journal) says, “Look around and you’d think this was a meeting of any business group.” Some panel topics: Advanced Retail. Risk Management and Insurance. Finance. Communications Strategy. Government Relations. “Most of our members are small business owners who are wrestling with all the things that small business owners everywhere wrestle with,” states West.

But a powerful big-business element is also mobilizing to make money on cannabis. Investment firms specifically focused on marijuana are being organized, like the Ghost Group in southern California, which is seeking $25 million in startup capital. Privateer Holdings is already being operated by two Yale graduates who are now raising $100 million for the private-equity company’s next investment round. Citing the Starbucks corporate model, principals Michael Blue and Brendan Kennedy recently told Australian broadcasters they are “treating it like a professional industry…like it should be treated.” They bought a website called Leafly and turned it into a popular review site for different strains of the drug, complete with a smartphone app. Privateer has developed 40 proprietary strains of marijuana; its “Pink Kush” hybrid contains more than 23 percent psychoactive THC. “It’s a massive industry now and it will only grow as further legalization takes place, and if you look globally it’s a $150 billion industry. That’s the only reason we jumped into the space,” stated Blue.

The ties between this new industry that sprung up after the philanthropic campaign and the donor-funded advocacy groups are strong. The links between the two worlds show in the trade leaders: the co-founder and executive director of the national trade association, Aaron Smith, is a veteran of the Marijuana Policy Project and also Safe Access Now, a Soros-backed nonprofit in California. Troy Dayton, co-founder of the first “angel investor” firm targeting the cannabis industry, called ArcView, was by his own account one of the first volunteers for the Marijuana Policy Project as a teen. These links are a reflection “of this industry’s roots in political reform,” says West. “The people who want to build this into a responsible, productive industry are obviously going to be the same people who worked to end the social injustice of prohibition.”

“A responsible industry”: West repeats the phrase, or something like it, several times during our interview. Colorado, where recreational marijuana use has been legal for more than two years, is one state-sized experiment—some critics say, a barely controlled experiment—into whether a responsible cannabis industry is possible. This summer, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd published one of the stranger op-eds ever to grace the pages of the Gray Lady, about a trip to Colorado where marijuana-infused FALL 2014

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A recreational marijuana store in Washington state makes a sale on its first day of legal operation in July of this year.

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Philanthropic mitigation Some observers doubt that the cannabis industry’s self-interest is enough to ensure a safe marketplace, or that the industry can be trusted to do the hard thinking about the effects of so radical an experiment. One concerned observer is John Krieger, executive director of the Achelis and Bodman Foundations. It was watching the influence that the Soros-backed groups had on the legalization debate that got him interested in exploring whether his philanthropy should wade in on the other side. “I think anyone should be concerned about the

John Van Hasselt/Corbis

creating rules on serving sizes, packaging, and labeling.

There are industry programs to train dispensaries and producers on how to label, market, and sell cannabis products to improve safety. “As an industry, we don’t have an interest in consumers having a bad experience,” she says. But in places where it is legal, economic forces are pushing marijuana rapidly into stronger and more readily ingested forms that consumers can easily misuse, mistakenly or not. There are now concentrates sold in the form of waxes, oils, or resins that can tip 80 or 90 percent THC. These are, for instance, injected into “pens” that can be plugged into a computer’s USB port for heating. One puff then gives the user the equivalent of smoking a whole marijuana joint.

Associated Press

chocolate left her “curled up in a hallucinatory state for… eight hours…. I was panting and paranoid, sure that when the room-service waiter knocked and I didn’t answer, he’d call the police and have me arrested for being unable to handle my candy,” Dowd wrote. “I strained to remember where I was or even what I was wearing…. As my paranoia deepened, I became convinced that I had died and no one was telling me.”

Dowd, it turns out, is not alone in the new Colorado, where the market for marijuana-laced edibles has exploded and the inexperienced are discovering that the new, industrially processed pot brownies, candies, chocolates, and sodas are not your Boomer dad’s weed.

At least one murder and one death in Colorado have been attributed to marijuana ingestibles, while dozens of Colorado children have been hospitalized after eating unsecured or stolen brownies or candies. The Potency Monitoring Project at the University of Mississippi, which tracks the strength of marijuana seized in drug busts around the country, has found that since the 1990s average THC levels in marijuana have zoomed from 3 percent to more than 13, and some strains now being offered for legal sale reach as high as 25 percent.

West says her trade group supports reasonable regulation of the cannabis marketplace, and some members are serving on a Colorado commission charged with

Vaporizer pens are one of many aspects of marijuana consumption in today’s legalized experiment that have not been thought through. Users put marijuana concentrates (easily available in Colorado or Washington in the form of oil or wax) and one drag delivers ten times the amount of psychoactive chemical as an average marijuana joint. “It’s hard to tell how much you are actually getting when you take a puff of one of these things,” Mark Kleiman of UCLA recently explained to an NPR reporter. “The risk of getting wrecked is a lot higher.” Even a legalization advocate like the director of NORML, Allan St. Pierre, worries that “you can potentially pass out with a single inhalation.” Perhaps most difficult, vaporizers (which are becoming extremely popular with users of all ages) give off no telltale scent. For parents and teachers, says Kleiman,

John Van Hasselt/Corbis

Associated Press

“this will be a nightmare.... I can tell if my kids are smoking pot. But if they’re using a vape pen, forget about it.”

legalization of an intoxicant. You don’t have to be a prude or a blue-haired old lady to think that if a society’s legalizing something that causes impairment, one should have questions and concerns,” he says. Himself strongly opposed to legalization and medical marijuana, Krieger was surprised to find his board split on the issue. Some, like him, were opposed, but others were open to legalization while curious about the surrounding legal and medical questions: What would employers do with high employees? What would parents tell their children about whether to smoke pot? While “there was no consensus on the board about what our attitude toward legalization should be,” says Krieger, there was interest in playing a constructive role. “We were wondering: ‘Well, what could we do to contribute to a greater debate of the issue?’”

Given the divide, Achelis and Bodman decided to approach the topic from several angles. Ultimately, the board approved $300,000 in grants split among five organizations. Partnership at Drugfree.org received

$50,000 to assemble a toolkit for parents on how to talk to kids about drug legalization. Carnegie Mellon University got $50,000 to support professor Jonathan Caulkins’s research into habitual marijuana use, examining its effects on family life and comparing it to alcohol abuse. National Families in Action took in $50,000 to produce a policy document on how marijuana legalization will affect the workplace: What are the rights and responsibilities of employers in a state that has legalized or decriminalized marijuana use?

A $100,000 grant went to former Philanthropy Roundtable president John Walters, to establish the Center for Substance Abuse Policy Research at the Hudson Institute, a D.C. think tank. Walters, who served as drug czar under President George W. Bush, sees his new venture as an effort to counter what he calls “misinformation” from Soros and the pro-legalization advocacy groups.

“Most families I see have a friend or family member who has been involved with drugs or alcohol. They know that no family is better with drugs in its midst,” says Walters.

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bottle is the equivalent of smoking several joints. Chocolates laced with high levels of THC (front) are being aggressively marketed in Colorado and Washington—along with marijuana-infused gummy bears, lollipops, rice crispy treats, brownies, peanut butter cookies, fruit chews, hard candies, cinnamon-flavored drops that can be put in drinks or directly on the tongue, and a wide array of other “edibles” which make marijuana use easy, stealthy, tasty, and much more concentrated.

He reports his center will produce research to correct misinformation from the pot industry, and work with localities that would prefer to abide by federal law, which still penalizes marijuana use. “The policy in many states, and the attitude of national leaders in the Obama administration, has become lax,” he warns.

A middle way Achelis and Bodman’s final grant went to Project SAM, or Smart Approaches to Marijuana, a group chaired by former congressman Patrick Kennedy. While anti-legalization, Project SAM “tries to take a more nuanced approach,” according to board member Ben Cort, a recovering addict (sober since 1996, at age 18), and an old hand in the nonprofit addiction treatment industry who works at an in-patient facility at the

“There has been no real regulation of this new industry. It’s like the Wild West out here.”

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Dixie Brands Inc.

Dixie Elixirs (rear) are sweet sodas packed with marijuana concentrates; drinking a single

University of Colorado Hospital. “Unfortunately,” says Cort, “the debate has boiled down to people who are into full-scale commercialization and industrialization…and other folks who really do think that swift and certain punishment of low-level offenders is the only way to keep our streets safe and our families protected.”

Cort, and Project SAM, seek a middle way: opposed to legalization, but willing to rethink sentencing laws that put non-violent offenders in jail. Cort also advocates for what he calls, with studied emphasis, “real research into the medicinal qualities of ” marijuana—willing to acknowledge possible medicinal benefits, but skeptical of claims that marijuana is a miracle plant that prevents cancer or slows Alzheimer’s.

Together with fellow Project SAM founder Kevin Sabet, a former Obama administration drug-policy official and author of the book Reefer Madness, Cort decries the rise of “Big Weed”—the takeover of marijuana cultivation and distribution by corporate interests that see the potential for major profits in highly processed, potent, and efficient marijuana products. These businesspeople are chasing a national market that some analysts say will reach $3 billion in 2015 and top $10 billion by 2019.

Financial interests, says Cort, have squelched an honest dialogue about the potential risks of legalizing weed, and have systematically underplayed the dangers of pot-infused edibles and THC concentrates.

He points to THC-infused sodas produced by the company Dixie Elixirs, offered in flavors like grapefruit and peach, that contain THC levels equivalent to several joints. (The company has recently begun to market a single-serving version.) Labels on such products will often contain a warning to drink only one serving at a time, “but who can believe that’s effective?” he asks. “There has been no real regulation…it’s been left to a piecemeal state system that doesn’t want to admit that it can’t handle this new industry. It’s like the Wild West out here.” To keep up with exploding demand for its products, Dixie Elixirs moved in August to a new factory four times the size of its earlier facility.

Cort is a realist about where the legalization debate is heading, and about what should come next.

Recognizing that the genie may be out of the bottle, he says the thing to focus on now is “setting up an infrastructure. We have rushed into legalization, without having given any thought to how we would regulate this industry. We’re allowing them to make the rules that they are then governed by. We need to think hard about that.” Helping spur that hard thinking may be a role that new philanthropic donors can fill as this debate unfolds across America. P

MANY OF THE MOST REMARKABLE ACHIEVEMENTS IN

EDUCATION

REFORM. . .

world’s best colleges • free libraries • scientific medical schools • literacy for slaves • discoveries in child psychology • invention of business schools • early education for women • children’s television • endowed professorships • tech colleges • schools for blacks during Jim Crow • pensions for teachers • the law & economics movement • inner-city Catholic schools • school choice • Teach For America • charter schools • online learning

…ARE PRODUCTS OF PRIVATE

PHILANTHROPY Learn more at PhilanthropyRoundtable.org/almanac/education

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PHILANTHROPY

© Vstock / gettyimages

CHAMPION A 15-year update on the winners of the William E. Simon Prize for Philanthropic Leadership

By Naomi Schaefer Riley

© Vstock / gettyimages

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n the year 2000, the foundation created by the pioneering philanthropist William E. Simon conceived of a prize for America’s most inspired and effective living donors. In this fifteenth season of the award’s existence, Philanthropy is looking back at its impressive roster of winners. What are they giving to now? With what results? How have their perspectives on donating changed?

We begin with this year’s winner—Utah billion-dollar-donor Jon Huntsman Sr.—then go back to the very first recipient and update you on each of the honorees. Our snapshots reveal an impressive variety of continuing projects and passions: from medicine to the arts, from charter schools to kindness training, from helping retirees launch nonprofits as “second careers” to encouraging young kids to read.

Some of these master donors have a personal connection to the issues they are most invested in; others are simply called by their convictions to help others in need. A few have found a fresh direction since winning the award; others are more dedicated than ever to their first causes. Three winners have passed on, so their children and associates reflect here on their legacies. What unites all of these givers is their generosity, their commitment to excellence, and their insistence that individual citizens, acting on their own in good faith, can make life better for their fellow man.

Naomi Schaefer Riley, a contributing editor to Philanthropy, is a columnist for the New York Post and the author of, most recently, Opportunity and Hope: Transforming Children’s Lives through Scholarships.

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This year’s winner

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he relief of human suffering.” That’s how Jon Huntsman Sr. describes the purpose of his philanthropy. Having already donated more than a billion dollars of his personal wealth, Huntsman’s philosophy of giving is fairly straightforward. “I believe that all individuals are the products of their upbringing, the trials and tribulations in their lives. I’m no different from anyone else. Where I’ve seen other human beings suffer in my own family, in my own life, that is where I have focused. We donate to the causes that have affected us.”

Huntsman’s fortune was launched when a company he created invented the clamshell container for Big Macs in 1970. In 1982, Huntsman formed the Huntsman Chemical Corporation in Salt Lake City, which grew into a multibillion dollar operation that manufactures many types of industrial plastics and consumer packaging. But while his means have increased, his approach to philanthropy has not changed much since childhood.

Though his parents weren’t active members, Huntsman started tithing to the Mormon Church as a boy. Even as a young man in the Navy he used to give away an extra $50 a month on top of his tithing, aiming it to families who were in trouble. “To me that was a part of life,” he says.

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Empathy comes easily to Huntsman.

“As a young boy, we were very poor,” he recalls of his childhood in a two-room home in Blackfoot, Idaho. Early on he realized just how important “a hot meal could be.” That has made him a major donor to the St. Vincent de Paul Soup Kitchen, run by the Catholic Church in Salt Lake City.

His childhood brought other burdens. “My mother’s difficult relationship with my father gave me a great feeling and sensitivity to abused women and children.”

Huntsman and his wife, Karen, support shelters and other programs to protect threatened and neglected family members.

One of the Huntsmans’ nine children has mental impairments. “Through his life,” Huntsman says, “we have learned how difficult it is for such a person to survive in the world without someone caring about you.” The couple gives to programs that help people like their son achieve a degree of independence. And when the Olympics came to Salt Lake City, they contributed $1 million to the Paralympic Games.

The Huntsmans also lost a daughter to a drug overdose. “We have seen the impact of addiction.” They have given accordingly to programs that minister to people snarled in drugs and alcohol, and to their families.

One heavy dose of human suffering that has fallen on Huntsman has been PHILANTHROPY

cancer. “My mother died in my arms at a young age,” he recalls. “Her mother died when she was 14.” Huntsman’s father had cancer, and Huntsman himself has battled the disease four times.

The Huntsman Cancer Institute, which the philanthropist willed into existence with gifts of several hundred million dollars, broke ground on a new wing this past summer with his additional help. The $105 million expansion, which will include both clinical and research facilities, will focus on children’s cancers. HCI’s database of 16 million cancer patients—the largest single set of information on people with cancer, including their backgrounds and their outcomes—will help researchers at the new expansion explore the genetic correlates of the disease and develop targeted treatments. HCI researchers are also investigating the genetic mechanisms that help animals such as elephants avoid cancer. About 300 new scientists are being hired as part of the expansion.

Huntsman has signed the Giving Pledge, and he has encouraged billionaire philanthropists to go beyond its promise to donate at least half their wealth— he thinks 80 percent is a better target.

Huntsman wonders what it would take to get people to donate more. “Giving money away can be just as difficult for billionaires as for poorer people. It is not about the amount of money as much as

Huntsman Cancer Institute

Jon Huntsman Sr. 2014

Huntsman Cancer Institute

William E. Simon William E. Simon was a successful banker, public servant, and noted philanthropist. A star bond trader, he served as Secretary of the Treasury in the Nixon and Ford administrations, became a pioneer of leveraged buyouts, and led the U.S. Olympic Committee during the 1984 summer games. He gave generously of his own wealth and became a trustee of some of America’s most influential philanthropic organizations.

Born in New Jersey in 1927, Simon volunteered for the Army and served as a private. After he was discharged, he attended Lafayette College. When graduation approached, Simon was married and in debt, with one young son and another on the way. He camped out in the offices of Union Securities on Wall Street until he landed a $75 per week job in the mailroom. Within a few years he made partner and was heading the firm’s municipal-bonds trading desk.

He moved to Salomon Brothers, where he became famous for his 16-hour days, standing beside his desk, guzzling gallons of ice water, and barking orders to his traders. By 1973, when he left for the Treasury Department, he was a member of the firm’s executive committee and sat on the board that oversaw federal mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. After his government service, Simon returned to private life to find himself nearly bankrupt. Inflation and losses in his blind trust had eviscerated his net worth. He quickly rebuilt his fortune through a series of leveraged buyout deals, founding Wesray Capital Corporation with Ray Chambers. Most famously, the partners purchased Gibson Greeting Cards for $80 million (all but $1 million of which they borrowed).

They revitalized it, and took it public again for $290 million. In later years, Simon turned his attention to building a Pacific Rim merchant banking house with his sons, Bill and Peter.

From 1980 to 1984, Simon was president of the U.S. Olympic Committee, leading the 1984 summer games to profitability for the first time since 1932. Simon used the profits to create the U.S. Olympic Foundation, which provided funds to support the athletes’ training.

Simon could be charming, but he was also—in the admiring words of Ed Feulner, former head of the Heritage Foundation—a “mean, nasty, tough bond trader who took no BS from anyone.” To an interviewer who suggested that Simon didn’t suffer fools gladly, he responded, “Do you?”

But Simon had a softer side. He often took his family to visit the homeless teens at Covenant House, playing games with them and working in the kitchen. Later in life, Simon became a Eucharistic minister in the Catholic Church, taking communion to the sick, lonely, and dying. He required all members of the board of his personal foundation to perform 150 hours per year of hands-on service to the poor.

After Simon left the Ford administration, John M. Olin asked him to lead his foundation. Under Simon’s direction, Olin funded what Simon called “the counter-intelligentsia,” the scholars and organizations who became the intellectual infrastructure of modern conservatism and libertarianism. Simon also supported a host of academic programs that developed the law and economics movement at top-flight law schools.

Simon’s commitment to Olin’s donor intent was forged out of dismay.

He was struck by Henry Ford II’s infamous departure from the board of the Ford Foundation in 1977, and even more by his own experience serving on the board of the MacArthur Foundation. Catherine MacArthur had read his book A Time for Truth and wanted her foundation “to have the same mandate

as the John M. Olin Foundation.” But Catherine’s stepson, Rod MacArthur, steered the foundation his own way.

New board members were elected and, without any clear mandate in the donors’ incorporating documents, they pursued their own favorite causes— many of which Simon believed would have infuriated the MacArthurs.

Through his own foundation, Simon funded programs supporting free markets, faith, strong families, and one-on-one efforts that build the capacity of the poor to support themselves. The William E. Simon Foundation has continued to give generously in line with these ideals.

Simon died in 2000, and that same year his foundation’s board created the William E. Simon Prize for Philanthropic Leadership to honor his memory. It is awarded annually to a major living donor who has set a high example of “the power of philanthropy to promote positive change.” Intended to honor the principles of personal responsibility, resourcefulness, volunteerism, scholarship, individual freedom, faith in God, and helping people to help themselves, the prize carries a purse of $250,000, which is allotted to a charity chosen by the winner.

Simon’s foundation is now spending itself out of existence. Sunsetting was an easy choice for him, assuring that all of his funds would be applied relatively quickly for maximum effect, while the effort was still guided by people the donor knew and trusted.

And Simon had confidence that fresh philanthropic funding and energy would quickly emerge, in tandem with the new wealth generated by America’s free-market system—which produced, in his words, “the greatest prosperity, the highest standards of living, and most important, the greatest individual freedom ever known to man.”

—Justin Torres

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their feelings about sharing with their fellow man.”

He has found “the amount of money isn’t nearly as important as a cheerful disposition” in helping others.

When he was president of the student body of his high school, Huntsman held a ceremony for the school’s custodians. “I felt bad that no one paid attention to the staff,” he says. He gave them each a new tie. “The underdog has always had a special place in my heart.”

That sometimes includes underdogs to whom he has no personal connection. In 1988 an earthquake devastated Armenia, killing more than 25,000 people. Huntsman led the effort to send over $50 million

to help rebuild the country. “We fall in love oftentimes with situations and adversities that we weren’t connected to in any prior way.” Huntsman became deeply impressed with the Armenian people, their long history of suffering, their work ethic, their desire to climb out from one of the worst earthquakes in the history of the world. To a country that he had never visited, for a people he previously knew nothing about, Huntsman became a savior. In the years since, the Huntsman family has made more than 40 trips to the country, building more than 40,000 housing units among other good works. “Once we got started, it was hard to say goodbye.”

2001

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hough quiet and humble, my father was an outspoken and passionate advocate for children in low-income communities and their access to high-quality schools,” states Lukas Walton. Son of the late John Walton, who won the first Simon Prize in 2001, Lukas explains that his dad’s “pioneering vision helped set a course for our family’s work in expanding educational opportunity, and continues to drive our work today.”

John Walton was an early and active backer of efforts to give families a choice of schools, supporting private scholarships, vouchers, tax credits, charter schools, and other initiatives. Since 2001, education-reform grants by the Walton Family Foundation have grown from just over $12 million to more than $145 million annually. The foundation puts about $25 million every year into helping germinate great new charter schools, for instance. It has poured more than $335 million into charters serving low-income families, launching 1,500 new schools—one out of every four charters in existence.

Walton’s giving to education has also spawned scores of important reform groups—like the NewSchools PHILANTHROPY

Walton Family Foundation

John Walton

Venture Fund, which raises capital from a variety of donors and invests it in promising new institutions, in the process sparking many of the most exemplary schools now operating across the U.S. The family has also provided crucial support to a range of organizations that raise school standards, help new schools acquire buildings, and monitor school quality.

John Walton believed that innovative new schools not only improve educational outcomes for the students who attend them but also create pressure on nearby schools to improve. The most lasting solutions, he came to realize, would come from putting options and resources in the hands of parents themselves. “If you look at it in terms of power,” he explained, “you will ‘follow the money.’ The money in education comes from the top, filters its way down, and various interest groups and factions pull off their share into what they think is important. The customers at the bottom just take what they’re given.” Public schools will only improve, Walton believed, if “customers”—parents—have the power to walk away from ineffective schools and take their child’s funding with them.

John Walton died in a plane crash in 2005, at the age of 58. The year before he died, Forbes estimated his fortune at $18.2 billion, but this had remarkably little effect on him. Not long after a new charter school opened in San Diego, Walton made an unannounced visit, asking how he could be of service. The school’s founder didn’t recognize him, and told Walton that the bathrooms needed cleaning. Walton simply asked, “Where’s the mop?” And so one of the wealthiest people in America spent 25 minutes swabbing floors, happy to help.

Walton Family Foundation

UPDATES ON PAST WINNERS, 2001-2013

Walton Family Foundation

Walton Family Foundation

The joy of composition! A class at eSTEM Elementary in Little Rock, Arkansas, one of the 1,500 charter schools that John Walton helped bring about.

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David Shankbone / CC2.0; The John Templeton Foundation

nets, Raymond Chambers has helped reduce childhood deaths from malaria by more than half in just a decade.

Š Mhallahan/Sumitomo Chemical-Olyset Net

A girl in Kenya peeks out from under an insecticide-treated bednet that protects her from malaria-bearing mosquitos. Distributing millions of these

John Templeton 2003

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Raymond Chambers 2002

David Shankbone / CC2.0; The John Templeton Foundation

© Mhallahan/Sumitomo Chemical-Olyset Net

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hen Raymond Chambers learned that 1.2 million children were dying from malaria each year and that most of those deaths could be prevented by sleeping under a pesticide-treated mosquito net, Chambers joined a team of donors who have raised $9 billion and covered 800 million people in Africa with insect-resistant nets. Childhood deaths from malaria have been reduced by more than half, and Chambers and his partners are aiming for fewer than 100,000 by the end of 2015. Since 2008, Chambers has served as United Nations Special Envoy for Malaria.

Chambers has also put a lot of time and money into his hometown of Newark, New Jersey. He and the other private donors helped get the Prudential Center, the city’s first professional sports arena, built downtown.

The facility, which now hosts the Devils of the NHL and Seton Hall University’s basketball team, is an effort to draw people and businesses back to this once-vibrant city. He is the founding chairman of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, a cultural hub that attracts prominent artists and half a million patrons every year.

Rehabilitating Military Park in the center of Newark is the latest contribution by Chambers and other donors to the city.

Encouraging entrepreneurship is another of his interests. He donated his Simon Prize award to the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, which teaches high-school students in over 50 countries how to start their own businesses. “It’s something that I think would please Bill Simon very much were he alive today.”

ir John Templeton lived to the ripe old age of 95, and hardly slowed down after selling his Templeton family of investment funds and shifting his steely focus from finance to his new purpose in life, philanthropy. The John Templeton Foundation continues to be a highly creative donor, disbursing approximately $70 million each year to advance knowledge and healthy social practice in areas like science and religion that were of keen interest to its founder. One ongoing project that is a particular tribute to the fecund philanthropy of John Templeton at the end of his life is the Purpose Prize.

Current Templeton Foundation president Jack Templeton notes that his father “frequently wrote about the importance of purpose in retirement,” and took great satisfaction from the fact that “his second career in philanthropy enabled him to contribute to the long-term spiritual wealth of others.” With that as backdrop, the Templeton Foundation partnered with Atlantic Philanthropies to create an award for people who find impressive new ways to contribute to society after retiring.

The 2013 Purpose Prize winners included Vicki Thomas of Purple Hearts Homes, which adapts houses that are too difficult for wounded veterans to navigate, and Ysabel Duron, a former TV anchor who is helping to educate and provide support services to low-income Latinos dealing with cancer. Those two winners received $100,000 each to continue their work. Another five Purpose Prize winners were awarded $25,000 each. The Templeton Foundation has devoted more than $8 million to the award since 2005.

“The Purpose Prize winners model my father’s passion, using their gifts and talents for the benefit of others, and inspiring other donors,” says Jack Templeton. The recipients apply skills they learned in their first careers to make a difference in their second ones. Thomas, who worked in marketing, public relations, and fundraising for ABC and the Credit Union National Association, has helped to raise millions of dollars for Purple Heart Homes, increasing the organization’s revenues by 600 percent in her first year on the job.

The Purpose Prize was intended to popularize the idea that even an aging population has tremendous potential to be productive. To echo that message the Templeton Foundation has given an additional $5 million for its “I’m FALL 2014

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2004

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aval Academy graduate and NBA star David Robinson wanted to share his bounty with poor children in his home city of San Antonio, so in 2001 he founded Carver Academy as a high-aspiration Christian private school for low-income kids, giving more than $11 million to launch it and keep it going.

When he decided in 2011 to transfer the operation to IDEA Public Schools, a top-ranked network of 30 charter schools that has grown up across south Texas, many wondered about the decision. People asked him, “How can you let your baby go?” But Robinson explained, “I didn’t see it that way.” In fact, making Carver a part of IDEA has allowed Robinson to come closer to his original dream of bringing a better education to poor kids throughout Texas.

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Carson Scholars Fund

David Robinson

When he started Carver with 60 students, they were performing an average of one or two grade levels ahead in math, English, and science by the end of their first year.

They were exposed to foreign languages, athletics, music, and the arts. They worked on service projects too. But, Robinson laments, “despite my best efforts, we were still a small school with the capacity to graduate just 15 students a year.” And “the yearly fundraising onus became a major challenge.” Robinson realized that he needed a partner—“an organization that could use the investment that I made in Carver to reach far more children. One that was run by like-minded people who were as committed to excellent education as I was.”

IDEA turned out to be the perfect partner. The charter network currently educates more than 15,000 students, 85 percent of whom come from low-income families and 95 percent of whom are Hispanic. As charters, IDEA schools are eligible for public funding (though they receive on average $1,500 less per pupil than a district school), so they don’t have the same fundraising challenges that private schools do.

Like the students at the original Carver Academy, IDEA students are performing far beyond their peers at traditional neighborhood public schools. All classes are at or above grade level in reading, and, so far, 100 percent of graduates have enrolled in college. U.S. News & World Report placed three of the IDEA schools in the top 1 percent of all high schools in the country. IDEA was recently named one of three finalists for the Broad Prize for Public Charter Schools.

Carver Academy, now IDEA Carver, opened in 2012 with five times the number of students it once had and a higher percentage of students from low-income homes. Currently serving grades K-6, the school is on track to become a K-12 facility. Robinson’s model is thus helping IDEA transform the experience of San Antonio’s disadvantaged kids—who currently have a 10 percent on-time graduation rate citywide. By the 2017-18 school year, IDEA is expecting to have 20 schools open in the city, serving more than 27,000 students.

“So, no, it is not hard to let Carver go,” Robinson has stated. “From my perspective, I am letting Carver grow— doing what’s best for the students that currently attend Carver and the students across the city of San Antonio that

© Maury Phillips / gettyimages

an Encore” project to collect and publicize the narratives of people from all walks of life who accomplish great things after retirement. It is also supporting a higher-education initiative called Encore U that helps people to find these new paths. As the idea of “encore careers” gains traction, the Wall Street Journal recently likened the Purpose Prize to the “genius” awards long given by the MacArthur Foundation to celebrate first-career achievements.

So far there have been more than 400 Purpose Prize winners, runners-up, and “Encore fellows.” As word spreads, there are more and more nominations each year—more than a thousand in the latest round. The phenomenon is likely to grow in the future.

“Research shows that about a quarter of the population in the second half of life are interested in becoming entrepreneurs, half of those as social entrepreneurs,” says Mark Freedman of Encore.org, which administers the prize. Already, “nine million Americans have moved into ‘second acts’ focused on the greater good. Some 31 million more have said they want to follow that path and express a practical idealism aimed at solving problems in areas like education, health, and poverty.”

Men and women after Sir John’s heart.

deserve access to a superior education. I am using my talents and influence to support a thoughtful and highly successful organization. I am excited about this partnership and eager to see the impact this shift will have on the educational landscape of my city. I will forever be grateful to the parents that entrusted us with the education of their children and to the students of Carver who brought so much joy and fulfillment to my life. Because of them I am even more committed to seeing the educational landscape change in our country, and excited to take on a new role in this work.”

Ben Carson 2005

Carson Scholars Fund

© Maury Phillips / gettyimages

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uch has changed in the life of Ben Carson since he was awarded the Simon Prize in 2005. He has retired from his position as the director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins. He has become a television personality and political commentator, even discussed as a potential Presidential candidate. What has not changed is the focus of his philanthropy.

Carson’s inspirational story is by now well-known.

Growing up in inner-city Detroit, the child of a single mother with a third-grade education but high expectations and strict rules for her children, he did well enough in school to gain admission to Yale University and then the University of Michigan’s medical school. He quickly earned world prominence as a surgeon, including in 1987 when he successfully led dozens of surgeons in a 22-hour operation to separate twins conjoined at the back of their heads—the first successful procedure of its kind.

Over the years, traveling to many poor communities to tell his story, Carson has been struck by the number of students who have no books at home. These children are not exposed to any reading before they

start kindergarten, and many do not develop the love of books that spurred his own educational journey.

So Carson has funneled almost all of his philanthropy into building reading rooms at schools with high percentages of low-income kids. The colorful, themed rooms, with murals and comfortable places to curl up with a good book, are meant to fire up children’s imaginations. The 110 reading rooms he and his wife have created include one in Denver with a cowboy theme and another near the NASA flight center in Florida that is decorated like a space capsule.

If you look out one of the “windows,” you see the Earth below. One room on the coast of Maryland resembles a pier jutting over the water. Adults in each community are invited to help create the rooms, and asked to come in and read to children or share stories of their own educations once they are open. And families are urged to reinforce reading for their children at home.

The existence of the reading rooms, along with a system of points and prizes that students get for completing books, has had a real effect on academic performance, says Carson. He reports that the program has brought students “from extremely low levels on standardized tests to well above average” in successful schools.

Carson used the proceeds from his Simon Prize to build even more reading rooms. “It was truly spectacular to have received the prize,” he says, “not just because of the monetary aspect, but because it lends credence to what you’re doing.” It has encouraged other donors to contribute to the program.

Improving U.S. education, he says, has to be a broadbased effort that includes changing cultural views. “Small kids aren’t that anxious for people to know they’re smart because they’re looked at as nerds. We need to turn education into a positive thing to counterbalance the message of pop culture.”

As one contribution he launched the Carson Scholars Fund, which aims to turn studious kids into role models. In its first year, 1996, 25 awards of $1,000 were given. Now the program hands out 500 scholarships annually, and Carson has seen ripple effects. “A student who wins one will get local press attention. He or she will be invited to a banquet. Other kids think, ‘I will do that too.’” One Carson scholar, teachers report, can inject enough enthusiasm to raise the GPA of an entire class.

By partnering with the IDEA charter network, David Robinson helped the private school he founded reach five times as many kids.

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Amway; HBR Capital, Ltd.

With support from the Templeton Foundation’s Purpose Prize, he was able to bring the design to farmers in 17 countries.

Full Belly Project

Retired gaffer and jack-of-all-trades Jock Brandis invented a “universal nut sheller” that can be constructed nearly anywhere from scrap materials.

Richard & Helen DeVos

Frank Hanna

ichard DeVos, the co-founder of direct-selling operation Amway, built his wealth nationally and internationally, and he and his wife, Helen, are active across the U.S. in their philanthropy, known for contributing prominently to historic and civic organizations like Mount Vernon and the National Constitution Center, free-market think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, and Christian groups including Focus on the Family and Prison Fellowship.

But the heart of their giving, they say, is local. “A focus of our philanthropy has always been our home area. We want to create an atmosphere for everyone to improve their circumstances while advancing our community, whether through Christian compassion, education, health care, or the arts.”

The DeVoses have given money to everything from local schools to the regional symphony, helping turn Grand Rapids, Michigan, into one of the livelier and healthier small cities in the U.S. When the couple won their Simon Prize in 2006 they distributed the award money to eight local organizations in western Michigan “whose leaders all demonstrated resourcefulness in helping people help themselves.”

Making sure that their local community has the resources to thrive motivated their major contributions to the city’s children’s hospital, and its heart and lung transplant center, one of three such in the state of Michigan.

The DeVoses’ gift was crucial in recruiting transplant pioneer Asghar Khaghani to lead the new center. Khaghani has personally performed more than 1,000 transplants in adults and children around the world. With talent like that in Grand Rapids, local patients can recover with support from family and friends in familiar surroundings.

Bringing the highest quality care to people in their home regions, so they don’t have to face wrenching choices about leaving, is a great goal for donors, in the DeVos view.

hen Frank Hanna received the Simon Prize in 2007, he celebrated in his remarks the ability of philanthropy to serve as “truth funding.” Since then, he says, he has “become even more convinced of this premise,” and has concentrated his personal giving on exposing both children and adults to what he sees as fundamental, eternal truths. He has supported character education, funded Catholic and charter schools, and established programs at colleges and universities.

In recent years, Hanna has turned to cinema to bring ethics and eternal truths to even larger audiences. In 2011, he provided seed capital to start Good Country Pictures.

GCP has acquired options to make movies of Flannery O’Connor’s novel The Violent Bear It Away and Charles Williams’s novel All Hallows’ Eve. O’Connor was a popular and acclaimed author of religiously infused books about Southern life. Williams was a British writer, theologian, and Inklings member, along with J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.

Hanna’s company hired seasoned screenwriters to create scripts for the two projects. It is now raising money to begin production of the first film, the O’Connor adaptation, in the winter of 2015. The firm has also acquired TV rights for 30 (nearly all) of O’Connor’s short stories.

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Doug Wright has outlined a series based on them; he is now working on a screenplay for the pilot episode.

“Both O’Connor and Williams understood the great peril involved when we accept the material world as all that matters,” says Hanna. “They created timeless works of literature which we believe will have an audience in cinema.”

While he continues to make contributions to universities and think tanks to undergird timeless truths, Hanna believes it is important to reach a broader audience as well.

“White papers are very important, but compelling stories and narratives are what move the world. In the end, the greatest impoverishment in our society today is one of character and virtue. So it is to this deficit that I am devoting my efforts.”

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Amway; HBR Capital, Ltd.

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Truett Cathy

Philip & Nancy Anschutz

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eaching kids in school how to be considerate is “innocently simple,” admits Gary Dixon, who oversees Random Acts of Kindness, a foundation supported by philanthropist Philip Anschutz. But it is not easy. When it was first launched in 2000, the mission of RAK was spreading inspirational ideas and kind behavior. Shortly after Philip and Nancy Anschutz accepted the Simon Prize in 2009 the foundation started looking for ways to have a more direct and deeper impact. The staff went to work on bringing “character education and social and emotional learning” to schoolchildren.

RAK has developed a K-8 curriculum now being used by over 30,000 students in Colorado, where the foundation is based, as well as a few school districts in California, Wisconsin, Texas, and Kansas. “With younger kids, we start with the question ‘Who am I as a person? What character traits can I attribute to myself ?’” says Brooke Jones, vice president of RAK. “We build on that.” Students are then taught to ask, “How do we treat each other? How do we define respect? How do we engage a larger circle, like our school or our neighborhood or family?”

Recent incidents in some schools have sent principals, teachers, and parents scrambling for curricula to combat bullying. Popular lesson plans and training can often run $30,000. The RAK curriculum, by contrast, can be downloaded for free by any teacher or school district. Conventional public schools, charter schools, private schools, and even homeschoolers can use it.

The foundation has employed scholars at institutions from SRI to Harvard to the University of Colorado to independently study the program’s results. One thing they are measuring is the level of trust among teachers, students, and staff. At one early session, the RAK trainers asked teachers to write down something they thought could be improved about the school. The teachers initially asked the trainers not to post the answers publicly because other teachers would recognize their handwriting and know what they said.

According the data collected so far, the RAK curriculum has managed to more than double the trust

Dennis Keiman

ruett Cathy knew what it took to succeed. He grew up in the first federally funded housing project in Atlanta, began delivering newspapers and selling sodas at the age of eight to bolster his family’s income, and eventually helped his mother run a boarding house to make ends meet.

Cathy, who passed away in 2014 at the age of 93, is remembered as the founder of Chick-fil-A, a $3 billion per year family-run business. He never forgot where he came from, though, or what helped him climb the economic ladder—a strong character formed by a loving family. It’s been 30 years since Cathy started the WinShape Foundation, so called because it aims to “shape winners.” The foundation supports college scholarships, summer camps, and all sorts of other opportunities for disadvantaged children.

“The number one problem in America today is unloved children,” Cathy once told Philanthropy. WinShape supports 13 foster homes, mostly in Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama, each overseen by a married couple. Cathy was a big believer in the importance of a strong marriage in raising children: “The best gift a mother and dad can give to their children is to love each other and live under the same roof.”

For many of the kids, WinShape provides the first stable home environment they’ve had. In an interview with a TV station in Texas, one foster parent said of a 13-year-old girl who came to his house: “She had never spent the same year in the same school…. The first couple nights when she came, she said we were the first people in her life that told her that we loved her.” One supporter describes WinShape as not an institution, but a family. Indeed, Cathy encouraged children to call him “Grandpa” and served as legal guardian for many of them over the years.

Trying to help kids from difficult backgrounds is not easy. “There are a lot of disappointments in working with young people,” Cathy once said. “You have to be prepared for that. But there are enough rewards that motivate me to keep doing what I’m doing.” And now, for others to continue his legacy.

Chick-fil-A; The Anschutz Foundation

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Roger hertog 2010

Dennis Keiman

Chick-fil-A; The Anschutz Foundation

level among teachers at schools using it. Anecdotally, Dixon and Jones say that they have heard from parents, teachers, and administrators who notice a difference right away in their school.

RAK is now expanding its curriculum for high-school students to address conflicts via social media. Foundation staff have been invited to speak to representatives of the U.S. Department of Education, which has a growing interest in social and emotional learning. In addition, the University of Colorado has just approved a massive open online course, based on RAK, dedicated to showing teachers how to teach kindness in their classrooms.

As one of the Stanford researchers who has been studying the program told Jones: “Kindness is what is underneath everything else. When you’re involved in kindness, everything else goes better. Relationships go better. Achievement gets better. Teachers are more engaged and feeling good about what they came there to do. Kindness is a remarkable catalyst.”

It is that idea, among others, that earned the Anschutzes the Simon Prize. “Having known and admired Bill Simon personally, we were honored to receive the Simon award,” says Philip Anschutz.

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t wasn’t hard for Roger Hertog to disburse his Simon Prize funds in a way “consistent with what William Simon believed in,” because both men believed that ideas are what matters. “There are crucial debates in any free society—about welfare or health care, national security, the

size of the defense budget, or religion in the public square,” says Hertog, and if you want to find the best answers then supporting thinkers and writers and magazines and conferences offers “a high return on investment.”

Hertog spread his award among 11 small intellectual journals and asked them to create articles and conferences on important topics. National Affairs put together a book for congressmen elected in 2010. National Review commissioned an article from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel that suggests we are not investing in the right things to keep the economy growing rapidly. Articles on the “coming global disorder” that appeared in Commentary, Hertog says, were “quite prophetic” in foretelling current events in Iran, Russia, and Syria. The Claremont Institute and First Things magazine each held conferences on political philosophy. Hertog says he felt “proud to have used the funds for the engagement of ideas.”

For other philanthropists interested in building useful ideas, Hertog advises, “first you have to figure out what you believe in.” With many donors “having spent their lives building capital,” they may have to take some time to find the thinkers, publications, and research organizations that build significant thinking on topics the donor considers important.

It’s not easy to judge the return on these investments, says Hertog. “It’s harder than buying a stock.”

For one thing, some of these ideas take a long time to gain traction. He cites Charles Murray’s book, Losing Ground. It was an assessment of what went wrong with social spending in the 1960s, published in 1984, and then it wasn’t until 1996 when Congress and the President finally changed the U.S. welfare system.

“What you’re trying to do,” summarizes Hertog, “is inform the most influential people, give them a deeper understanding of what’s at stake.”

Roger Hertog dedicated his Simon Prize funds to supporting articles and conferences that reinforce a free society.

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Koch Industries; The Marcus Foundation

The cutting-edge technology enables early diagnosis and intervention.

Kay Hinton/Emory University

A nattily attired patient at the Marcus Autism Center is monitored by a device developed by director Dr. Ami Klin that tracks eye movement.

Charles Koch

Bernie Marcus 2012

2011

Koch Industries; The Marcus Foundation

Kay Hinton/Emory University

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harles Koch has been nurturing a lot lately. He is giving away money to a range of recipients in hopes of advancing emerging academic understanding of everything that goes into “well-being.” Over the past year, Koch’s grantmaking arms have convened gatherings on subjects ranging from the value of a college education, to ways of encouraging economic mobility, to criminal law reforms, to how creation of new businesses can be encouraged.

In one event, Richard Vedder of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, data researcher Robert Morse of U.S. News & World Report, and Mike Rowe, creator of the TV show “Dirty Jobs,” met to discuss whether college, with rising tuition costs, remains the best path to success, and for whom, and what the alternative paths to the workforce might be. A program at Catholic University’s school of business is researching how economic freedom and ethical businesses can lift communities out of poverty. At Baylor University the Charles Koch foundation is supporting a center that investigates how entrepreneurship connects to “human well-being.”

A Koch gift will help to build a Ph.D. program in entrepreneurship at historically black Fayetteville State University.

Most recently, the United Negro College Fund announced one of its largest gifts ever, from Charles Koch and his brother David. The $25 million donation will provide about 3,000 merit-based scholarship awards for African-American undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students, as well as $4 million for 37 historically black colleges. The scholarships will give students the opportunity to explore how economics, entrepreneurship, and innovation can increase quality of life for individuals, communities, and society.

The “ultimate goal is to help people improve their lives,” explains Koch. “That’s the proper role of business,” he says, “and the essence of my philanthropy.”

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ix thousand. That’s the number of children that Atlanta’s Marcus Autism Center will serve this year. It’s more than any other center in the country by far. And Bernie Marcus, who made his fortune as the co-founder of Home Depot, couldn’t be more proud. Since 1991, Marcus has given around $100 million to the center, and tens of millions more to other autism-related causes, almost single-handedly putting the disorder on the mental map of Americans.

The center began when Marcus saw the distress of a young employee, the mother of an autistic child, who was having difficulty finding help for him at a time when many families and medical practitioners weren’t even sure what to call this particular syndrome of problems. Through sheer force of will, Marcus launched his clinic in two trailers, and began to pour money into treatment and research of the disease. The center reached a turning point in 2011, when Marcus convinced the eminent researcher Dr. Ami Klin to leave Yale University and become its director. Klin and his team have developed a revolutionary eye-tracking technology that can identify autism in the first year of life, dramatically increasing opportunities to intervene before problems take root. The device, which is awaiting approval from the FDA, would enable early-stage diagnosis and treatment that is both more effective and less expensive. Currently, most autistic kids are not diagnosed until they begin school.

The Marcus Autism Center is now at the forefront of research the condition. Almost 3,600 investigators from a variety of disciplines attended the major conference there earlier this year—up from 1,200 five years ago. The meeting “showed how far autism research has come in the last ten years,” says Marcus.

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Eli & Edythe Broad 2013

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here could my money go so that it would make a difference?” That’s a question Eli Broad asks himself a lot. When he and his wife, Edythe, won the 2013 Simon Prize he funneled the $250,000 award to the Ramón Cortines High School for the Visual and Performing Arts in downtown Los Angeles. Illustrating the modern reality that personal involvement in solving problems is often as important to good philanthropy as financial gifts, Broad had worked for more PHILANTHROPY

The Broad Foundation

How do you build an institution like this? Marcus starts with annual operating support. “In many cases when people give money, they are giving to a project or building or other one-time expense. But operating costs are often the biggest burden. Opening doors can be expensive: there is insurance, rent, liability.”

Marcus’s Simon Prize money mostly went toward the general budget of the autism center.

And Marcus emphasizes the importance of finding people you trust. He does in his philanthropy “what you do in a good business. You find the best people.” Particularly in the medical field, says Marcus, there is so much jargon, and so much risk in getting something through a bureaucracy like the FDA, you need to have “someone who can evaluate researchers.”

Marcus took great satisfaction in using his Simon Prize money for the autism center, because a relative of William Simon has been diagnosed with the disorder. “I guess that’s how the world goes around,” he says. “Sometimes you can affect people’s lives. They won’t know you.

But the feeling you get should be enough.”

than a decade, wading through the city’s educational bureaucracy, to get the school opened in 2009. New York City, he reasoned, had LaGuardia High School and Washington, D.C., had the Duke Ellington School. Where was the institution that would nurture the young performing and visual artists of Los Angeles? The school, which now serves over a thousand students in grades 9-12, has been able to offer more public programs and exhibitions thanks to the Broads’ latest gift.

Support for this school is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the Broads’ patronage of the arts. In 2015, they will open a new museum in Los Angeles that will house more than 2,000 works they have collected themselves, one of the most significant assemblages of modern art in the world. Works by more than 200 artists, including Jeff Koons, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Barbara Kruger, and Roy Lichtenstein, will be available to the viewing public for free. As the opening approaches, the Broads have offered a series of art talks to the public. In February, 1,900 people attended a conversation between Koons and filmmaker John Waters. “We may have set a record for the number of people who attended an art lecture,” Broad jests.

Having both grown up in Michigan, the Broads have also given $33 million (including a $5 million gift this spring) for an art museum at Michigan State University with a special emphasis on contemporary international artists and the historical context for their artworks. The museum has seen 125,000 visitors for 32 different exhibitions since opening in 2012. Broad notes that it has brought people to the university who hadn’t been there in years.

The Broads are determined to give away most of their $6 billion fortune. They recently added to their many contributions to medical research by granting an additional $100 million to the Broad Institute at Harvard and M.I.T., which does pathbreaking work on the genetics of disease. Education is the other of their three main causes, and they recently gave $3 million to an organization that helps teachers use digital tools to personalize classroom instruction.

“Philanthropy is hard work,” stated the couple when they signed the Giving Pledge. “We approach our grantmaking activity with much the same vigor, energy, and expectation as we did in business.” P

Don’t Surrender the Academy

ideas

The case for donors to get involved with schools of education

BY FREDERICK HESS AND TARYN HOCHLEITNER

For two decades, education conclaves have featured impassioned reformers, frustrated by the state of teacher preparation and education research, declaring that “We’ve got to blow up the ed schools.”

Why the hostility? Instructors at education schools often throw up obstacles to some of the most promising ideas in school reform, like teacher accountability, non-traditional recruiting, alternative certification, use of monetary incentives, and school choice. Unable to get a foothold in colleges, reformers have largely surrendered the commanding heights of academe to ed-school professors devoted to protecting the status quo in school management.

Reformers take refuge in the foothills— starting nonprofits and small businesses to train principals and superintendents, relying on think tanks and advocacy groups to spread their ideas, and turning to unconventional sources like Teach For America as talent pipelines. The reform community has enjoyed some success with these tactics, but it’s been inevitably limited. There are 8,000 school superintendents in America; the Broad Superintendents Academy produces a dozen great new ones annually. In a nation of 3.3 million teachers, TFA provides no more than 6,000 raring to break molds per year.

Moreover, many of those TFA alumni eventually head off to schools of education (where you must punch your ticket in order to progress along the tenure and salary assembly line set up by most school districts).

There they spend years being tutored by professors who believe school choice is morally dubious, “efficiency” is a troubling concept, strict discipline constitutes cultural imperialism, and the real solutions to lousy schools are reducing poverty, adding “professional development,” and increasing expenditures.

A few dozen reformist scholars at think tanks and in academic departments are dwarfed by the tens of thousands of

faculty in teacher-preparation programs at state colleges of education. Not coincidentally, the lion’s share of reform-minded academics today almost all work in departments outside the education establishment: Eric Hanushek, Terry Moe, Checker Finn, Paul Peterson, Caroline Hoxby, Marguerite Roza, Dan Goldhaber, Paul Hill, Macke Raymond, and the like are all found in economics departments, policy schools, or think tanks.

This won’t do. Economics departments and policy schools can only offer perches for a handful of education specialists. And because these thinkers are not instructing education students, they are isolated from the rising generation of teachers and school leaders. Their remove from education networks on and off campus also makes it tough for them to alter professional norms, build new communities of thought, or connect with young talent.

Teacher-preparation programs make lots of money for the colleges that run them. They enjoy strong back-scratching relationships with the local school systems surrounding them. Schools of education are closely connected with the national associations of superintendents and principals (many of whom are alumni), and they have the ear of school boards and state legislators.

Even if a reform-minded dean should sweep into such a school, the rank-and-file faculty members who embody the field’s conventional wisdom will routinely outnumber and outlast him.

Given their steady revenues, credentialing authority, political relationships, and millions of alumni uninterested in major change, “blowing up” the existing schools of education is just not a viable option. That poses a thought: If they can’t beat ’em, maybe education reformers should join ’em? There would be many payoffs if new thinkers were planting their flag and bringing reform research and analysis to ed-school campuses.

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For one thing, faculty at major universities have an outsized influence in setting the nation’s research agenda, steering professional academic associations, directing federal research funding, and training the next generation of education thinkers. A university setting can confer greater credibility on reform-friendly scholarship. Op-eds and declarations by Ivy League professors come with a built-in megaphone that amplifies even banal arguments and findings.

Terrific studies by independent scholars or organizations can also be influential, but don’t have this same institutional heft.

Also, universities can provide stable financial support. It costs up to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in salary, benefits, and research, travel, and office expenses to support a top-flight scholar at a think tank. Salaries and overhead support, teaching assistants, access to the college fundraising apparatus, and other university amenities massively subsidize faculty at education schools. Why should reformers cede that turf ?

Further, the presence of pedigreed, reform-minded scholars can make it more comfortable for graduate students, young faculty, and aspiring educators to question ed-school dogma. Education researchers frequently drift into conventional thinking not necessarily out of conviction, but because that’s how pretty much everyone around them thinks and talks. They enter a community where academic publication, perks, and jobs all come more readily if they, like everyone else, assume certain things. The range of “legitimate” thinking can and should be expanded.

Frederick Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and has taught at three graduate schools of education. Taryn Hochleitner is an external affairs manager at the Data Quality Campaign.

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It’s a huge mistake to regard ed schools as implacably hostile. Ed schools are shifting assemblages of individuals, with views that are not preordained. Instead of writing off all the institutional heft that ed schools control, it’s time for reformers to get in the ring and work to ensure that some top colleges of education become places that can produce and host a healthy quotient of reformminded thinkers. With the right strategy, this can be done.

Learning from the law Forty years ago, would-be reformers in the legal community faced a similar predicament: entrenched, dominant opponents in the academy and the profession. The battle lines were different—the legal divide was much more of a liberal-conservative split, whereas school reform today attracts supporters across the political spectrum—but the dynamics were familiar.

In the early 1970s, conservative legal thinkers lacked a presence within the academy where they might convene or train the rising generation. Even intellectually curious students saw little evidence of credentialed thinkers disagreeing with liberal verities, so aspiring legal minds casually absorbed those assumptions as uncontested truths.

As Johns Hopkins political scientist Steve Teles explains in The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, “conservatives began investing in a broad range of activities designed to reverse” this situation. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a savvy coterie of strategic funders and reformers started to build an infrastructure to challenge the establishment. In 1980, Michael Horowitz penned a seminal report for the Sarah Scaife Foundation, urging a substantial investment to get conservatives a place at the table and a fair hearing in university programs.

Entrepreneurial lawyers and movement leaders forged ties with young legal scholars like Antonin Scalia, conservative law students, and key foundations. The coalition built a networking organization, created programs and funded faculty in existing law schools, and founded some new, competing institutions. Three efforts are particularly relevant here.

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A first is the Federalist Society model, which entails launching an organization to help ensure that junior faculty and graduate students in schools of education encounter reform thinking and have the opportunity to take its tenets seriously. A network of Federalist Society-like chapters at elite education schools (including Harvard, Stanford, Vanderbilt, Columbia, and so forth) could bring new voices to campus, advocate for new course offerings, and make the case for more intellectually diverse hires. There’s a ready array of relatively inexpensive but potentially promising complementary investments in campus chapters, including scholarships, post-doctoral fellowships, and conferences.

A second strategy is the law and economics model: endow new faculty chairs reserved for reformists, create lecture series, and fund new instructional programs. Universities are often amenable to establishing new chairs or programs, even when current faculty object. Education schools may prove surprisingly open to donors interested in supporting individuals or programming focused on education markets, teacher incentives, accountability, entrepreneurship, and such. Dumping in money without carefully spelling out conditions would simply subsidize the status quo but, if requirements and boundaries are defined in long-term agreements, the legal experience shows that defeatism is unwarranted. Indeed, recent ventures like Harvard’s Strategic Data Project (headed by professor Tom Kane) and Stanford’s Center for Education Policy Analysis (headed by professor Susanna Loeb) show that it’s possible to launch initiatives that remain admirably free from convention and committed to empirical rigor.

The George Mason model entails founding new institutions. Here, readers may think of terrific startups like the Relay Graduate School of Education or the High Tech High Graduate School of Education.

But these programs are small and relentlessly focused on teacher preparation, meaning they don’t provide the ancillary benefits of a university. One tack might be to invest Three strategies For donors seeking to apply the successes of in building those programs into something the legal reform movement to the world of much more akin to a full-service education education, the examples above suggest three school. Another would be to create new, free-standing departments within existing broad strategies.

One was the Federalist Society.

Launched by law students at Yale, Harvard, and the University of Chicago in 1982, the Federalist Society built networks and created forums to air conservative arguments, emphasizing discussion and debate rather than decreeing set positions. Growing quickly, it became a magnet for noted law faculty, conveying to students that conservative thought was worthy of consideration and creating a safe space to question law-school orthodoxies. Today, the Federalist Society has 40,000 members, including a raft of influential law school faculty, attorneys, advocates, and judges. This has ensured that the elite schools, gatekeepers to the legal profession, have produced a steady stream of capable, credentialed conservative thinkers.

A second relevant example, taking place at about the same time, was the push by legal reformers to create “law and economics” programs at top law schools. The Olin Foundation spearheaded an effort to fund faculty, curricula, and guest lectures, which introduced the logic of competitive markets and a tempered view of government regulation into legal decisionmaking. This strategy benefitted from millions of dollars in private philanthropic funding during the 1980s, predominantly provided by Olin, but also by donors like the Bradley, McKenna, Earhart, and Sarah Scaife foundations.

As a third precedent for ed-school reform, consider the rise of the George Mason University School of Law. In 1985, Henry Manne, a recognized authority in law and economics, was recruited to build a law school from scratch. Whereas law and economics programs at elite institutions had to adapt to institutional norms, Manne was free to launch an Austrian-flavored program free from such constraints. While lacking a significant endowment, alumni network, or institutional brand, the new school enjoyed enormous success as a place of refuge for conservative scholars, some of whom went on to win Nobel Prizes and other honors.

PHILANTHROPY

schools of education focused on alternative certification or new ideas for addressing pressing problems. A third possibility could be to approach elite universities that don’t have schools of education (like Rice or Georgetown) and offer to found a flagship program centered on a reformist perspective.

What this means for K-12 The ground is fertile for these changes.

Twenty years ago, it would have been tough to identify a half-dozen education professors at elite institutions who were sympathetic to the tenets of contemporary reform. Today, there are dozens of such faculty, who are fair-mindedly studying teacher pay, accountability, charter schooling, and much else once verboten.

Teach For America is pumping hordes of alumni through (mostly elite) ed schools, while more than one fourth of Education Pioneers alumni have degrees in education. Even faculty are more open to reform than before. Pollsters Steve Farkas and Ann Duffett reported in 2010 that 66 percent of teacher-prep faculty think that the system “needs many changes” and 86 percent say it should be “easier to terminate unmotivated or incompetent teachers— even if they are tenured.”

Funding from donors like the Gates, Walton, Kern, Broad, and Arnold foundations for new organizations and research has shifted the center of gravity in K-12 education policy. This is a propitious moment to consider institutionalizing some of the new perspectives on specific campuses.

In truth, this has already been tried in education, to excellent effect. A decade ago, a pair of $10 million gifts from the Windgate Charitable Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation established a Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. These donations, complemented by the university’s matching gift program, created six endowed chairs as well as generous fellowships for ten graduate students each year. Arkansas recruited Jay Greene, an authority on school choice, away from the Manhattan Institute to chair the department. A political scientist who had spent his early career in think tanks and departments of political science, Greene is the kind of

scholar one would never have expected to turn up in a school of education. He quickly moved to recruit a similarly unconventional faculty, including Patrick Wolf, a political scientist who had led the federal evaluation of the D.C. voucher program, and Robert Costrell, an education economist who had advised Republican governors. With deep coffers and extensive contacts, the department was able to arrange a steady stream of A-list speakers, becoming something of an academic salon for reform-minded scholars.

Arkansas’s education-reform department has put a decidedly non-elite education school on the national map. The faculty, funding, and culture attract graduate students interested in questions of school choice and teacher pay. Graduates meet a glaring need among reform organizations for young, smart, trained scholars. Arkansas alums can be found today in influential roles at places like Stanford’s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes, the Arnold Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, and my own American Enterprise Institute.

The Arkansas example suggests that the legal reform strategy is not only viable in education, but relatively cheap. The investment to establish this program is dwarfed by the dollars that foundations have spent to build alternatives capable of doing these same things in non-campus settings.

Taking reform to the next level This is not to say that donors already involved in education reform should alter or abandon their current strategies. The point is just that there is a promising opportunity for savvy, complementary investments that can offer a terrific long-term return. K-12 reformers have done a good job launching a barrage of advocacy and reform organizations and fighting in the halls of policy. These results are notable. The success of the conservative legal movement offers education reformers of all political persuasions a lodestar for taking their movement to the next level.

Some tactics that can help on this score: First, think long term. The key donors behind legal reform trusted the individuals they funded to build results incrementally, without harrying them to meet immediate “metrics,” an approach that runs contrary to much philanthropic strategy today.

Second, breaking up a sclerotic orthodoxy is all about airing ideas, not (at least initially) seeking converts. Rather than promoting specific platforms, entities like the Federalist Society emphasized free and open debate. This allowed novel ideas to become more familiar and receive a fairer hearing in the hallowed halls.

Third, invest in people. The success of the legal-reform movement in influencing the bench, the canon, and the legal education culture was the organic result of the academic and professional networks it fostered. The organizations created had no short-term policy agenda and did no advocacy. (In this way, these investments were very different from K-12 reform efforts today, where short-term advocacy has been heavily emphasized.)

“Blow ’em up” is the disgruntled cry of the defeated. Reformers should instead try to plant their flag, too, on the commanding heights. The goal is not to silence other voices, but to break the monopoly and insist on a fair competition. This makes for a manageable task—after all, it’s a call to make colleges of higher education more diverse. How can a twenty-first-century academic oppose that?

Reformist groups like TFA, the Broad Superintendents Academy, and Democrats for Education Reform have challenged comfortable assumptions, attracted talent, created professional opportunities, and forged networks and forums that allow fresh thinking to emerge. Now, imagine if these were not lonely outposts deep in the foothills but housed right within established schools of education. That would be good for research, good for policy and practice, good for aspiring educators and leaders, and very good for America’s kids. P

It’s a huge mistake to regard teacher colleges as hopeless. It’s time for reformers to get in the ring.

FALL 2014

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books

Four Brothers and the Apocalypse A biography of the Koch family offers a fascinating window into their life and philanthropy

BY TOM RILE Y

Many people who don’t follow business or politics too closely learned what they know about the Koch brothers from Jane Mayer’s lengthy 2010 New Yorker profile, “Covert Operations: The Billionaire Brothers Who Are Waging a War Against Obama.” The widely circulated article, dripping with hostility and innuendo, lacked balance but had plenty of impact.

To the Left, Charles and David Koch became villains of mythic, historical proportions. An entire spectrum of the commentariat, from bloggers to MSNBC pundits to mainstream journalists to the Senate Majority Leader, now routinely blame the Kochs for everything from international crises to bad weather.

Indeed, what has been called “Koch Derangement Syndrome” has reached such a pitch that the United Negro College Fund is under pressure to reject a $25 million grant from Koch Industries and the Charles Koch Foundation—not because of any terms of the grant (it would fund 3,000 college scholarships for African-American students), but merely because it is attached to the Koch name.

Into this climate comes Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty. With the four shadowy faces of the Koch brothers looming from the cover, glowing reviews from the elite media, and a booksleeve bio revealing that in his day job author Daniel Schulman is senior editor at the venerably left-wing Mother Jones, the reader is understandably inclined to think, “Oh, here we go.”

But wait—this book turns out to be a real surprise.

Schulman has done a remarkable job of attempting to put aside whatever political biases he may harbor in order to serve his larger goal: To tell the genuinely fascinating tale of the rise of the Koch family, via Koch Industries, and to try to explain the personal and philosophical influences that inform the brothers’ actions and giving.

It is a heckuva story, a quintessentially American one, and Schulman tells it well. Fred Koch, the son of a Dutch immigrant, sought his fortune in hardscrabble Quanah, Texas. An industrious, insightful, and most of all tough man (“He was like John Wayne,” 62

Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty

By Daniel Schulman

PHILANTHROPY

David Koch recalls, “just like John Wayne”), Fred Koch understood that being a good father was not the same thing as being an indulgent father. According to Schulman, “Fred feared that a life of privilege would little by little erode [his sons’] independence, and he worried that they would rely on his successes and never bother to achieve their own. ‘The most glorious feeling,’ Fred often told his sons, ‘is the feeling of accomplishment.’”

Fred Koch must have been quite familiar with that “glorious feeling.” Starting with a mere $300 investment and living out of his office, he built an impressive business empire focused on oil, refining, and ranching. A daring entrepreneur, Fred accepted an invitation by the Soviet Union in the 1920s to help develop its oil “cracking” capacity. Fred was appalled by what he saw in the U.S.S.R., and the experience haunted him for the rest of his life. “I was naïve enough to think in that far away day that I could help the Russian people by what I was doing,” he wrote in a letter to the Washington Post in 1964. “What I saw there convinced me that communism was the most evil force the world has ever seen and I must do everything in my power to fight it.”

Fred Koch fought communism and promoted freedom in three ways: through the success of his own business, through support of anti-communist groups like the John Birch Society and the nascent libertarian movement, and, perhaps of greatest long-term significance, through the education of his sons.

Each of those sons is today a major philanthropist, though as Schulman makes clear they are very different men.

Frederick, the eldest, has always followed his own path. An elegant and private man who was always more interested in art than in business, Frederick gravitated more to his mother, chafing under the expectations and stern discipline of his father.

The only one of the four brothers not to pursue engineering at M.I.T., Frederick has quietly amassed an eclectic, sophisticated collection of art and properties.

His independent streak, however, came at the price of often-acrimonious disputes with his brothers and the disapproval of his father, whose company biography at one point removed all reference to his firstborn son.

Fred Koch’s ambitions for the future of his company were clearly invested in his second son, Charles, who came back to work for his father after eight years in Boston. A legendary toiler with a quick, questioning mind, Charles went from triumph to triumph at the rapidly growing Koch Industries. As Charles unlocked the secrets of business and personal achievement, he

observed the powerful role that liberty plays in economic success, and the corresponding ways that dependence, over-regulation, and cronyism drag on productivity. His intellectual engagement with Austrian economics deepened the interest in freedom that his father had inculcated in him, and Schulman details the parallels between the central roles that Charles’s leadership has played in the astonishing growth of Koch Industries and the development of libertarian thought and infrastructure in America.

To his credit, Schulman effectively dismisses one of the hobgoblins of contemporary criticism of the Kochs—that their philanthropic giving is somehow calculated to redound to the bottom line of their business. It is impossible to read this book and fail to see that Charles and David’s support for free markets and economic liberty is based on sincere and passionate personal belief. If anything, their charitable and political giving has hurt or distracted from their business.

Charles’s charitable giving in particular has been astringently principled. The Charles Koch Foundation, founded in 1980, is dedicated to advancing the “understanding of how free societies improve the well-being of people around the world.”

Through long-term investments in research on free markets and wider understanding among intellectuals and future leaders of the power of liberty, the foundation has been vital to developing libertarian thought.

Charles has taken leadership roles with the Cato Institute, the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and the Institute for Humane Studies. “I have a passionate belief in the power of the ideas of liberty,” he says. “It is to them I am dedicating my life.”

The two youngest Koch brothers, fraternal twins David and Bill, may share a birthday, but there the similarity ends.

David has always had something of the golden boy about him: handsome, intelligent, charming, and successful at whatever he puts his hand to. Athletic and academic success came naturally to him, and he quickly assumed a leadership role at Koch Industries in partnership with Charles.

While David clearly shares Charles’s

fascination with the power of markets, even going so far as to run for vice president on the Libertarian Party presidential ticket in 1980, his philanthropy has extended into many other areas as well.

A cancer survivor, David has become a major funder of cancer research. He and his wife are also among the most prominent arts and culture donors in New York City. David was recently at the center of an interesting intersection of arts giving and property rights: He pledged $100 million toward the renovation of the New York State Theater, home of the New York City Ballet, and part of Lincoln Center. In honor of this gift, the facility was renamed for him—but only for 50 years, after which his family will have first refusal over whether to renew the funding or allow the naming opportunity to pass to someone else.

Bill Koch followed his older brother to M.I.T. and into Koch Industries, but despite his obvious intelligence always seemed to have something to prove. Pugnacious and ambitious, over time his disputes with Charles and David became so toxic that they felt compelled to buy him out. Unhappy with the size of the settlement, Bill enlisted Fred in a series of painful, scorched-earth lawsuits against Charles and David. Though the brothers ultimately reconciled, the years of tortuous depositions and testimony sparked by these acrimonious cases provided ample grist for today’s opponents of Koch Industries, as well as the personal information (much of it no doubt mortifying to the family) that is detailed in this book.

Bill Koch’s colorful story could itself fill a book twice this long. An innovative and successful entrepreneur on his own, Bill’s philanthropy has reflected his diverse interests. From sailing (he won the America’s Cup in 1992) to collecting (his art, gun, and Old West memorabilia collections are all world class), Bill’s funding has tended to follow his own muse. Indeed, the title of a Boston Museum of Fine Arts exhibit displaying his various treasures was “Things I Love.” Emblematic of his passion is his campaign against counterfeit wine: upon discovering that the celebrated bottles of Thomas Jefferson’s Chateau Lafite that he FALL 2014

had purchased for $500,000 were fraudulent, he didn’t skulk away in embarrassment or seek a refund—he went on an aggressive litigation crusade. As a public service, he single-handedly took on and sought to legally destroy the shadow market of fraudulent fine wine. And eventually he won—pocketing not just his initial investment, but $12 million in punitive damages.

Beyond its personal fascinations, this book is a treasure trove for readers with an interest in the history of the libertarian and conservative movements, featuring telling anecdotes about many familiar, and some unfortunately forgotten, names. While libertarianism is clearly not Schulman’s area of expertise, he at least (unlike Jane Mayer) recognizes the intellectual seriousness of these schools of American thought, and draws out the influence they had on Fred Sr., Charles, and David—and the profound influence that they are in turn exercising on American politics. Charles, Schulman writes, “has arguably done more than anyone else to promote free-market economics and the broader ideology surrounding it. By mainstreaming libertarianism, he helped to change the way people think. Absent his money and strategic vision, the country would be a different place.

Few people can claim they changed the world, but this is undeniably true of Charles.

And he’s not done.”

The great, potentially fatal, flaw of this impressively researched and well-written book is that Schulman was unable to talk on the record with his subjects or many of the people closest to them. No doubt, people in the know could point out errors in this book.

But the portraits that emerge do ring true.

The reader finishes the book with four new acquaintances: excitable youngest brother Bill, eager to prove himself to his family and the world regardless of cost; Fred, the somewhat estranged, intensely private aesthete; the bright, loyal, well-liked all-star David; and Charles, whatever the organized effort to turn him into an evil mastermind, one of the most successful and intellectually consistent business leaders of our time.

Tom Riley is a contributing editor to Philanthropy.

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president’s note Charitable Capital of the World

As this magazine comes off the press, The Philanthropy Roundtable is holding our 2014 Annual Meeting in the charitable capital of the world.

The United States is by far the most charitable of all major countries. And Utah is by far the most charitable of all American states. In 2011, according to the Urban Institute, itemizing taxpayers in Utah gave an amazing 4.8 percent of their adjusted gross income to charity, more than twice the national average of 2.1 percent. No other state came close.

Our conference in Salt Lake City offers an outstanding opportunity to observe how our nation would be transformed by a doubling of charitable giving.

Utah is charitable for the same reasons America is charitable: Utahns are religious, they are entrepreneurial wealth-creators, and they understand the crucial connections between charitable giving and the strengthening of our free society.

Salt Lake City is also one of the nation’s leaders in upward mobility, according to a pathbreaking study published last year by Harvard economist Raj Chetty and colleagues. Strong families in Utah are an important contributor: Chetty found that the greatest obstacle to upward mobility in America is the proportion of children growing up in single-parent homes. The emphasis on self-reliance in Utah and the state motto of “Industry” also encourage economic improvement. The Mormon welfare system, which doesn’t take a dime of government funding, combines work requirements with extraordinarily generous support to people in need to help them move to self-reliance.

Philanthropists of all faiths, and none, can learn from the tithing, fast 64

offering, and volunteer traditions among Mormons, which help to make possible the LDS Church’s extraordinary network of food warehouses, remarkably low tuitions at Brigham Young University, and an exciting new venture teaching entrepreneurship in developing countries.

And as in the rest of America, giving in Utah enables civil society to flourish. Thanks to private giving, Utah has a vibrant arts community, including the Sundance Film Festival, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and one of America’s best Shakespeare theaters. The University of Utah is consistently among the top 20 state universities in charitable support.

Utah leads the nation in the percentage of children who participate in Boy Scouts. At our Annual Meeting, we are awarding the William E. Simon Prize for Philanthropic Leadership to Jon M. Huntsman Sr., lead funder of the Huntsman Cancer Institute, steward of one of the world’s most comprehensive genetic databases.

Other highlights of our Annual Meeting include remarks by columnist and Fox News commentator George Will; Hobby Lobby president Steve Green describing his plans to build a world-class museum of the Bible; Jeff and Laura Sandefer on their revolutionary one-room-schoolhouse model combining project-based learning, apprenticeships, and students as teachers; and Eric Greitens and Jake Wood, who are mobilizing the amazing capabilities of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans as leaders in civilian life.

Our Annual Meeting is closing with an inspiring dinner session on “How Philanthropy Changed My Life.”

Jason Tejada, a Children’s Scholarship Fund recipient, is opening the evening. One of more than 139,000 PHILANTHROPY

low-income students who have benefitted from privately funded CSF scholarships, Jason attended Incarnation School in upper Manhattan thanks to a CSF scholarship, and later graduated from Columbia University after surviving non-Hodgkin lymphoma. He now works in finance in New York and is mentoring students at Incarnation.

Our next speaker is Jack Horner, curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies and one of the scientists portrayed in the movie Jurassic Park. Jack’s Hell Creek Project, largely underwritten by philanthropy, led to fossil discoveries that have significantly advanced our understanding of the growth of dinosaurs. As the Roundtable’s forthcoming Almanac of American Philanthropy shows, many of the boldest initiatives in scientific discovery have been funded by private giving. Here’s a great TED talk by Jack, seen by 2 million viewers: “Building a Dinosaur from a Chicken,” available at TED.com.

Closing our evening is Brent Adams, who founded the animation department at Brigham Young University. This award-winning launch pad for creative talent was made possible by philanthropy. Graduates of Brent’s program are now influencing current culture at industry giants such as Pixar and Disney as well as startups in the new media space.

Our speakers embody this wisdom from the winner of our William E. Simon Prize, Jon M. Huntsman Sr.: “Selfless giving unto others represents one’s true wealth.”

Adam Meyerson President

The Philanthropy Roundtable

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