Philanthropy Fall15

BROOKS & KOVNER • CATHOLIC SCHOOL REBOUND • CAN DONORS TRIM POLARIZATION? A PUBLICATION OF THE

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HALF HALF For more than 20 years, David Weekley has devoted

half of his time half of his income to philanthropy

meet the 2015 winner of the William E. Simon Prize for Philanthropic Leadership

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Save the Date The Philanthropy Roundtable extends its sincere thanks to the following donors for their generous support of our 2015 Annual Meeting* Anonymous (2) Armstrong Foundation Laura and John Arnold Foundation 2016 ANNUAL MEETING November 16-17, 2016 Charleston Place Charleston, South Carolina

H. N. & Frances C. Berger Foundation Hilda E. Bretzlaff Foundation Lyda Hill Graham and Carolyn Holloway Family Foundation Miles Foundation M. J. Murdock Charitable Trust Sid W. Richardson Foundation Tapeats Fund Walton Family Foundation Yarborough Foundation

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

* As of September 18, 2015

table of contents

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10

42

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14

PHILANTHROPY

features

departments

14 Asking Tough Questions

4 Briefly Noted

The William E. Simon Prize for Philanthropic Leadership honors David Weekley: homebuilder, charity-grower, and hard-nosed inquisitor.

By Ashley May 22 The Texas Miracle wasn’t just economic; it was philanthropic

26 H igher Ed, Lower Costs An e-learning entrepreneur brings cut-rate practical degrees to far-flung corners of the world.

By Anne Snyder

32 M adisonian, and Not Going to Take It Any More!

The Hewlett Foundation wants to improve the effectiveness of our political debates.

By Scott Walter

36 G oing for Broke

How foundations sunset, and the reasons it’s becoming popular.

By Joanne Florino

42 L aying Foundations for Change: A Photo Essay

W inds of change for charters.

Science charity. Suing your alma mater. $100 million and a crowd.

9 Nonprofit Spotlight

Students learn good habits plus culinary skills at Food For Life.

10 Interview Bruce Kovner The trading titan on investing in ideas and policy, school choice, and music.

50 Ideas Renaissance Ahead?

Catholic schools are on the cusp of resurrection.

By Andy Smarick and Kelly Robson

54 Books in Brief

Effective Altruism ignores deserving charities.

56 President’s Note

25 ways to strengthen America.

By Adam Meyerson

Who says bricks-and-mortar philanthropy isn’t effective?

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 D I TO R

Ashley May

MA NAGIN G E D ITO R

Andrea Scott

A SSO C IAT E E D IT O R

Taryn Wolf

A RT D IR E CT O R

Jen Para I NTE RN

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

C O 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

46 T he Art of Public-Policy Philanthropy: The Battle of Ideas

Copyright © 2015 The Philanthropy Roundtable All rights reserved Cover: blackred

/ gettyimages

Featuring Kim Dennis, Gara LaMarche, Roger Hertog, and Chris Demuth.

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The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge turned out to be more than a gimmick—much more.

An Attack on Charter Schools Just as students in Washington state headed back to school in September, families seeking educational alternatives were dealt a blow by that state’s Supreme Court. The famously activist justices (who also tried to force the governor and state legislature to dramatically increase the education budget by fining them $100,000 per day) declared the state law creating charter schools unconstitutional. Charters, which were created by voters in the 2012 general election in a law in some ways considered one of the strongest in the U.S., cannot be deemed “common schools,” said the court, or funded with public money.

This unprecedented act put education reformers across the nation on high alert. At least 15 lawsuits trying to undo charter schools have PHILANTHROPY

Renphoto / istockphoto.com

Charity Science Research 2, Death 0 On the same day in August that he and three other researchers published their breakthrough explanation of the cause of ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease) in Science, Johns Hopkins ­U niversity scientist Jonathan Ling did a Q&A session on Reddit. He said he wanted to set the record straight on whether the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, which raised $115 million for disease research in six weeks back in 2014 (and then tens of millions more in repeat donations since), actually accomplished anything.

Ling recounted “reading a lot of stories about people complaining that the ice bucket challenge was a waste and that scientists weren’t using the money to do research, etc. I assure you that this is absolutely false.” The surge of research funding from the ALS Association allowed his Johns Hopkins team to conduct high-risk, high-reward experiments that were crucial to their discovery, he reported.

At any given time, about 30,000 people suffer from ALS—which kills most of its victims within a couple years of diagnosis. There is currently only one drug for treating the disease, and it quickly loses its effectiveness, extending a patient’s life only three to six months. It is hoped that lifesaving therapies based on the new JHU findings could enter clinical trials within two or three years. And thanks to the money raised in the Ice Bucket Challenge, those expensive trials are already paid for.

Another charity that recently hit pay dirt with a creative approach to disease research was the ­Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. Its leaders had become frustrated that only incremental improvements in treatment were in place by the late 1990s, despite

discovery of the genetic cause of cystic fibrosis more than a decade earlier. Most cystic fibrosis sufferers continued to pass away by their 30s, even after decades of traditional research investment.

S o in 1999 the foundation shifted gears.

Instead of just funding academic investigators, it would put money directly into pharmaceutical companies, seeking to speed useful drugs and also to interest the industry in making its own larger investments in lifesaving treatment. The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation eventually poured $450 million of donations into investments in a variety of small and large drug companies.

CFF bets paid off in a big way. In 2012, a breakthrough drug developed with the foundation’s funding was approved by the FDA. It treats underlying causes of the disease rather than symptoms. Then in 2015 an even more broadly effective drug was approved; it offers significant relief to half of all sufferers. These compounds may double the life expectancy of some patients.

I n addition to catalyzing these clinical triumphs, the foundation more than recouped its investments—by selling its rights to future royalties from the drugs for $3.3 billion. Those proceeds will allow the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation to maintain and expand existing patient-support services while directing additional money into a “supercharged” scientific search for a long-term CF cure for all patients.

University of Central Arkansas

briefly noted

Renphoto / istockphoto.com

University of Central Arkansas

reached state supreme courts in recent years, notes Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform, but this is the first where opponents have prevailed. “We need to think more deliberately about creating charter-school laws that will withstand this,” she warns.

Washington state is burdened with particularly militant anti-charter and anti-school-reform interests. Indeed, on the first day of school this year the Seattle teachers’ union went on strike over opposition to student testing, control of staffing levels, and a 21 percent pay-increase demand.

While the case law in Washington is unique to that state, “it’s never good to have an opinion like this on the books,” says Nina Rees at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. One thing that is unusual about this ruling, she notes, is that the court struck down the entire law rather than particular provisions. This gives opponents a fresh opportunity to block charter schools despite their approval by public referendum.

State leaders are scrambling to figure out how to cope with this politicization of charter ­s chooling. At the nine new charter schools that already have children in their classrooms, leaders are turning to philanthropists for emergency help. “We are seeking the support of donors who can help provide immediate funding to make sure the schools stay open in the short term. We want to minimize the disruption for these students as much as possible,” says Thomas Franta of the Washington State Charter Schools Association.

“We are concerned about the effects of the court’s ruling on the teachers, parents, and 1,200 students who attend Washington’s public charter schools,” the Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation told Philanthropy immediately after the ruling. “We are committed to ending the education opportunity gaps that persist, and believe that public charter schools are an essential part of a comprehensive solution.”

Big School Plans in the Big Apple Three time zones and a charter-school universe away, in New York, Success Academy co-founder Eva Moskowitz recently announced plans to operate as many as 100 campuses within the next

decade. To get there, she will rely on philanthropic backing from supporters like hedge-fund manager John Paulson, who with his wife, Jenny, announced an $8.5 million gift this summer toward Success Academy’s expansion.

Paulson’s donation is one of the largest ever received by the school—whose proven results with poor children have created extraordinary demand for its services. In 2015 statewide assessments, an astronomical 93 percent of Success students scored proficient in math and 68 percent scored proficient in reading. These rates placed Success Academy’s nearly all low-income and all minority students in the top 1 percent statewide in math and top 3 percent in reading.

Last year the network received over 22,000 applications for just 2,600 open seats at its existing 34 campuses. Paulson’s hope is that any student who wants to attend a Success Academy will eventually have a spot. That will require lots of expansion of the sort he has agreed to help with. In addition to h ­ elping with bricks and mortar, it’s likely that donors will also need to offer political defense and cover. Last year, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio tried to block three new Success Academy campuses. Donors

What it costs to attend Catholic school in Wichita

$0

(For more information about Wichita’s unique scholarships for its students, see page 50 for an excerpt from our latest guidebook.)

FALL 2015

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briefly noted

It all began with two men in the north woods.

PhilAphorism

“No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave.”

Action Saves a Bequest Tracy Stuart was living in Martha’s Vineyard when she received unexpected winter news. The board of her alma mater Sweet Briar College decided to

—CALVIN COOLIDGE

(from the Roundtable’s forthcoming Almanac of American Philanthropy) 6

A Modern Barnraising in Boiling Springs Amid the bustle of swinging locker doors and ringing class bells, Brenda Hurst’s laugh bounces through the halls at Boiling Springs High School.

Through 20 years of faithful service as custodian at the South Carolina school, Hurst has “always been there,” keeping things spic and span and making many friends among the student body. Then in June 2014, her home burned to the ground.

When he heard this, Boiling Springs principal Chuck Gordon called on his staff and student council to lend a hand. Determined “to give her a home,” student body president Alexis Ork recruited fellow Bulldogs and partner donors at local businesses. They organized coin collections, T-shirt sales, building-supply donations, creative fundraisers, and recruitment of volunteers.

The group Carpenters for Christ joined in, and a new home for Hurst was not only built but also furnished with washer, dryer, air conditioning, furniture, and Bulldog-red front door. It pleased Hurst to tears. “So many people were there to support me,” she said. “God is just good, too good.”

—Emily Rothbard

PHILANTHROPY

Fisk University, John Hope, and Aurelia E. Franklin Library, Special Collections

Wreathed in Glory In 1992, a wreath-making company in Maine found itself with a surplus at the end of the holiday season. Owner Morrill Worcester fondly remembered a boyhood trip to Arlington National Cemetery, and wanted to send the extra 5,000 wreaths to honor and remember the fallen who protected the country. The owner of a local trucking company, James Prout, liked the idea, so he provided transportation from Maine to ­V irginia.

Volunteers decorated them with red bows and coordinated a ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

For years after, this continued as a little tradition donated by Worcester, Prout, and residents of ­Harrington, Maine. Then a photo of snowy gravestones covered with their tribute wreaths went viral on

the Internet. Thousands of people called Worcester, wanting to replicate the service at their own veteran cemeteries. The next year, wreaths went up in 150 locations. Soon a nonprofit called Wreaths Across America was combining volunteers, companies, veterans, and truckers. Last year, WAA volunteers laid over 700,000 memorial wreaths at 1,000 locations in the U.S. and overseas, including Pearl Harbor M ­ emorial, Bunker Hill, Valley Forge, and the World Trade Center Memorial. With crucial help from trucking companies that provide equipment and fuel, while drivers donate their time, WAA hopes to lay over a million wreaths this year. —Jen Para

James Varhegyi, WreathsAcrossAmerica.org

quickly provided a defense fund, parents marched on Albany, and the state government required City Hall to cooperate with the charter schools. Donors also helped raise the cap that charter opponents instituted on the total number of charter schools allowed in New York City. —Pat Burke

Fisk University, John Hope, and Aurelia E. Franklin Library, Special Collections

James Varhegyi, WreathsAcrossAmerica.org

close the school. They anticipated that the college wouldn’t be able to stay afloat in coming years.

Stuart was stunned: “No one had been warned of this whatsoever.” She joined a Facebook discussion group seeking to keep the school alive. The interim president said alumni would need to raise $250 million to keep the doors open. Some found that number questionable, given that Sweet Briar’s endowment of $94 million, for only 600 students, actually made it one of the top schools in Virginia in terms of endowment per pupil. “ They had nobody sitting in the admissions office, no one in the development office, there were no leaders. It seemed like the school had gotten lazy,” says Stuart. She decided to hire a lawyer to get to the bottom of the matter.

W hat the legal team found was intriguing.

Indiana Fletcher Williams, the college’s founding donor, “bequeathed all of the land, the buildings, and all of her money to create Sweet Briar,” says Stuart. And her will was “air tight” specific that the alumni of the college could be understood as trustees, who should have been informed before any closure.

This argument won in mediation, and Sweet Briar’s doors would remain open if Stuart’s alumni group, which recently became a 501(c)(3), raised $12.5 million, which it accomplished in early ­S eptember. Meanwhile, a new college president has been recruited, and alumni have become energetically involved. “In this traumatic event we came together as a huge team,” Stuart says.

A Big Donor Plus a Lot of Crowdsourcing Scientist turned Internet entrepreneur Yuri M ­ ilner announced in July that he will donate $100 million over the next ten years to expand the search for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. His gift will be used to purchase equipment, hire astronomers, and secure observing time at two of the world’s most powerful telescopes. This new effort will cover ten times more sky and five times more radio spectrum, use 50 times more sensitive receivers, and analyze results 100 times faster, compared to previous endeavors. The c­ omputers of more

DONOR DOCUMENTARY For most Americans, Julius Rosenwald is the greatest donor you’ve never heard of. He kept his name off most projects, and avoided the spotlight.

But with a new commercial documentary in theaters this fall, he now has something not even Rockefeller or Carnegie have ever had (so far): a theatrical film about his life story. Rosenwald was the son of a poor German Jewish immigrant peddler who never graduated from high school, but turned Sears, Roebuck and Company into the ­Amazon.com of his day.

When he became wealthy, Rosenwald championed a muscular “give while you live” philosophy, in opposition to the encrusting of riches in permanent foundations that dribble out 5 percent of their assets each year. He was also a pioneer of the matching grant, requiring even poor communities to come up with funds to pair with his gifts. For his donations that built schools in poor towns across the South, locals held fried-chicken dinners, designated parts of their sharecropped fields as “the Rosenwald patch,” and otherwise stretched themselves. This unified recipients and allowed them to take proud ownership of the joint projects—which eventually totaled more than 5,000 schools, built in areas where rural schooling had been shamefully ignored by government authorities.

By the time Rosenwald died, his schools were educating one out of every three African-American children in the South. Absent the opportunities for learning and self-improvement that Julius Rosenwald offered to the offspring of former slaves, America would be a distinctly lesser society.

For more on Julius Rosenwald, see his entry in the Philanthropy Hall of Fame: philanthropyroundtable.org/almanac/hall_of_fame/­­julius_ rosenwald —Jen Para FALL 2015

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briefly noted than 9 million volunteers will be used, during times when they would otherwise be inactive, to process the raw data—effectively creating the world’s largest supercomputer by yoking together a legion of small donors. —Jen Para

8

Whitney Ball

John Von Kannon

PHILANTHROPY

In Memoriam: John Von Kannon The Philanthropy Roundtable mourns our friend and counselor John Von Kannon, who passed away in September.

Von Kannon was best known in his role as a matchmaker of donors to worthy causes. During his 40 years as a fundraiser, including over 30 years as the leader of development at the Heritage F ­ oundation, he raised over $1 billion for ­liberty-­oriented causes.

But his generosity and skills were not limited to Heritage. He “helped grow countless other organizations dedicated to the ideals of the Founding Fathers,” says ­H eritage president and former Senator Jim DeMint. Von ­Kannon served on the Alliance for Charitable Reform’s strategy committee, as a trustee of the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment, and as a trustee of four grantmaking institutions.

“John was a strong defender of philanthropic freedom and always added humor, insight, and wisdom to our deliberations,” says Adam Meyerson.

Known for his jovial nature and listening ear, John was known jokingly as “Baron Von Kannon” on the masthead of the American Spectator, of which he was founding publisher.

“John Von Kannon had personality to burn,” said DeMint in a memoriam, “a keen intellect, and an absolutely outrageous sense of humor. Most important of all, he had tremendous empathy and a passion for making America a nation that truly offers freedom and opportunity for all. His sense of mission led him to understand that fundraising is not about extracting money from someone, but about marshalling resources to advance a shared goal.”

DonorsTrust, Heritage Foundation

In Memoriam: Whitney Ball The Philanthropy Roundtable mourns the passing of Whitney Ball at age 52. She was a trusted friend to many in the philanthropy world, a staunch champion of freedom, and a pioneer in meeting the need for principle-oriented donor-advised funds.

“As founder and president of DonorsTrust, a sponsor of donor-advised funds for philanthropists committed to liberty, Whitney was one of America’s great entrepreneurs in conservative and libertarian philanthropy,” states Adam Meyerson, president of The Philanthropy Roundtable. “Since its founding in 1999, DonorsTrust has guided $740 million to liberty-oriented causes. Under Whitney’s leadership DonorsTrust became a vehicle philanthropists could trust to protect their donor intent, and a highly flexible tool allowing like-minded givers to pool funds for strategic purposes. Whitney was one of those rare CEOs who combined entrepreneurial energy with a passionate focus on detail, big-picture vision with careful attention to legal and financial compliance.”

Before starting DonorsTrust, Ball was executive director of The Philanthropy Roundtable, where she helped founding president Kim Dennis build the organization and create many of its distinctive products, including the Annual Meeting.

Ball also served as director of development for the Cato Institute, and worked at ­Consumers’ Research magazine. She served on the board of the State Policy Network, and contributed to countless nonprofits and volunteer organizations, connecting service providers and donors with a discerning eye. Meyerson adds, “she was always there for long conversations with donors strategizing how best to achieve their charitable goals, with grantees facing a management crisis, and with friends seeking career or personal advice. She spent a lifetime investing in others. Two months

before she died, she dropped everything to spend hours in the hospital with a former staff colleague who had just suffered a personal tragedy.”

During her difficult battle with cancer, Ball was “guided by deep religious faith and optimism.

She remained in cheerful spirits, focused on her friends and family and the useful institutions she had built. All who knew her encountered a woman of valor, energy, principled leadership, loving kindness, and unstinting commitment to liberty.”

nonprofit spotlight Food For Life students roll out dough for sweet potato pie.

Greg Justice

FOOD FOR LIFE On a Peace Corps mission in South Africa, Mississippi-bred Marisa Stubbs wanted to make flour tortillas from scratch. There was just one problem. No rolling pin. She created relatively round tortillas nonetheless—with a drinking glass. All the more satisfying for the challenge. It was then Stubbs realized “you don’t have to have exactly what something says to make it work.”

Stubbs went on inventing after returning to the states—founding her own mission in a church kitchen in southeast D.C., around the corner from the U.S. Capitol. At Food For Life, launched in 2013, disconnected young adults out of school and out of work are offered an opportunity to build a brighter future. Through a program that combines culinary training, work readiness, and good habit building, FFL students are nudged toward productive living, whether the next step is culinary school, commercial driving, customer service, hospitality management, or cutting vegetables with precision at the Shake Shack down the road.

In groups of six to eight, 18- to ­23-year-olds meet in the basement of ­Capitol Hill United Methodist Church for 20 or more hours each week, in six- to nine-week sessions. They learn the ins and outs of a professional kitchen while preparing gourmet takeout meals from scratch for customers

who place their orders online. The group also caters events, from fancy family dinners to company BBQs. Participants also take classes that “explore food, food culture…and how faith and food connect.” Periodically, FFL students prepare breakfast foods to donate to a local homeless café.

When participants arrive, Stubbs makes it clear she’s not there “to solve them.” She encourages them to get their troubles out on the table so they can start building a structure of accountability. It is often challenging to get students to show up on time, to follow through on tasks, to manage stress and conflict, control their impulses, and finish tasks.

By encouraging her young chefs to learn from the past and meet present challenges with diligence, Stubbs instills steadfastness and a feeling that says “I can.”

“I don’t glamorize the industry,” she says, acknowledging that culinary work can be demanding. In addition to strengthening their work ethic, students gain valuable assistance from volunteers with backgrounds in education and career services.

Through mock interviews and other preparation, students learn how to acquire jobs, and then hold onto them. An early evaluation showed that after one year, 70 percent of FFL graduates were either employed or continuing their education or training.

Janelle Smith is one shining example.

After sharpening her knife skills and learning how to sauté and blanch, Smith ­graduated FALL 2015

from the program in May. She then enrolled at the Lincoln Culinary Institute in ­Columbia, Maryland, where her FFL experience allowed her to place out of basic training courses, and was soon on the dean’s list. The path to professional chef-hood is “a commitment,” she says, but “I don’t mind burning myself and getting a few cuts, because it’s something I love to do.”

Food For Life currently operates under the wing of the Care Company, a nonprofit that nurtures several ministries like it in the D.C. area. Care Company provides accounting services, insurance coverage, and office space, but 92 percent of FFL’s expenses are covered by donors (60 percent) or meal sales and event fees (the rest).

Stubbs currently trains about 30 students per year. She would like to expand the program, offer longer training sessions for those who need them, and hire chef instructors so she can dedicate more of her own time to individual counseling and work placement.

She envisions FFL becoming a transitional employment site for graduates, like the ­FareStart restaurant in Seattle that has trained thousands of homeless, former prisoners, long-term unemployed, and other economic strugglers through its ­culinary-training program, while serving over 6 million meals to the public, allowing a temporary first paying job for many of its graduates. Another inspiration is D.C. Central Kitchen, a nonprofit that has been combating hunger and creating opportunity since 1989 through culinary instruction and social enterprise.

Few things smell better than a kitchen bubbling up with shrimp ’n’ grits, roasted corn polenta, and chocolate caramel tart with raspberries, mint, and a drizzle of crème anglaise. But things more lasting than a good meal leave the kitchen at Food For Life and other programs in this area that are well-run. Students who learn how to cook up a promising future through the art of food, says Stubbs, are “proud to finish and take the next step toward their dreams.” —Emily Rothbard 9

interview Bruce Kovner was born to a Jewish immigrant family steeped in the belief that you could do anything in America—and young Kovner would soon prove the point. He enrolled at Harvard University, drifted to New York when he stalled in grad school, drove a cab, then found he had a knack for trading commodities. A $5 billion knack, judging from his approximate net worth when he retired in 2011.

One of the ways Kovner succeeded on this scale was by being a leader in the quant revolution on Wall Street, recruiting exceptional math and science minds to help with his trading without worrying about their finance credentials. Kovner has shared his wealth with as much care as he applied in building his business. He has been generous with time, not just resources—becoming a leader on the boards of the Juilliard School and American Enterprise Institute, for instance.

Kovner’s primary philanthropic passions are classical music (which he plays as well as champions), public policy (he was a student of the great Harvard political scientist Edward Banf ield), and education ­ merican reform (as a means of keeping the A dream alive and accessible to the general populace). Philanthropy contributing editor and American Enterprise Institute president Arthur Brooks conducted this chat.

Brooks: Tell me about your family.

Kovner: My grandparents came from very poor areas of Poland and Russia and fled to avoid the pogroms of the late nineteenth century. I’m told my grandmother actually walked most of the way out of Poland to Hamburg to get on steerage to the United States. What courage they had to strike out with barely a cent in their pockets, and to follow their dreams to America!

My parents had that belief in the American dream too. But they were 10

caught up in the Great Depression and weren’t able to go to college. They had to drop out and take care of their extended family. But with hard work they made their way into the middle class, raised a family of four kids, and led a good life.

I grew up in an environment in which there was a passionate belief that you could do anything here in America. I was taught we all had an obligation to treat the underdog fairly and not put obstacles in his way.

Education was an essential part of it.

I did a lot of thinking: How could I lead a life in which I care about what’s happening in the world and do something about it? My hero at the time was John F. Kennedy, so I decided to go to Harvard to follow in his footsteps. I became a Young Democrat and went to Washington to meet the Kennedy cabinet.

Brooks: How did your thinking evolve?

Kovner: The popular idea at the time was that the Democrats and FDR were committed to fairness and the ­Republicans were committed to greed. I grew up in that kind of household. My father told me that one of the biggest mistakes he ever made was to vote for Wendell Willkie in 1940. I thought it was charming he couldn’t think of anything worse!

When I went off to college, my father’s sole concern was that I would become too much of a doctrinaire leftist. He was shocked and dismayed when he realized I had come to very different conclusions about the truly effective ways to be fair. It was a major transformation in my life. Men like Edward Banfield, James Q. ­W ilson, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan taught me the law of unintended consequences.

Pat Moynihan came to Harvard in 1966 and became one of the most important influences of my life. He had hands-on experience in the K ­ ennedy administration. He explained how the war on poverty of the mid-’60s was not extinguishing poverty, but creating PHILANTHROPY

bureaucratic dysfunction and a class dependent on welfare.

All of that was quite a revelation to me. I came from a background where the mere intention to eradicate poverty was a badge of honor, sufficient to do the job.

I learned that good intentions are not enough. I learned economics.

The social pressure to avoid those conclusions was enormous. I felt it personally. Skepticism about popular government programs wasn’t a winning ticket with girlfriends either! But I gradually came to believe that much of what Kennedy and Johnson did was counterproductive. A significant portion of my peers didn’t want to have those discussions.

Brooks: So you finished school and, after a few years, wound up in finance.

You ultimately started one of the first successful hedge funds. This has made philanthropy a big priority for you. You are deeply involved in supporting ideas, and have done so primarily via think tanks. How do you compare think tanks to universities?

Kovner: It is clear that universities are sometimes the best place for fundamental scientific research, but they haven’t been very good at maintaining an atmosphere of dispassionate analysis, objectivity, and creativity in the social sciences. On the contrary, the “academy” has created an orthodoxy which stifles dissent, unconventionality, and good judgment. One needs to look elsewhere for the best original work in the social sciences and the analysis of public policy. Think tanks, along with independent journals, are often the best place to find it; many were founded for that very reason. I look for the institutions that can support independent thinkers.

Brooks: You’ve been on the AEI board since 1989. You were the chairman of the board for six years. How did your connection with AEI first begin?

Mike McGregor / Contributor / gettyimages

BRUCE KOVNER

Mike McGregor / Contributor / gettyimages

Kovner: It began with a phone call from Chris DeMuth, an old college friend who had worked in the Reagan administration and had recently become president of AEI. He asked me if I would think about joining the board. Until that time, I’d only been vaguely aware of AEI, but I started studying its material and paying attention to the scholars.

I realized that AEI stood for two of the core principles in my life. First, defending the vision of America as a place committed to free enterprise and personal liberty. Second, the necessity of a serious and assertive military and foreign policy that would defend America in a dangerous world. AEI was the home of some of the most brilliant scholars in social science and foreign policy in the U.S., including academic institutions.

When I first came to AEI, my philanthropic activities were unorganized and almost purely civic—just being a good citizen in my neighborhood. In my 20s and 30s I led a very normal life: getting married, finding a career, starting a family, trying to manage financially. It was only in the early 1980s that I began to find enough financial resources to do more than be a good neighbor. My formal philanthropy began first with AEI, and later led to other organizations and causes I felt strongly about.

Brooks: Many of those other organizations and causes are musical and artistic.

How did you become interested in the arts?

Kovner: Before my teenage years, I had no involvement in the arts. But at the age of 15, I had a near-religious experience when I heard a piece of classical music for the first time. It was “Mars” from Holst’s “The Planets.” My mother was driving me to school, and this piece of music came on the radio, and I remember stopping and saying, “What is that?” in wonder at the images it conjured up.

On that very day I began an exploration of classical music that never stopped. It has been the most consistent

Trading titan Bruce Kovner has focused his philanthropy on free-market think tanks, arts (especially music organizations), and school-reform advocacy.

form of spiritual stimulation in my life for the past 55 years. Music increases empathy. It helps us think about devotion, brotherhood, tragedy, and loss.

With Bach, you have a window into the transcendental. When looking for grace and beauty, it’s Mozart. For introspection, it’s Beethoven. When I want to feel the expansiveness of the world and the creation, it’s Bruckner. Shostakovich is FALL 2015

about tragedy, and humor. Music is a universal language. It opens these experiences and ideals to everyone.

Brooks: You are a musician yourself.

Kovner: A couple of years after that road-to-Damascus moment, I found myself as an undergraduate thinking “I cannot be illiterate in the language I love.” So I signed myself up for piano 11

interview Kovner: I find there is a “harmony” in the best thinking in all three. The most interesting thinkers in public policy and finance have a strong conception of the nature of human society and sense the basic harmonies of the entire social order. I am thinking of Adam Smith, for example, and Tocqueville. Much of my reading today is an attempt to see some order in the daily frenetic chaos.

10,000 kids enrolled and may reach 30,000 over the next several years, thanks to donor support.

lessons at age 18. Pretty late, but I have played the piano ever since. I’ve never taken more than a couple of years’ worth of lessons consistently, but I inconsistently take lessons to this day. And I’ve managed to acquire enough skill to play badly through most pieces of music.

Brooks: When did you start giving to the arts?

Kovner: When I first came to New York City in the early ’70s I realized that ­Juilliard had an evening division where I could enroll in classes. I was doing everything from driving a cab to working as a consultant, during which I signed up for a variety of classes. From this has arisen the mistaken notion that I was a real student at Juilliard, as opposed to an evening schlepper!

But I did get to know some folks on the Juilliard board. I joined in the ­m id-’90s and was asked to become ­c ­h airman in 2001. It was a great fit. ­Juilliard had many needs as it was evolving into a bigger and stronger institution.

12

And Lincoln Center was dealing with many issues as it confronted the need for renovation. I found that I could play a constructive role at both places.

I felt an obligation to be a good citizen in New York. One of the obligations of citizenship is to help the great institutions where you live.

Brooks: You almost never put your name on your donations. But you did on the Kovner Fellowship Program, a $60 million gift to Juilliard in 2013. Why? Kovner: For me, gifts are given for the pleasure and the moral value of giving rather than public recognition. I prefer anonymity. But at Juilliard, Suzie and I want to have a close relationship with these amazingly talented students, 20 or so a year, and identify ourselves with them. We enjoy their company immensely. It was a purely personal act.

Brooks: W hat ’s the status of your Brooks: You spend your time with musi- school-reform efforts today? cians, policy wonks, and finance experts. Kovner: In the beginning we believed What do they have in common, if anything? charter schools were going to be PHILANTHROPY

Blair Getz Mezibov

Students from Success Academies —a high-performing charter chain that now has close to

Brooks: You’re also heavily involved in education reform in New York. How did that come about?

Kovner: I received a scholarship to go to Harvard and wouldn’t have been able to attend otherwise. I’d like other low-income students to be afforded similar opportunities. In the mid-’90s, a group connected with the Manhattan Institute, including Peter ­Flanigan and Roger Hertog, began talking about what we could do in New York to promote school choice. We set up the School Choice Scholarships ­Foundation and created a lottery to distribute vouchers every year for high-risk kids to go to private schools. These kids enrolled primarily in Catholic schools, some in Orthodox Jewish schools, and a few in other denominations or secular schools.

We asked Paul Peterson at Harvard to do a longitudinal study of kids who got vouchers compared to kids who didn’t.

Twenty years later, we have a lot of data on the kids and the results are extraordinary.

As time went on we enlarged the group to include about 20 activists and shifted our focus to charter schools. There was no charter-school authority in New York state then, so we began a political effort, an educational effort, a lobbying effort to bring legislation authorizing charter schools. In 1998 we helped persuade Governor George ­Pataki to play hardball with the legislators who didn’t want to pass this bill. We wound up with charter school legislation that enabled New York to become a leader in education reform.

Blair Getz Mezibov

s­uccessful simply because they were charter schools. We learned that charter schools could fail too. But we also learned something else: that in the hands of effective practitioners, charter schools could succeed beyond our wildest dreams. Four great charter networks have developed in New York, each taking disadvantaged kids and turning them into successful scholars.

Success Academies, for example, takes kids who are among the most disadvantaged in the city, but usually ranks near the top of all schools in the city and state. This is going to make a very big difference in the lives of poor kids in New York. And this is scalable.

Success is growing every year. It now has close to 10,000 kids enrolled and may reach 30,000 over the next several years. This needs to be emulated by others.

Brooks: How does political giving fit into this?

Kovner: The political interface with ideas is extremely important. The real world requires us to figure out how to connect our analysis with practical actions, including legislation and public policy. For me, it’s part of my sense of moral obligation to participate in the political process.

When our little group formed the School Choice Scholarship Foundation, we thought the possibility of having an effective charter-school program in New York State was close to zero, or at least would take a generation. We couldn’t get any politicians to sign on originally, even those whose constituents were crying out for charters. But tenacious political action in this area allowed us to get legislation, protect it every year against assaults, and improve it incrementally so that now we have one of the best charter­school programs in the United States.

I’m amazed that we’ve come to this point. And political activity was a necessary part of it. Those of us who’ve been a part of this strategy have been closely in touch with every governor, every S ­ enate majority leader, all of the caucuses in New York, every single year, to make our case and to encourage politicians to recognize that it’s in their interest to vote for school reform.

Brooks: How would you describe yourself politically?

Kovner: I believe in free-market principles and strong defense and look for those things in political representatives.

In my view, complex coalitions lead to the most stable government, so I want a variety of opinions, ethnicities, and classes in each party. I deplore ad hominem attacks, which degrade the quality of political debate and are not good for the country. We can make progress if we call those who disagree with us our opponents in policy, but our colleagues in seeking good outcomes for America.

But not if we call them dishonest or cast doubt on their good intentions.

Brooks: How do you measure the success of your giving?

Kovner: When I make a major commitment, I will often try to become part of the governance of the organization. Then I can really observe effects. Each entity or cause has a different set of assessments. Not all measures are numeric, sometimes they’re more qualitative.

Juilliard can be hard to measure.

Another place I give, the Institute for ­Justice, can be quite easy: How many court cases did you win, and how many did you lose? But even there, tricky questions arise, like “are you changing the tone of the debate about judicial intervention?”

When you’re doing philanthropy, you have to make judgments about whether your giving is succeeding or failing. But there’s no one method. In my case, I want to be close to the governance so I can continuously ask questions.

Brooks: You’ve often said that the biggest threat to excellence is self-­congratulation.

What does that mean?

Kovner: It comes from my own life experience in the financial arena. The moment you feel complacent, you stop thinking critically about an environment that’s always changing, and you start making bad decisions. So when I see leaders of organizations being self-congratulatory, I worry that their critical defenses have FALL 2015

dropped and they’re open for a nasty left hook. I try to remind those leaders that they can’t enjoy the warm glow of success for more than one dinner and one good bottle of wine.

Brooks: In managing your philanthropy, you appear to operate in the George ­E astman mode, without much staff. Is that true? What is the value you see in that approach?

Kovner: I have a small staff to help me administer the foundation grants and to serve as my eyes and ears for reports, conferences, and the many necessary personal connections. And in recent years my wife, Suzie, has been an invaluable partner. It’s been even more gratifying doing this work together, sharing the successes and failures. But I have resisted forming a larger organization because bureaucracies have a way of creating their own agenda. I would rather keep my strategic priorities limited and clear—and then personally make sure that they are being accomplished without mission drift.

Brooks: What are some things you hope to accomplish 20 years from now via your giving?

Kovner: I continue to believe that the U.S. K-12 education system can be improved. I would be happy if some of what I do contributes to better education and thus better lives for the less privileged.

But I also believe we should help those with extraordinary gifts achieve their full potential. We continue to look for ways to help promising young people with talent and ambition. All of us are the beneficiaries of the contributions high-achievers make to society.

More generally, I want America to be a place of ever-greater opportunity, via a highly mobile free-market economy that empowers people to achieve what they are capable of. We know that the free-market economy has lifted hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people from poverty. I want to support institutions that promote those policies. P 13

Rocky Kneten

14

PHILANTHROPY

asking questions

By Ashley May

Rocky Kneten

The William E. Simon Prize for Philanthropic Leadership honors David Weekley: homebuilder, charity-grower, and hard-nosed inquisitor here’s a table in David Weekley’s office, well known among Houston’s nonprofit leaders. “Large, green, marble-top,” Young Life vice president Eric ­ S cofield describes it with a playful shudder. “If you ever go into his office to have a meeting and you sit at that table then you need to prepare yourself to be challenged, pushed, maybe even argued with. You’ll certainly walk away from that table licking your wounds.”

Those invited to sit down at the marble-top consider it a privilege, if an intimidating one.

Former Houston YMCA president Clark Baker confesses, “I probably did more mental rehearsal and briefings with staff before I went into a Weekley request than with any other donor.”

As Weekley has developed a reputation as one of the toughest meeting partners, he’s also become a go-to person for strategic advice.

“How can you grow faster?” he asks those who come to him. “Are you serving enough kids? Is your board strong? How do you know you’re Ashley May is managing editor of Philanthropy.

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making a difference?” For some nonprofit executives, the questions fall on deaf ears. They walk away without a check, and often into trouble.

“He’s looking for a leader who can actually perform,” says Scofield. “There have been people who come to the marble-top and David says, ‘I’d be more than willing to give you money. Come back to me with a plan and a board.’ And they never come back.

From a charity standpoint that’s crazy, but it happens all the time.”

For those willing to listen, however, this businessman from Houston offers them a chance to pick his mind as well as his pocket. Because when it comes to philanthropy, David Weekley means business.

David beats Goliath Weekley never intended to be an entrepreneur. After graduating from Trinity University in San Antonio, he was accepted to Harvard Business School where he intended to follow in the footsteps of his older brother Bob. But Harvard wanted all its students to have two years of work experience, so David delayed his acceptance and went job hunting. He landed a spot in the warranty department of a homebuilder, and quickly rose to become a superintendent and then a manager. Observers saw that he had a knack for selling new houses.

“David’s commitment of time and resources to nonprofits is legendary. When he gives permission to use his name as a funder, organizations have an enormous amount of credibility with other prospective donors. I don’t know of another funder in Houston and maybe all of Texas who is as highly regarded for his thoughtfulness and involvement.” ~ Albert Mueller, Excellence in Giving 16

PHILANTHROPY

When David heard that the company was going to change his compensation package midyear and raised the issue with his supervisor, he was fired. David had been married to his high-school sweetheart, Bonnie, for one month at that point. “I’ll never forget my wife coming home,” he remembers. “I was watching ‘As the World Turns’ or something like it, and she said ‘What are you doing home?’ I complained that I got fired, and she said ‘I know this was for better or worse, but this is a little quick.’”

What seemed like a disaster proved to be a blessing.

Weekley’s entrepreneurial bent revved up. He got a loan from his brother Dick to begin building and selling his own homes, and some advertising from his father Weldon, founder of a successful marketing firm. The ad used a David vs. Goliath theme, portraying his son as the cheeky underdog against a behemoth industry.

Houston went for it. Sales soared over the next ten years, making David a millionaire before age 30. He became active in the Young Presidents Organization and regularly spoke in front of large groups. He built a fancy home and drove a BMW. “I thought I had it all figured out,” he says. “There wasn’t much I didn’t know.”

But David and Bonnie were in for a wilder ride. In the mid-’80s a downturn in oil and gas sent Houston into a slump. The housing market contracted from 30,000 new-construction sales per year to 6,000. “Most everybody was going broke,” says David, including himself.

Realizing that erecting houses in Houston wasn’t going to be profitable for a while, Weekley realized his only hope of saving the business was to expand to new regions. He hit the road to pitch his product.

Luckily, David Weekley Homes ended up being popular in Dallas and Austin, offsetting his other losses. Nonetheless, “we ended up selling our big house, and selling our expensive cars. It was a pretty sketchy time.”

Piled on top of the business stress was the sense of a missed opportunity. “I had literally millions of dollars flow through my hands, and no good had come out of it,” he remembers. “Money was there and then it was lost, and nothing had changed in terms of the world.” He saw a bumper sticker on the back of a car reading, “God, give me one more million and I won’t screw up the next one.” Weekley was starting to feel the same way.

Eventually, the market picked up again, and having made it through the downturn via regional expansion, Weekley’s business came out of the late 1980s stronger than ever. In fact, it became the largest privately held homebuilding company in America.

But something was changing in its founder. “I really thought that money motivated me,” he says. “But I learned it didn’t. Once I had enough, I lost some of my

enthusiasm. Through my late 30s and 40s, I was a little dissatisfied. I’d made a lot of money, but there wasn’t necessarily any meaning or purpose in what I was doing.”

He kept remembering the bumper-sticker promise.

A serious health complication in the early ’90s finally prompted him to re-examine his life. “I was working like crazy, 60 to 70 hours a week, not paying attention to my family.” He recalled a book he’d seen in his early 20s, God Owns My Business by Stanley Tam. “Tam gave half of his money up to do community work and nonprofit work.” Suddenly that concept didn’t seem at all crazy to Weekley. In 1992, he decided to do the same: From then on, he would devote half of his time and half of his income to philanthropic pursuits.

Marble-top conversations “When I started doing half and half, I did what most people do: you get involved in local activities that you can see, touch, and feel,” Weekley explains. He joined a number of Houston charitable boards and gained experience as a leader. He helped grow the superb Houston-born charter-school organizations YES Prep and KIPP. He led the Sam Houston Council of the Boy Scouts of America.

“I learned a lot, I made a lot of mistakes, I saw areas where I could contribute. Since I was giving time as well as money, I had to determine where my personal skills could best enhance nonprofits. As you would expect, in some I couldn’t help. I had to learn where my sweet spots were.”

Those sweet spots turned out to be similar to what he had practiced during the crisis in his business: How to expand into new markets. How to track results and measure if new branches are performing up to speed.

How to save the enterprise by thinking bigger, reaching more people, growing at the right pace.

When Positive Coaching Alliance founder Jim Thompson first met Weekley, he came armed with a lengthy PowerPoint presentation outlining how the organization trains coaches and players and parents to use sports as opportunities to build character. But he only got three minutes in when Weekley interrupted him. “Look, here’s what I’m willing to do,” laying out a three-year gift to establish a chapter in Houston, with a local board that would control the operation. At the time Thompson had no local boards—and no chapters outside his headquarters in northern California.

Ninety percent of the money that’s given away is given away locally, Weekley explained. Houston

“Not only is David very generous financially, but equally important is the intellectual capacity and very high energy he brings to a philanthropic undertaking. He has the unsurpassed ability to get to the heart of the matter quickly and accurately, and makes any project fun, rewarding, and effective.” ~ Ernest Cockrell, Cockrell Foundation

donors will be far more likely to engage with your program in their own city than as a California charity.

There would have to be a local board that gives money, raises money, and has its own power. Weekley’s seed funding would taper off over three years, at which point the local board would be fully responsible for sustaining the chapter.

Thompson accepted both Weekley’s money and his advice. “That model he laid out for me in about 30 seconds is still basically the model that we use,” he says. PCA will soon open its fourteenth chapter in Portland, Oregon. The organization now reaches over 66,000 kids in Houston alone.

“Leadership is critical,” Weekley explains. “I hate to give to something today that might not be here or might not be effective 20 years from now…. It’s really up to good board governance to ensure that an organization continues.”

Tiger Dawson was in town in 1994 amid a drive to expand Young Life, a Christian outreach to teenagers, so he stopped by Weekley’s office. “I heard he was really good at strategic planning and wanted to help people be better at what they do.” In what Dawson calls “typical David fashion,” Weekley pushed him to improve. It’s “not really his style” to give a proposal a quick thumbs up or thumbs down—“his style is much more, let me beat you up a little bit,” Dawson laughs.

“Most donor meetings are predictable. You know the beginning, the middle, and the end. I’m now great friends with David, and I still have no idea where meetings with him are going.”

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“David Weekley is one of the finest people God ever made.

Every aspect of his life—business, church, family, citizen—is without peer.

We could use more David Weekleys.” ~ Jerome Fullinwider, Hillwood International Energy

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PHILANTHROPY

Expanding to Africa Recognizing his sweet spot as an inquisitor also led to another revelation for David: maybe his expertise could be useful outside of Houston. “After a while, I saw that there were terrific local leaders across the U.S. that could do a lot of what I could do. So I wanted to go where it was harder, where there were more challenges.” In the early 2000s he took a trip to Rwanda with evangelical pastor Rick Warren. His travels continued to China, India, and Latin America, doing “a survey of where I could be the most helpful.”

He decided on Africa as his primary focus. “I could get seven times as much philanthropic mission done in Africa as I could in the U.S., just because of the difference in cost structure. But it was really challenging to find the right people to work with.”

One of his international partners came from his work in Houston. Tiger Dawson, moved on from Young Life, was starting a new organization called Edify to provide loans to private schools in the developing world. Weekley sent his international

Rocky Kneten, nesneJkraM / istockphoto.com

Over the next two years Dawson met with ­Weekley and a few other philanthropists interested in extending Young Life’s reach into urban areas. They arrived at a model where local donors would provide seed funding for new Young Life clubs, decreasing over time until the club was self-sustaining.

With a successful model in hand, Weekley and his friends Rusty Walter and Terry Looper wanted to propel Young Life into new places. They initiated a million-dollar match: if local city boards are formed and local givers step up, they would give $1 million in seed funding to support their cause. Ultimately, five cities participated in the match.

Looper recalls giving with Weekley and Walter fondly. “Some of our most fun investments have been Christian camps for kids, especially the ones who are in trouble and need much more than just money.

David usually takes the lead in the beginning and then we take over when he is ready to chase a new ministry in trouble or one on the cutting edge.” Giving as a team has proved to be “an effective model of accountability, new ideas, problem-solving, and a great way to fund ministries.”

Weekley cherishes close relationships with peer donors. “What happens once you’ve been fortunate enough to create some wealth is that you begin to think that you’re invincible, and that because you’re wealthy, you have some kind of overarching control,”

he says. “It can be kind of heady. Giving people checks can create a sense of entitlement and power. When you have other people giving with you who are smart and competent, they can hold checks and balances, and remind you that your answer is not necessarily the right one.”

Naturally, Weekley dishes at least as good as he gets. Says Dawson, “I think some people who know David from a distance can think he’s hard on them and pushing them, but he’s hard to help them succeed at their mission. That’s his contribution. His inputs are difficult questions. The outcomes are organizations that are more effective as a result of meeting with him.”

“Every time I meet with David I gear myself up,” says Thompson. “Because it’s not just a frivolous meeting. Often he’ll focus on something that I haven’t thought of, and ask about it. And then I realize I need to think more deeply about it.”

Daunting as it may be, Thompson appreciates the process. “When he thinks he has an important idea he pushes hard. But he respects you—he understands that I’m in charge of the organization, I’m the one who has to make it all work, not him. So he doesn’t hold a grudge if I don’t take all of his advice, which makes him an invaluable advisor.”

“If I’m funding organizations that are not the best in their class, then I’m taking away from the best organizations,” Weekley explains of his rigorous approach. “Since there aren’t market forces at work in philanthropy, the folks who usually get funded are those who do the best job of raising funds, not necessarily the folks who do the best job of executing their program and mission.”

A WEEKL

M O N D AY

EY SCHE DULE

9:00 a.m.: Business call for Weekle y Homes Weekl

group, Ste rling and A ssociates, ey Homes to work with is the large growing n st private hom onprofits he thinks ebuilder in have prom America, is constructin e , to help them impro g new resi ve their op dences in 1 cities natio e ra 9 tions, governance nwide. Wh , and fund en Weekley cut back to raising.

focus on p hilanthrop he enlisted y 2:00 p.m.: a new CEO Call abou , but he remains ch t Glorieta C airman of th a m e board. p

Bonnie an d David lo 11:00 a.m ve the outdoors. .: Meet wit T hey took th h Steve ki Vinton, Vil eir own ds on long lage Scho camping tr ols The David ips, and supporting Weekley F outdoor ca amily Foundatio m ps for youths, esp n gives ab ecially one out half of its port s with a moral com folio to in ponent, is ternationa projects. V a l philanthro illage Sch p ic favorite o o ls runs 31 schools in .

Tanzania a nd Malaw educating i, 4:00 p.m.: nearly 9,0 Bible stud 00 studen

ts. y David and B o nnie are a 12:00 p.m ctive in their Pre .: Lunch w sbyterian ith Kim Sterl church and a mix ing, Sterlin e d -denomin g and Assoc ation fellowship iates group.

David ofte n pays for a consultin g

WEDNES 8:00 a.m.:

A key to su cceeding in homebuild ing is land acquisition . Each wee k David talks with senior lea dership about wha t acreage Weekley Homes mig ht acquire .

10:00 a.m .: Phone c all with area presidents Every

quarter Dav id tries to visit all 16 area office s of Weekley H omes. He al so speaks frequently with area p re sidents about press ing issues.

THURSD

T U E S DA Y

10:00 a.m .: Call wit h Jim Thom pson, Pos it ive Coaching Alliance Wit

Rocky Kneten, nesneJkraM / istockphoto.com

h the help of Weekle y, Positive C oaching A ll ia n ce has launched chapters in 14 U.S. cities. Tho ugh not a big sports fan, David believes P C A’s mission of teachin g characte r lessons through a thletics ha s power among ch ildren tod ay.

12:00 p.m .: Houston philanthro py lunche on Weekley hosts regu

lar

sent for C oo

kie David has five grand children: Cookie, To bin, Sawye r, Asher, and Booke r.

3:00 p.m.: Excellenc e meeting fo r Weekley H omes T

12:00 p.m .: Lunch w ith Stephen M edlicott a nd David You ng, Boy Scouts of Americ a David se

rved as ch airman of the Sam H ouston Co uncil of the Boy Sco uts of Ame rica, and still se rves on th e executive committee .

6:30 p.m.:

Prax

is dinner Praxis is a nonprofit b usiness accelerato r, helping yo ung entreprene urs of faith connect to mentors, ca pital, and handson support . Praxis co-founde r Josh Kwan formerly served as W eekley’s dir ector of internation al giving.

AY

8:30 a.m .: Buy a bir thday pre

philanthro py luncheo ns with peer dono rs. “Having other people co me alongsi de you helps give you balan ce ,” he says. “It can ensure you don’t man ipulate a n onprofit organizati on throug h your gifts.”

he compa ny gathers quarterly to discuss results and give o ut reward s for outstandin g perform ance.

D AY

Land call

10:00 a.m .: Visit St. Thomas H igh Schoo l Althoug

h David is Protestant, he is a ma jor support er of Catholic e ducation b e cause it offers ex cellent inst ru ction and chara cter enhan ce m ent to many st udents wh o w o uld otherwise be trapped in p o or public sch ools.

F R I D AY

Farm time

!

A couple ye ars ago Da vid bough his parent’s t 110-yearo ld farm in Brenham, Texas. It is a refuge fo the family. r

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GROWING UP WEEKLEY Generosity runs in the Weekley family. David’s father, Weldon, taught third-grade Sunday school at Memorial Drive Presbyterian Church and raised three sons—Dick, Bob, and David—with his wife, Rosalie. Most of their giving was done in secret, but the sons noticed their good deeds and followed the example.

“We had some friends and relatives who were not well off, and mom and dad would take them on trips and pay for their expenses,” Dick recalls. Bob once had a woman describe how his father, when he was just starting his business years earlier, needed to sell his car for $2,300. She wanted the vehicle, but could only pay $2,000.

Learning that she was in desperate straits, he accepted her offer, then placed her check right back in her hand, saying she needed the money more than he did and she could just take the car.

All of the Weekley family have been loyal supporters of the ­Houston YMCA (which they see as a great equalizer in a rapidly growing and very diverse city), which is named for the whole family with an inscription by the sons above the entrance: “May this building built in honor of a loving Mom and Dad be a constant inspiration to develop and nurture a healthy Spirit, Mind, and Body and promote faithful service to family, community, and our nation, forever.”

A third generation of Weekleys has volunteered as interns at the Houston Y. “The family has worked hard at a sense of responsibility,” says former director Clark Baker. “My greatest fear,” says David, “is that my success will harm my kids, either in terms of their motivation, or in terms of their outlook on the world, or their sense of who they are. It’s been a real journey to figure out how to attempt to enjoy life and what we’ve earned and been blessed with while at the same time raising great kids with an understanding and belief that they owe things to a broader world.”

“I know a lot of very generous people, but David Weekley breaks the mold. You can have all the heart you want, but David will put you through your paces to make sure you’re running a good business. Everyone knows that if you can pass the David Weekley test, you have been evaluated thoroughly and you’ve been deemed worthy.” ~ Michael Feinberg, KIPP Schools

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giving officer at the time, Josh Kwan, to travel with ­Dawson and help think through strategic questions. ­Dawson returned to Houston a few times a year to hear W ­ eekley’s input, where he would “challenge us on how fast we’re growing and whether it’s wise to grow at that pace.” Edify has now aided 320,000 students by loaning money to nearly 1,500 schools.

HOPE International CEO Peter Greer was returning from living in Rwanda when he met Weekley. “The very first project we did together was simply coming up with a strategic plan,” he remembers. “He encouraged us to say ‘What would it look like to have a bigger-picture viewpoint? No one would ever accuse David of thinking small.” Weekley followed up by visiting HOPE’s programs himself. It’s important to “physically be on the ground with those organizations you give to,” he explains. “As a steward of what I’ve been given and earned I need to really see, touch, and feel.”

Stephen Maislin of the Greater Houston ­Community Foundation calls Weekley a “trailblazer in Houston with regard to international grantmaking.”

The donor now devotes half of his philanthropic effort to international work and half to domestic causes. He’s an avid reader, devouring “everything from Hernando de Soto’s The Mystery of Capital, to William Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden, explaining we can’t assume that our culture can be implanted on foreign cultures, to Gary Haugen’s The Locust Effect.” The new puzzles of giving internationally are welcomed by Weekley: “If you’re a person who loves continuous learning, philanthropy gives you an opportunity to practice that.”

A downturn comes again This half-business, half-philanthropy career has finally settled David in a rhythm he enjoys. “I don’t see any reason I couldn’t do this to 70, or 80, or until I lose my faculties and ability to continue to contribute,” he says. “The concept of dying empty and done, using all your physical attributes and resources, appeals to me.”

This philosophy was put to the test in another downturn. As the 2008 housing bubble burst, W ­ eekley knew that trouble was coming to his company. The blow necessitated “some very dramatic and drastic cuts,” reducing his employees by more than half.

But this time he could handle it differently. “We tripled the severance, we held onto people for a while.

We helped them outsource. We did all kinds of things to attempt to be as generous as we could be within the reality we were facing. My definition of leadership is to

define reality and give hope, and so all through the downturn we talked with our team about what was going on.”

In some cases David and Bonnie decided to step in themselves. To replace the Christmas bonuses the company could not give out, they wrote personal checks to 400 employees. He credits such empathetic touches to Bonnie. “My wife’s great at the h ­ eart-giving, and I’m better at the head-giving. It might be better if I were more like her in a lot of ways. She can help me see and understand people at a different level, she sometimes asks questions that cause me to pause and rethink. Sometimes I can drive, drive, drive, and miss the human aspect.”

When it came to their personal philanthropy, they did not cut back, despite the hit to their assets.

“Sometimes I wondered if I was going to deplete the foundation and no longer be able to help as a philanthropist,” he recalls. “But I decided to keep going, use the resources in difficult financial times because they’re probably more needed now than they would be in the future. To me, that was a faith statement.”

“He dug even deeper,” says HOPE’s Peter Greer.

“He increased his generosity at a time when the market, when the business, when everyone else was saying ‘We should take a step back from such active philanthropy.’ David was going in the opposite direction.”

“He’s big-hearted,” says Tom Lewis, a private homebuilder and philanthropist in Phoenix who sold his company to David Weekley Homes in 2011.

(Lewis also followed Weekley’s lead in bringing ­Positive Coaching Alliance to Phoenix.) “By nature, he’s incredibly generous, not just with his money, but with his time and talent.”

Fellow donor and friend Jeff Sandefer concurs: “David tells the truth in a joyful way. It’s that simple.

He’s humble, warm, and tough—not an easy combination to pull off.” Asked what hard questions W ­ eekley has put to him, Sandefer recalls being asked, “Are you giving enough each year?” Sandefer answered “No,” which sparked a follow up: “Then he asks: ‘So you think a foundation or the government will do a better job when you are gone?’ His words haunt me every day.”

Weekley’s advice “has saved me from some serious mistakes, when I have been wise enough to listen, and his encouragement has provided a dose of courage when I needed it most,” says Sandefer. Dozens of leading Texas entrepreneurs and philanthropists, he adds, could say the same. “On a personal level, even the value of David’s advice pales by comparison to his influence as a role model. So many of us have been lifted up by his example as a Christ follower, husband, father, and entrepreneur. The ripples of his generosity extend from one end of Texas to another—and far beyond.”

David’s brother Dick, one of his earliest champions, continues to admire his example: “It’s not easy to be a

“David is that rare individual who is both a determined, energetic entrepreneur and a humble, compassionate servant of his country and community.

The highest compliment I can give David is that he is exactly the kind of person I want my kids to grow up to be.” ~ Denis Calabrese, Laura and John Arnold Foundation

successful investor in philanthropy. There aren’t the same measures that you have in business. It’s more difficult to be effective in philanthropy than it is in business,” Dick says. “Like most things in life, to be successful takes a lot of hard work and dedication. You’re not born with it, you’re not gifted with it. David certainly has incredible gifts, but basically it’s just hard work and dedication.

Decide to do it, then go do it.” P

Sir John Templeton.

Roger Hertog. Charles Koch.

Eli Broad. John Walton.

Who’s the next exceptional philanthropist whose charitable work strengthens our free society?

The Philanthropy Roundtable is now accepting nominations for the 2016 William E. Simon Prize for Philanthropic Leadership.

To recommend a donor, e-mail esmethurst@philanthropyroundtable.org between now and February 19.

FALL 2015

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and prosperity. Today’s two giant stars dominating the Texas philanthropy constellation are Houston and Dallas.

Houston is one of the most cosmopolitan cities in America. It is the energy-­production capital of the world, a huge port, NASA’s base. It is home to several of the nation’s top medical facilities.

Houston has a major arts complex. It is an immigration hub, and a bookend of the South (with Atlanta and Charlotte standing at the other end of the shelf).

Dallas is a technology and transportation center, as well as an oil town, and considers itself the most Texan metropolis. It has the long, spare views speckled with yellow and blue that tell you you’re in the West. “There is no obvious reason for Dallas to exist,” notes Brent Christopher, president of the Dallasbased Communities F ­ oundation of Texas.

There is no port like Houston’s; it was never capital of the Republic; the Trinity River is a muddy, meager wriggle. “This city was built out of the sheer will and d ­ etermination of the people who decided to make it so.”

Parks and recreation The secret of Dallas and Houston is that they are both chock-a-block with

grop / shutterstock

You’ve heard about the “Texas Miracle.”

When the Great Recession touched down, Texas weathered the whirlwind far better than other places and was soon back to its rapid pre-recession growth.

In the seven years after the slowdown, the Lone Star State added 1.7 million net new jobs—more than the entire rest of the country put together over that same period. The Texas economy is now bigger than all but 11 entire nations. And people are flocking in: the three f­ astest-growing metro areas in the U.S. are Austin, Houston, and Dallas, with San ­Antonio not far behind.

The stereotypes may conjure up plains and cattle but, as in the rest of the country, most of Texas’s population and wealth resides in the cities. And those cities have recently become some of the most philanthropic places on earth. There are a lot of Texas donors. They give away gobs of money. And they invest entrepreneurial and management talent in many of their favorite causes.

Lone Star philanthropists are intensely civic-minded. Many of them are devoted to turning their hometowns into national centers for culture, health, innovation,

thedafkish / istockphoto.com

THE TEXAS MIRACLE WASN’T JUST ECONOMIC; IT WAS PHILANTHROPIC

grop / shutterstock

thedafkish / istockphoto.com

willful, determined builders. And that shows in their giving. As they’ve each become centers of gushing economic production, and matured as communities, an energetic competition has grown up in their creation of impressive new parks, museums, hospitals, universities, and arts centers. Burgeoning circles of local patriots wielding newly minted fortunes have dramatically changed the quality of life in both cities over the past decade or so.

One thing these wealthy, public-minded families have done is to beautify their ­downtowns, giving locals new reasons to step outside on a lunch break, or stick around after 6 o’clock. Klyde Warren Park, opened in 2012, was created out of thin air by decking over a downtown freeway that once divided the heart of Dallas. Its five acres of green space, open-air restaurants, and performance pavilions now link rather than separate, and attract thousands seeking a bit of recreation.

About half of the park’s $110 million price tag came from private philanthropy. Oil-pipeline billionaire Kelcy Warren gave $10 million to, literally, get it off the ground. In a sign of the personal and generational involvement that Texas philanthropists often show, Warren named the park for his young son on the

condition that the boy devote one day a month to helping clean it.

Warren Park unifies the surrounding Dallas Arts District—itself a remarkable product of private philanthropy. About 85 percent of the Arts District’s total funding came from philanthropy. That included some outsized individual contributions like a $42 million gift from the late Bill Winspear. The district connects previous facilities—like the Dallas Museum of Art, the Meyerson Symphony Center, and the Nasher Sculpture Center—with spectacular new offerings. One of the latest additions was the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, a $180 million attraction funded entirely through private donations.

The crown jewel of the Arts District is the AT&T Performing Arts Center, opened in 2009. A sprawling, ten-acre complex, the PAC features several opera and theater houses and outdoor parks and concert spaces. Fully 93 percent of its $354 million construction budget came from private donations.

Amazingly, there were 134 separate gifts of at least a million dollars. The board increased its fundraising goal twice as contributions poured in, adding new elements to the project to keep up with generous public interest.

FALL 2015

In Dallas, even the bridges carrying interstates over the Trinity River owe their striking visual signatures to philanthropy.

Three highly artistic suspension bridges designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava are completed or under way.

The first, which opened to traffic in 2012, was named for donor Margaret Hunt Hill.

Another is being completed now thanks to Margaret McDermott, widow of a founder of Texas Instruments and a loyal Dallas arts patron.

When it comes to art and parks, though, Houston is making itself hard to beat. The Museum of Fine Arts, already a favorite destination for high-profile touring exhibitions, announced in January a $450 million redesign. Two thirds of that has already been raised, led by gifts of $50 million from the Kinder Foundation founded by pipeline entrepreneur Richard Kinder and his wife, Nancy, and $70 million from money-manager Fayez Sarofim. The redesign, scheduled for completion in 2019, will include architecturally inventive exhibition halls, a continuous 14-acre green space, and expanded room for the adjoined Glassell School of Art. It will cement Houston as an art destination.

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In the meantime, Houston is buzzing about its Buffalo Bayou. The river that leads to the bay has long been as shaggy as its name: vines dragging along languid, swampy, forgotten waters. The ­donor-funded ­Buffalo Bayou Partnership seeks to reclaim the once-polluted and industrialized waterway for the public. The centerpiece of the project is Buffalo Bayou Park, which will encompass 160 acres of downtown waterfront and include 20 miles of ­hike-and-bike trails, canoe launches, playgrounds, art installations, spaces for private events, and outdoor performance venues. It will reconnect Houston with its waterfront that was long ago broken up into bleak marooned segments.

This project too was launched with a major gift from Richard and Nancy ­Kinder—a $30 million check that covers half of the total cost. Many other donors are contributing as well. Like their neighbors in Dallas, businesspeople in Houston now view green spaces and museums as important to their city’s qualify of life, and are consequently happy to help pay for these improvements. The bayou project has already drawn national attention as one of today’s leading upgrades of urban space. Dallas is similarly transforming its riverfront with philanthropic leadership, and both cities are drawing inspiration from San Antonio’s River Walk, a hugely successful earlier enhancement that depended on private donors.

Healthy care and surprising schools One area of philanthropy where Houston is the undisputed leader is medical care.

Literally multibillions of donations built the Texas Medical Center in southwest Houston.

It is the size of a small city, bringing together more than 50 separate hospitals, research labs, and patient centers. Many of them are rated among the best in the U.S. and the world—like the MD ­­­ Anderson Cancer Clinic, Methodist ­Hospital and St. Luke’s Hospital (both near the top of the U.S. News & World Report rankings), Texas Children’s Hospital, and the Menninger Clinic.

MD Anderson’s latest big philanthropic campaign hoped to raise a billion dollars over six years; it shut down two years early after it exceeded $1.2 billion. There were 24

more than 630,000 individual gifts—127 of them having at least seven figures. (See “Deep in the Heart of Texas” by Joel Kotkin in our Fall 2012 issue.)

Philanthropic powerhouses Michael and Susan Dell have focused much of their generosity on enriching the health infrastructure of Austin through the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation. Its $150 million in medical donations in the area include $32 million for a children’s medical center and a $50 million pledge to launch the first medical school in Austin, scheduled to open at the University of Texas next summer. Not to be outdone, Texas Christian University and the University of North Texas announced plans in July for a medical school in Fort Worth, which has reportedly already raised $25 million in donor pledges. The school plans to accept its first class in 2018.

While no state values its heritage more highly than Texas, the place is remarkably open to anyone. A great many Texas success stories involve outsiders coming to the state to make a big mark. One legendary example is the Knowledge Is Power Program. In 1992, David Levin, a Yale graduate from New York, and Mike Feinberg, a UPenn graduate from Chicago, were both given two-year Teach For America assignments in Houston. Levin and Feinberg sought to overhaul the conventional approach to teaching. They used mnemonic chants and songs, strict discipline, heavy homework loads, and personalized attention to the home lives of kids who were most struggling. In one case, Feinberg confiscated the TV of a student who’d repeatedly neglected to turn in homework.

In the fall of 1994, they founded KIPP Academy Houston, where they were able to add long school hours, Saturday classes, a summer prep course, and a contract signed by teachers, students, and parents committing them to the rigorous standards. Among their first class of 50 students, half had failed both the state math and reading tests the year before. At the end of KIPP’s first year, all but one student had passed both exams.

Two decades later, KIPP has 70,000 students at 183 schools, and is nationally recognized as a ray of hope in innercity s­ chooling. Feinberg sums up KIPP’s ­Houston-born formula for success as “great teaching and more of it.” The PHILANTHROPY

hardest part is finding potentially great teachers, and making that potential real. Here philanthropy steps in, funding training and leadership programs. In addition, charters don’t usually receive the same amount of government funding per student as public schools, and they can’t go to taxpayers for appropriations or bonds for facilities. Philanthropy steps in to make up these differences.

Houston’s Jeff Hines, one of KIPP’s top donors, speaks of the program as turning the educational system from a monopoly into a marketplace. “Creating competition where none previously existed,” he says, “forces everyone to ‘up their game.’”

Competition means that KIPP’s effects aren’t just on its own students, but “you are also positively impacting kids across the entire school system.”

KIPP has recently formed a partnership with YES Prep, another Houston-founded charter network, and promised to serve tens of thousands of new students in Houston. Among the components of this project is a partnership with public schools through the Spring Branch Independent School District.

Known as the SKY Partnership, it includes two middle-school collaborations that bring charter methods to students in the district-run school, while sharing their band, athletics, and elective offerings with the charter kids. Students in the programs then continue on to a YES Prep high school. The partnership is backed by $90 million of philanthropic funding, including $10 million from Jeff and Wendy Hines.

New styles, and scopes, of philanthropy “Texans believe in excellence, and they’re willing to invest in excellence,” says Texas philanthropy consultant Alison Alter. The state’s donors “are finding new ways of working,” and creating new alliances among themselves to bite off huge improvements.

Most of these givers are “entrepreneurs who are becoming philanthropists, as opposed to people who have just inherited wealth.” And these self-made donors are bringing skills and appetites for innovation that they honed in making their money. “They’re not willing to settle,” she asserts, “for anything less than really solving the problems.” —Ari Schulman

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, and 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.

HigherED

An e-learning entrepreneur brings cut-rate practical degrees to far-flung corners of the world

Julien Pacaud

By Anne Snyder

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PHILANTHROPY

LowerCOSTS

Julien Pacaud

I

t’s evening in Bangalore. A woman at an Internet café enters a comment into an online discussion board, then closes her notes and heads to her shift at a call center. Meanwhile, a peach-picker in Fresno is just waking up and logging on. He reads his classmates’ commentary and chimes in with a question of his own. Across the ocean, an Eritrean student in a refugee camp submits his answers to the computer-science ­problem-set via text message. Their teacher, a moonlighting professor from NYU, reviews the assignments and ongoing conversation.

This is the University of the People, and it is real, not a thought experiment.

In today’s economic climate, a college degree is becoming more and more valuable.

At the same time, rising costs are making it harder for more and more people to attain.

Shai Reshef is out to change this.

The 60-year-old entrepreneur spent over two decades in for-profit education, first as CEO of the Kidum Group, an Israeli ­test-preparation company, and then as the Anne Snyder is a writer in Houston, Texas.

FALL 2015

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I’d pay full price for this education. I’ve learned so many things I never would have imagined learning. You’re viewed as a person instead of a piece of paper.

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dorms and dining halls, students log in from city libraries and refugee camps, many of them between hours spent at jobs or raising kids. “Our students are unique in their motivation,” Reshef says. “For most of them, we’re the alternative where there is no other alternative.”

The people of University of the People Twenty-one years old and a first-year computer science student, Clarice Bayne learned resilience at an early age.

At 18 she moved out of her family’s home in ­Washington state to escape some unstable dynamics, and got two jobs to pay the rent and finance what education she could find in the area. The choice was a wise one emotionally, but the financial burden was overwhelming. Bayne had to pay for every thousand-dollar class out of pocket as the community college considered her a dependent on parents. The investment brought disappointing returns.

“For the first six classes, I didn’t learn anything new,” she says. “It was a recap of high school. All my friends urged me to just push through it, but education is one of those things I don’t want to push through. If I’m not learning anything, some certificate saying ‘She knows what she’s doing’ just isn’t worth it.”

Then she was hit by a series of health scares that required multiple surgeries, took her out of the workforce, and left her with $20,000 of medical bills that sent her back to work for long hours. School slipped off the table.

Then, just as she began to get her bearings again, her brother mentioned the University of the People. Bayne watched Reshef ’s TED talk and “fell in love” with the idea. She applied and enrolled in the fall of 2014. One year in, she raves about her experience.

“I’d pay full price for this education,” she says. “I’ve learned so many things I never would have imagined learning. The instructors are really nice and get back to you in a timely manner. You’re viewed as a person instead of a piece of paper. I can’t B.S. things like I used to—it’s a lot more difficult than I expected.”

She’s also found that the benefits extend beyond the curriculum. “I’m not only learning educational things, but learning things about myself, about my peers, and different viewpoints that I would have never imagined.

I’m learning a whole different side of compassion.”

UoPeople has attracted first-generation college students, single moms in Appalachia, undocumented immigrants, Rwandan orphans, Haitian earthquake survivors, and a Syrian named Wael Ahdali whose Skype tagline reads “in the land of blood and tears.”

“When you give these people the opportunity, they grab it as hard as they can, as strong as they can, and they push it all the way in order to succeed,” says Reshef.

Take Jacob Ousi, a Ugandan refugee now living in Konya, Turkey. Ousi grew up in a family of 11 and had to drop in and out of school because of political instability.

Julien Pacaud

founding chair of KIT e-learning, the first online university outside the United States. In the early 2000s, while managing hundreds of programs for hundreds of thousands of students from kindergarten to the university level, Reshef came to appreciate the reach and flexibility of online learning. Yet he “had this feeling that something was missing.” Virtual schooling was not as accessible to everyone as it could be.

Soon Reshef “realized that everything that had made the previous university I owned so expensive is actually available for free. There’s open-source technology. There’s content that professors produce and put on the Internet for everyone to use. There’s this culture of social networking where people share, teach, and learn from each other. I told myself, ‘Wow. All I need to do is put it all together and create a university.’ So I did.”

That was six years ago. Now Reshef ’s dream has blossomed into the University of the People: the first tuition-free, accredited, nonprofit, online higher educator of its kind. It has enrolled over 2,000 students from 150 different countries and graduated its first crop of bachelor’s students last April.

The university has only three requirements for admission: a high-school diploma, English proficiency, and Internet access. There are currently two subject tracks offered—business administration and computer science—with the choice of an associate or bachelor’s degree in either. A basic liberal-arts curriculum is required, then students go deep into their practical specialty. Courses are designed by an advisory board of academics and practitioners, and all study materials are freely accessible through the Open Educational Resources system that organizes learning material on the Internet. The only time students reach into their wallets is for each course’s $100 exam fee, with scholarships available in cases of true need. By the time graduation rolls around, the average bachelor’s student will have taken 40 courses and paid $4,000. Most students complete their degree within four to seven years, usually while working full-time.

Each course enrolls between 20 and 30 students, often from as many different countries. In addition to individual assignments, active discussion is required.

The instructor will pose a question for the week, and the students will write substantive responses and comment on each other’s submissions. Instead of strolling in from

Julien Pacaud

He won a scholarship to attend a college in west London but eventually had to return to Uganda to care for his mother and siblings. When he lost his job there, he knew he couldn’t climb the economic ladder without a degree.

A friend told him about University of the People, but he was skeptical. The bit about free tuition sounded off.

“The universities that are free—they’re not exactly admirable,” he says. “When I told my mother about University of the People, she was like, ‘What? We know Oxford. What is this place?’”

But when he lost another job, he “became willing to try anything. I realized that without a degree, I’m not going anywhere. Is there a university that can let me leave Uganda, that can offer an opportunity to move as well as study, without holding me accountable to a rigid schedule?”

Ousi went to Turkey to find work and enrolled in University of the People. He lives amid refugees spinning in from war zones in Syria, Iran, and Iraq. It’s been tough finding a place to settle. Sometimes he has to join class discussions from free hotspots on the street because he can’t afford to renew the Internet connection in cafés. But “these moments will be worthwhile in the future when my struggle for higher education is finally over,” he says.

And as much as he wants his degree, in some ways the camaraderie and intangible benefits are as meaningful to him as the coursework. “University of the People is an inspiration to me,” he says. “It’s not just a solution to my problems. It offers a broad spectrum of ideas.”

“The best thing I’ve gotten is being able to share with others interactively,” he goes on. “When you check in to the discussion forum, you get respect, you get the feedback. You feel really good about yourself. You say, if you can do this, if you can understand that, so can I. It gives you the fuel to go on.”

Ahdali in Damascus says the often wide-ranging discussions can be as valuable as the required readings. “The system here in Syria would never discuss what’s actually going on—everything we learn would be outdated. But at UoPeople, we have debates—everyone sees stuff from their own view. It’s a very unique experience, seeing how people from other places think and imagine things.”

Supporters of the people UoPeople styles itself as the un-MOOC (the massive open online courses that some universities and teachers popped onto the Internet starting a few years ago).

For one thing, it attracts a different demographic from those large, less structured, much looser, à la carte class offerings. A big proportion of the users of many popular MOOCs, states Reshef, already have secondary or advanced degrees. Because users are generally seeking personal enrichment, not practical advancement, the rate at which participants complete the courses is very low.

By contrast, “our students do not come with a previous

Internet entrepreneur Shai Reshef took his e-learning savvy from the for-profit marketplace to the nonprofit world, extending opportunity to isolated and low-income corners of the globe.

academic degree, yet 95 percent of them complete each course. They realize this is the last opportunity to get out of the situation that they’re in, so they’ll do anything in order to succeed.”

In addition, UoPeople’s relatively low-tech, ­text-based materials and forums make them far more accessible to students without the bandwidth to watch video lectures (though there are videos available as optional supplements). And its discussions and weekly assignments promote engaged learning and active participation, not passive watching.

Another difference is that UoPeople is intimate, not massive. Its high level of interactivity relies on heavy volunteer labor from professors and administrators. So far 3,000 volunteers have signed up to teach a class, proctor an exam, or assist in some other capacity. All faculty and advisers have tenure-track or emeritus status elsewhere.

Paid backups stand at the ready but have not yet proven necessary. “Hardly any of our volunteers quit,” says Reshef.

“We are very lucky—people love what they’re doing.”

Their testimonies confirm this. “What Shai is trying to do is use a combination of technology and sheer inventiveness to democratize education,” says Stephan Chambers, chairman of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship and a member of UoPeople’s advisory board. “You’d struggle to find someone who’d argue that education is a waste of time. Or that it is adequately distributed around the planet…. Here’s Shai with a creative and energetic attempt to really do something about this.”

Another supporter, venture capitalist Albert Wenger, sees in UoPeople “the potential for very profound change,” FALL 2015

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citing its accessibility to anyone, its aim to become a self-sustaining enterprise, and its curricular focus on practical business knowledge. Its $1.5 million budget goes mostly toward a few paid staffers, IT, and other modest administrative costs. Reshef believes the $100 exam fees will make UoPeople operationally sustainable when it reaches 4,000 students, expected to happen in 2016. After that point he expects it to have a surplus, which will be allocated toward student scholarships and a greater investment in academic programming.

Additional donors include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, Chris Anderson and Jacqueline Novogratz, the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, and many more, including corporate supporters like Microsoft, Google, and Hewlett-Packard. Some of the corporations are providing professional mentorships along with financial support. Academic institutions such as Yale and a council of administrators from top universities worldwide (which includes people like the chancellor of UC-Berkeley and the presidents emeritus of Barnard, Rockefeller University, and George Washington University) provide counsel and in-kind support.

Pfizer has given funding to develop a health-­sciences program that will become a third major alongside business and computer science. That will present new challenges—much of the vital training in health work cannot be done at a computer. Reshef ’s team is exploring regional partnerships that will allow students to get the lab and clinical experience they need.

“The first time I saw Shai describe his university,” says NYU president John Sexton, “a technology enthusiast who was moderating the panel exclaimed, ‘You are the future!’ Much to his credit, Shai said, ‘No, I hope I’m not the future. University of the People is simply the source of hope for those in Haiti or Africa or India for whom the alternative is nothing.’”

This kind of self-awareness struck Sexton, who has thought hard about the pitfalls of online education.

Admiring Reshef ’s prudence, Sexton agreed to chair his board. “I believe this is a model we in the higher-ed community can use to discover talent and draw students to the contexts where they can succeed most,” he says.

Sexton sees UoPeople as a bridge to the millions of people who are qualified but unable to access a school like NYU. “We can use University of the People as a

Ninety-five percent of our students complete each course. They realize this is the last opportunity to get out of the situation they’re in, so they’ll do anything to succeed.

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PHILANTHROPY

search engine for talent. What I want to do is find people who do well in the courses their freshman year. Then I’ll put NYU on the table with some sort of offer to them to come to our campus. Hopefully we can get lots of universities on the table.”

A Haitian man already found his way to NYU’s Abu Dhabi campus from UoPeople’s pool. Reshef had secured 250 scholarships from the Clinton Global Initiative, which he committed to Haiti earthquake survivors. This student earned straight A’s his first year at UoPeople, won a scholarship to NYU, and is now studying in Abu Dhabi. After graduation that student intends to return to Haiti to start a boot camp training IT professionals.

“With his grades, graduating from NYU, he can go anywhere in the world, study anywhere, work anywhere,” says Reshef. “But he wants to give back. I love him, what can I say?”

Commencement Whether they proceed to further studies or out into the world, University of the People aims to propel its students forward. The dozens of students I interviewed described in very concrete terms how much they’re learning. Faculty from some of the most prestigious universities often find their interactions with UoPeople students to be the highlight of their week. Corporate partners laud the “­twenty-first-century skills” that UoPeople fosters.

One trial for the short-term will be to maintain the volunteer enthusiasm that makes the whole operation tick.

Reshef wants to challenge common assumptions about how much a quality education should cost, but his business model takes for granted a large supply of donated labor. Will the mission that draws today’s volunteers be sustainable if the student population expands beyond the most disadvantaged? Reaching out to appropriate beneficiaries has also proven difficult—there are no central channels for word-of-mouth testimonials to reach the villages, refugee camps, and post-disaster zones that hold the people the university is particularly eager to serve. Finally, there is the question of impact. The net economic benefit of the institution remains unknown, as do the futures of its students. The first class has just graduated, so results are still forthcoming.

For now, University of the People is doing something intriguing and bold. Reshef marvels at “the goodwill of the world,” while wishing that “we could run much faster and much bigger. It will happen, and we’re still running fast enough. But I do wish the world would come alongside and help us run faster.”

“We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years, and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten,” Bill Gates once said. If higher education is to shake off its structural inertia and make itself more affordable, more practical, more effective and efficient, something must light the fuse for change. A betting funder might keep an eye on University of the People. P

Philanthropic freedom is essential to a free society.

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

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

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

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

If you agree . . . become a member of the

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

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

Our members include individual philanthropists and foundations of all sorts.

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

For more information, go to philanthropyroundtable.org/join or contact Julie Drinkard at 202.600.7885 or jdrinkard@philanthropyroundtable.org

Madisonian, and not going to take it any more!

The Hewlett Foundation wants to improve the effectiveness of our political debates

By Scott Walter

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PHILANTHROPY

B

y the standards of the $9 billion William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, its Madison Initiative is not (yet) a large project. But Larry Kramer, president since 2012, has been aiming toward something like it for many years.

As the former dean of Stanford’s law school, Kramer opened his best-known book with a quotation from James Madison, and like “the father of the Constitution” Kramer thinks public policy should be energetically debated and settled by the people themselves. He’s not concerned if their disputes become heated. Kramer does worry, however, when the people and their representatives become so polarized that they lock up and fail to settle on decisions.

When he interviewed for Hewlett’s presidency, the board asked Kramer for his views on the foundation’s priorities. He replied that all five of Hewlett’s funding areas are important, but that one thing was missing, especially since so much of the foundation’s work aims for changes in public policy. “If no one on any side can move public policy, in any direction, whether to get government to do more or less, then everybody is wasting time and resources.”

Kramer hoped to probe the questions, “Can we understand the problem of polarization? And do we have a reason to think philanthropy can make a difference?”

Polarizing vs. paralyzing Kramer and Daniel Stid, whom he brought on to develop Hewlett’s project on political polarization, asked the board in 2014 for an initial three years and $50 million. Like Kramer, Stid has an academic background steeped in American history, and he understands that our founders intended “freewheeling debate” and conflict to exist in U.S. politics. But our Constitutional order also assumes

that as arguments progress, majorities will be built up that can reach decisions.

There have been previous efforts to address polarized politics, many of them aimed at fostering “civility” in political debates. Critics have objected that these calls for civility often masked a partisan desire to stifle one side in disputes where ­powers-that-be were frustrated after being stymied by opponents, or bothered by what they considered the bad taste of popular opposition. Kramer and Stid insist that they’re not trying to grease the skids for any particular agenda. “We’re often agnostic on policy outcomes,” Stid says.

Hewlett’s roughly 100 grants to date bear out this claim. Mostly six- and seven-figure gifts have gone to groups that span the left, right, and center of the political spectrum. “We think genuinely vigorous dispute is valuable,” Stid reiterates. “We now fund fairly far on the left and right.”

Polarization, in this view, only becomes a problem when it causes the machinery of government to grind to a halt. As Kramer puts it, “Say you root for the Mets and I root for the Cubs. We can still come together and set rules for the game without trying to twist them so that one side always wins. We know that’s possible. And desirable, because rules that favor one side today may flip around tomorrow.”

Kramer and Stid are especially concerned that Congress is not functioning well—both in its internal arrangements and distribution of power between committees and leaders, and in the way Congress allows and even encourages the other two branches to perform functions it should be handling in our ­representative system.

Hewlett concedes that polarization is a massive issue to confront. “It took decades for the U.S. to get into the present stalled situation,” Kramer and Stid told their board. “It will take decades to get out.”

Has the electorate developed such deep differences in principle that this project is hopeless?

“We can’t take popular government on a continental scale for granted,” Kramer admits. “Making that Contributing editor Scott Walter is executive vice president of the Capital Research Center in Washington, D.C.

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In this graphic (produced from research by Penn State academic Clio Andris and five others), each dot represents a Member of Congress in 1951. Color indicates party, and placement indicates voting behavior. As you can see, Democrats and Republicans didn’t always vote separately but sometimes mixed in the middle.

work is the great A ­ merican experiment. Our Founders understood how difficult that would be, but they also had faith in the possibility. We have to remember that the country has seen worse than today. Look back to the 1850s, when Senators were nearly killing each other on the legislative floor.”

What about the idea that polarization stems largely from the growth of the U.S. government beyond anything Madison envisaged, raising the stakes of government decisions to dire levels? Kramer believes that “isn’t the fundamental problem” and argues that earlier expansions of government’s scope—Alexander Hamilton’s creating the first national bank, Andrew Jackson’s shutting down the second national bank, the L ­ ouisiana Purchase, the New Deal—didn’t cause today’s levels of polarization.

But Kramer is also not keen on the claim, popular among liberal donors, that tighter campaign-finance restrictions would be a cure-all. He worries that the limits already passed have weakened the influence of political parties, which have historically moderated our politics.

He is concerned that the legal requirement that politicians rely on many small donations causes them to spend so much energy on fundraising (which requires oppositional Sixty years later, the two parties have almost completely separated into opposite poles, with little engagement between them.

2011

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rhetoric) that they lack opportunities and motivation to form friendships across political divides.

Hewlett is, however, funding groups that support more astringent campaign-finance restrictions and disclosure laws. For instance, it has provided two years of funding, totaling $450,000, to the United ­Republic ­Education Fund, which works with its advocacy arm, Represent.us, to promote controversial c­ ampaign-finance laws as “anti-corruption” measures.

Skeptics on the right also noticed that the director of a Pew Charitable Trusts project to alter state voting and registration procedures—funded with a $1.5 million Hewlett grant—previously worked for the ideologically charged People for the American Way, whose campaign against the nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court was a milestone in the polarization of our politics.

Forging alliances Building friendships among peers is part of Hewlett’s mission for this project. Donors that the foundation has worked or hopes to work with span the ideological spectrum and include such notables as the Joyce Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Omidyar Network’s ­Democracy Fund, and Searle Freedom Trust. Politically, that’s a stark mix of sheep and goats.

George Cheung, program officer for the Joyce Foundation’s democracy portfolio, which supports liberal grantees such as FairVote and the Brennan Center for Justice that Hewlett also funds, says that one of the most valuable aspects of the initiative so far was a large meeting Hewlett convened last year in Baltimore with dozens of grantees of widely varying perspectives. “Hewlett has done a good job building relationships with organizations and leaders across the political spectrum,” Cheung says.

“Having ideologically diverse conversations about how to strengthen democracy is quite inspiring”—and quite rare in philanthropy.

Eugene Meyer, who heads the conservative and libertarian Federalist Society, was impressed when Stid remarked that the legal group has produced meaty analyses of the judicial and executive branches, but hasn’t done much work on the proper role of Congress. ­ ewlett Meyer agreed, and accepted $1.5 million in H funding to research, publish, and hold seminars for members of Congress and their staff on topics like the budget process, gerrymandering, and existing incentives to dodge responsibility on tough decisions.

The Bradley ­F oundation, a long-time Federalist backer, has also begun supporting this project. Its vice president for programs, Dan Schmidt, says he agrees that developing a deeper understanding of how ­Congress is designed to work with the other two

Mauro Martino / PLoS One

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Mauro Martino / PLoS One

branches will be valuable, especially if it encourages less congressional passivity.

Another grantee that has benefited from ­Hewlett’s interest in strengthening Congress is the journal National Affairs. Editor Yuval Levin, a former ­Bush-administration staffer, says he was impressed by H ­ ewlett’s open-­ mindedness. “They don’t think they know what all the answers will be.” Levin also values the wide-ranging meetings Hewlett has convened. The foundation “clearly believes that allowing debate to happen is good.”

He disagrees with Kramer’s diagnosis on the role of increased statism, saying “a government that’s playing so large a role will be controversial in ways the Founders never imagined, and will inevitably polarize arguments.”

But Levin agrees with Kramer and Stid that “Congress is the ‘sick man’ of Washington, and its weakness invites aggression from the other branches in ways that are destructive.” Levin also agrees that “polarization must be worked with, because it can’t be undone.”

Columnist Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner, a scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, also appreciate Hewlett’s open approach. “Mike and I are social conservatives,” Wehner notes, which makes them unusual grantees for a foundation that supports abortion and population-control efforts. But Stid was interested in their work on how Christians can find “new models of cultural engagement.” Their Hewlett grant will be used to explore that challenge with evangelical Protestant leaders who want to take part in national discussions in ways “that don’t require Christians to give up their convictions, but, on the other hand, don’t involve speaking with serrated edges and provoking people to deepened division.”

Playing on a fair field Another topic studied by this project is the rise of minorities in the electorate. Ruy Teixeira of the liberal Center for American Progress is conducting large-scale studies of how America’s changing makeup will affect its politics. ­Teixeira has managed to foster a bit of political ecumenism by bringing on board counterparts from two of ­Washington’s powerhouse think tanks, the conservative American Enterprise Institute and the liberal Brookings Institution.

Teixeira demurs when presented with the theory popular with many left-of-center thinkers that the notion of “fair” rules for deliberation in a democracy is a smoke screen that protects privileges based on race, sex, or class.

“The U.S. has always had an unequal distribution of power and wealth, and yet we’ve managed to get things done. I disagree that things today are so terrible. I think American democracy is flawed but still real.”

Hewlett’s leaders are sober about how much they and their grantees may be able to accomplish to reduce polarization in immediate ways. But willing to be patient, they remain passionate about any progress they can make. “I believe,” Kramer avers, “that this republic is more than worth fighting for.” P

OFF THE CUFF WITH HEWLETT’S LARRY KRAMER Q: Some researchers have observed a correlation between being better informed about public policy and being more polarized politically. What do you make of this?

A: Because of fragmentation of the news and information pipeline, people today can choose among a million news sources: not just MSNBC and Fox News, but blogs and a myriad of online sources that come at them with a range of journalistic quality and ethics. Back when there were three TV networks and a few newspapers, all basically centrist or maybe with a slight lean to the left, people might disagree about what we should do, but they were all working from the same set of facts. That’s just not true today. We can’t argue about how to handle an issue when we don’t even agree on what the issue is. At the same time, this has also been true in the past.

At the beginning of this country, there were a multiplicity of overtly partisan newspapers, and still the system worked reasonably well.

Q: What is the biggest cause of polarization?

When both parties encompassed an array of ideologies, it was fairly easy to get things done in Congress. Over the past few decades there has been a kind of political sorting. Today, all liberals are Democrat, and all conservatives are Republican, which makes it really difficult to build coalitions across party lines.

Making matters worse, members in both parties are pushed to be more extreme and inflexible because they are chosen in caucuses or primary elections in which only a small number of voters, who reflect the extremes, turn out. Campaign finance is also a contributing factor.

Partly that’s because so much of

A:

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the money also comes from the ideological extremes, and it takes less money to affect a primary. Just as problematic, the need to raise so much money leads candidates to spend well over half their time fundraising—which means less time to govern, less time to learn about issues, less time to develop relationships with each other and build trust. Plus, spending so much time with donors inevitably affects how candidates think about issues.

Q: How do you define success in the long run?

A: One major benchmark will be: how does the public feel about the job Congress is doing?

Approval of Congress used to poll in the 40 percent to 60 percent range, depending on things like how the economy was doing, who was President, and the like.

Now it bounces in the 10 percent to 20 percent range. One sign of improvement will be that we see approval of Congress back in its historical range, or at least moving in that direction. This would tell us that whatever Congress is doing or not doing, it’s what the public wants.

Other measures will be the extent to which members from both parties work together: How much bipartisan co-sponsorship of legislation takes place? How frequently do we see members voting for legislation sponsored by the other party? These trendlines will help us track whether the problem is improving. But the bigger questions we’re raising don’t lead to simple, quantifiable answers.

Judgment calls will be needed.

Q:

Under you and your predecessor, Paul Brest, Hewlett has encouraged healthy argumentation. Does that have something to do with your shared background in the law, which has a tradition of debate? Or with your Jewish heritage, which has an even longer tradition?

A: I don’t know. Maybe those are both factors. I know it had something to do with my mother!

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ONiONAstudio / babyblueut / istockphoto.com

How foundations sunset, and the reasons it’s becoming popular

By Joanne Florino

ONiONAstudio / babyblueut / istockphoto.com

“

o capture the magic of compounding.”

For spritely Gisèle Huff, that is both reason and reward for a limited-life foundation. Looking back over her 17 years as executive director of the Jaquelin Hume ­Foundation, she believes the big bets and sharp focus of its grantmaking have sparked outsized results. When you put significant money to work early, she advises, “you can change the world in front of your own eyes.” The Hume Foundation has another three to four years to invest its remaining assets—in its case in blended-learning strategies for improving our nation’s schools.

It wasn’t always expected that the Hume Foundation would spend itself to zero. When

founder Jack Hume died, the foundation had a clear statement of donor intent that had been followed faithfully by the trustees, all of whom had known him and agreed with his guidelines.

But the trustees weren’t certain Jack’s successors would share his vision. “The members of the next generation have their own careers, their own interests and, most importantly, their own views of the world,” wrote his son, William, to explain the trustees’ decision to sunset. “It is hard enough for the current trustees to adhere to his intent; it would be doubly difficult for my Joanne Florino is senior vice president for public policy at The Philanthropy Roundtable.

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Recent lessons Questions abound regarding how best to sunset. When should the spend-down begin and end? What practical challenges does it entail? There’s no one right answer.

But with foundations of all shapes and sizes now in the midst of disbursing all of their assets to maximize their effect before folding up their tent, recent experience offers a variety of lessons.

Real-estate developer Aaron Diamond decided in the 1980s that his 30-year-old foundation would spend out its considerable assets over a ten-year period—a decision affirmed and honored by his wife, Irene, after his death in 1984. So the foundation made a big bet—creating the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in the terrifying early years of that disease. The investment paid off.

Diamond Center director David Ho was named Time’s Man of the Year in 1996 for the breakthrough “cocktail” drug treatment he and his colleagues pioneered.

Our immediate needs are too plain and too urgent to allow us to do the work of future generations. They can provide for their own needs as they arise.

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Racing to finish Among the philanthropies now structuring their grantmaking for shut-down are the Bechtel, Earhart, McCune, and Donald W. Reynolds foundations, the Searle F ­ reedom Trust, and Atlantic Philanthropies.

Some of these are very close to the finish line. Active grantmaking has already ceased at Michigan’s Earhart ­Foundation, which will close its doors on December 31, 2015. The decision to spend out was prompted by an internal review, in the early 2000s, of the foundation’s ability to preserve donor intent as the trustees grew further removed in time from founder Harry Earhart. ­Earhart had a crisp notion of what he hoped to achieve with his donations, focusing them on graduate students,

ONiONAstudio / pamela_d_mcadams / comzeal / istockphoto.com

children to do so.” And so the foundation, established at first with aims of perpetuity, changed course. It would spend itself out of existence.

Accomplishing this takes effort. Despite his famous dictum, “He who dies rich, dies disgraced,” Andrew Carnegie himself not only failed to spend his wealth in charitable endeavors during his lifetime, but left behind a foundation intent on perpetuity. Yet his words have inspired other philanthropists to attempt to push out their resources in one generation. In the 1920s, Sears, Roebuck and Co. president Julius Rosenwald stipulated that his foundation, which constructed more than 5,000 schools across the South for the education of neglected African-Americans, would spend out its assets no more than 25 years after his death. “Our immediate needs are too plain and too urgent to allow us to do the work of future generations,” he said. Noting that every new cohort of Americans has been wealthier than the previous one, he urged that “coming generations can be relied upon to provide for their own needs as they arise.”

Another donor committed to medical research was Lucille Markey, who directed in her will that her charitable trust spend out its resources in 15 years. Like ­Rosenwald, she sought significant impact in a brief time frame. Operating with a small staff and minimal paperwork for grantees while handing out $500 million, the trust had a powerful influence on biomedical sciences.

Before closing in 1997 the Markey trustees requested that the National Academy of Sciences evaluate its performance. The reports praised the trust’s strategy of offering long-term support to promising researchers too young to win government grants. Markey’s scholars “achieved higher rank, had a shorter time to tenure, and were located in higher-ranked institutions than those in comparison groups.”

Established by Milwaukee industrialist William Brady in 1956, the W. H. Brady Foundation funded research in support of capitalism and a free society. The foundation continued his giving strategy for another 15 years after Brady’s death in 1988, devoting a significant amount of the corpus to these grants. But when the trustees couldn’t come to an agreement on completing their spend-down, a portion of the assets went into a Brady Education Foundation directed by Brady’s grand­ daughter to support early learning for at-risk children.

The John M. Olin Foundation closed its doors in 2005, 23 years after the death of its founder. Olin carefully selected his staff and board members and instructed the foundation’s trustees to disburse its assets over their lifetimes. The Olin Foundation was the crucial early funder of the Federalist Society, and its funding launched a flourishing field in law and economics at leading law schools. Its commitment to sunsetting enabled Olin to achieve a level of grantmaking comparable to foundations three to four times its asset size. Observers on both right and left acknowledge that compared to what a perpetual foundation would have trickled out, Olin’s grantmaking strategy and accelerated disbursements significantly strengthened the conservative policy network.

ONiONAstudio / pamela_d_mcadams / comzeal / istockphoto.com

junior and senior faculty, and independent researchers in political philosophy, economics, and culture who were doing important work in defense of liberty and free enterprise. Nine Earhart grantees went on to win the Nobel Prize in economics, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman among them.

Earhart’s leadership decided to make moderate increases in its grant expenditures with the aim of maintaining its programming at a steady level until it ceased operations. This necessitated keeping a full staff as long as possible—not an easy feat when everyone knows their jobs are slated for extinction. The foundation had an attractive incentive plan to help with morale, but Earhart president Ingrid Gregg attributes the successful retention of all staff members mostly to their shared commitment to the Earhart mission. Operating with a deadline, she believes, actually refreshed everyone’s focus, discipline, and creativity.

Earhart has devoted special attention to helping grantees prepare for its absence, a common challenge for sunsetting foundations. When possible Earhart staff have made introductions to other potential supporters, and held conferences to foster contacts among scholars and organizations it funded. “We have built a base for supporting the world of ideas,” says Gregg, who is optimistic that “others will pick up our work.”

As it prepares to make its final grants in 2016, the multibillion-dollar Atlantic Philanthropies is reaching what president Christopher Oechsli calls a “crescendo,” with significant jumps in the volume and size of grants.

Founding donor Charles Feeney and the Atlantic board decided in 2002—fully 20 years after the foundation’s ­creation—to limit its life. In recent years it has dramatically ramped up its capital grants, including $350 million to secure and build the new Cornell Tech campus on New York’s Roosevelt Island. (For more on Atlantic’s capital projects see the story following.)

Grants of all sorts became fewer and bigger. Meanwhile the staff has halved since 2010, and additional departures are scheduled at six-month intervals. As manpower shrinks, grantees are being nudged to stand on their own. Matching requirements—an Atlantic hallmark—have encouraged its beneficiaries to find and cultivate co-funders, reducing risky dependence on a sole funder.

Steve Anderson, president of the Donald W. ­Reynolds Foundation in Las Vegas, has wrestled with this same issue of balancing necessary personnel reduction with retention of staff critical to ongoing operations.

When Reynolds bequeathed much of his media empire to the foundation upon his death in 1993, he gave no written instructions, but left things in the hands of board chairman Fred Smith, who had worked with him for 40 years. Smith and the other trustees believed that it would

be a mistake to allow the foundation to live so long that the staff and board would be far removed from Reynolds and his values. They limited the life of the foundation at first to 50 years, then shortened that to 25.

In 2009, Anderson developed a “road map” for the foundation’s home stretch that has final grants going out at the end of 2017. The manpower transition was managed via ample lead time, generous severance packages, educational support for employees let go, and a deferred compensation plan to encourage others to stay.

One upside of the spend-down, says Anderson, was that it allowed funds for special opportunities beyond the foundation’s traditional focus areas.

The trustees grabbed “unique opportunities to advance patriotism, entrepreneurship, or another special lifetime interest held by Mr. Reynolds.” These included a $30 million gift to enable the National Portrait ­Gallery to acquire and build programming around the 1796 Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington; nearly $70 million toward creation of a museum, education center, and ­Presidential library at Mount Vernon; and $150 million to build a performing arts center in downtown Las Vegas, the largest philanthropic donation in Nevada’s history.

Do not go gently into the night In California, the S. D. Bechtel Jr. Foundation, established in 1957, decided in 2009 to distribute all of its assets by 2020. Spending out has demanded a dramatic change in the scale of its grantmaking—from $10-$15 million in annual grants before the decision to about $143 million in 2015. The closing grants are typically FALL 2015

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larger, and more likely to include support for long-term capacity-building. “We’ve been learning from Atlantic Philanthropies,” says Laurie Dachs, Bechtel’s daughter and president of the foundation. She reports that any funds remaining in 2020 “will be distributed to the foundations of the next-generation Bechtel family members.”

Two foundations on a longer trajectory are the Searle Freedom Trust and the McCune Foundation. Like many donors before him, Dan Searle launched his foundation with a broad mission and implied perpetuity. In the early 1990s, however, he began to reconsider both the direction and the timetable of his philanthropy. He hired Kim Dennis, the founding president of The Philanthropy Roundtable who had worked at the Olin Foundation while it spent down, and with her help committed his donor intent to paper in a six-page document. By supporting research and education on public policies, Searle sought to “foster those underlying values and attitudes that enable the free market and democratic systems to both function and flourish.” And by stipulating a limited life for his organization, he wrote, “I seek to ensure that the foundation will always remain in the hands of people who understand my intentions and are committed to carrying out the foundation’s mission.”

Either sharpen your mission and plan to sunset, or be content knowing that things may be done with your money that you would never have countenanced.

Dennis encouraged Searle to move money through the foundation more rapidly than he had originally intended so that staff would have personal knowledge of the decisions he would make. Bigger grants occasioned more thoughtful reflection from the donor, and gave him the opportunity to clarify his objectives to those who would continue distributing his money after his death in 2007. “A big part of my job was worrying what could go wrong” between the end of direct donor involvement and the closing of the fund in 2025.

“We will always honor Dan’s intent, though with a dash of creativity,” Dennis says. During the spend-out phase, she predicts, if the political environment is one in which the foundation can make progress, more money will go to immediate research. In a less friendly context, the foundation will look at more long-term investments.

(For more on Dennis’s work with the Searle Freedom Trust, see page 46.)

The McCune Foundation of Pittsburgh is spending down by narrowing its focus. Charles McCune ran the Union National Bank and gave generously to charity during his lifetime. In 1979 his will created his 40

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f­oundation with a limited life of 50 years. The broad mission: “to advance the quality of life in southwestern Pennsylvania by fostering community vitality and economic growth.”

As frequently occurs in family foundations, McCune experienced “geographic creep” as family members moved to new regions. With its 2029 termination date in mind, the foundation has now begun shrinking the geographic area of its grantmaking. For the ten third-generation McCune families who no longer live in Pennsylvania, $80 million has been shifted to donor-advised funds at their chosen community foundations. Staff and board then whittled a grantee list of 945 organizations to under 200 “targets of opportunity” for spend-down grants. A handful of “big idea” grants have been awarded to long-term grantees for major projects like support of early-stage technology companies in Pittsburgh, and community-development projects in low-income neighborhoods.

What staff learn from these “big idea” gifts will determine how grantmaking proceeds after 2016. From the short list of 200 grantees, suggests executive director Hank Beukema, McCune may be able to strengthen 50 or 60 of them well into the future. The board will direct $60 million to building up rural community foundations in the locality, for instance, but will also look for small organizations it can buttress.

There is no shortage of limited-life foundations that today’s donors can observe as guides to the sunsetting process. Organizations like the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies (2016) and the AVI CHAI Foundation (2020) are among those listed by Duke researchers when they compiled, in 2012, a roster of 74 major foundations committed to time-limiting their work (see cspcs.sanford.duke.edu/time-limited-­ philanthropy/time-limited-foundations). The newly funded Ralph Wilson Foundation has just announced it will operate until 2035. At the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the 20-year spend-down begins at the death of Bill and Melinda Gates.

Whether they want to magnify their impact, prevent mission drift, see results with their own eyes, avoid bureaucracy, or eliminate family conflict—or perhaps all of the above—donors have many motives for pushing their gifts over a limited, immediate period. “You can become musty if you keep doing everything as you always did,” Kim Dennis observes. “The lesson for other donors is clear: sharpen your mission and plan to sunset.”

Otherwise, she warns, “be content knowing that things will change.” P

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Russell Shakespeare, Magnum Photos

Who says bricks-and-mortar philanthropy isn’t effective?

Eoin Stephenson

L AY I N G F O U N DAT I O N S FOR CHANGE

Russell Shakespeare, Magnum Photos

Eoin Stephenson

Atlantic Philanthropies has been a maverick foundation in many ways: It is the largest fund ever to push all of its assets out the door quickly within the life of its donor. For years it made most of its grants anonymously. It laid down some of the single biggest bets in philanthropic history. It was a pioneer in investing heavily in certain foreign countries as well as the U.S. And at a time when conventional wisdom often discourages “bricks and mortar” giving, it was famous for erecting buildings and entire campuses—confident that strong programs would grow up within the commodious physical structures it provided.

Out of the $7 billion Atlantic Philanthropies will have given away when it concludes its grantmaking in 2016, nearly $3 billion has gone into buildings and associated capital investments. Pictured to the left is one of Atlantic’s most famously inventive

investments: the University of Limerick. When Atlantic founder Chuck Feeney first set foot at Limerick it was just an obscure small college. His gifts of $180 million built everything from dorms to libraries to gyms to state-of-theart labs to top-notch programs—turning the institution into a talent attractor and a power player in engineering and applied science. Limerick was named a University of the Year in 2015. “I’m happy when the underdog makes it to the top,” Feeney remarked.

Feeney believed that higher education was the key to shifting Ireland from European laggard into economic leader, and his big gifts to Limerick and other Irish universities contributed substantially to Ireland’s economic growth. Thanks to its highly educated and productive young people, Ireland’s GDP per capita now exceeds levels in Germany, France, or the Netherlands.

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Atlantic invested about $300 million in the Australian university system, emphasizing applied scientific research. Here ­ niversity a professor at the U of Queensland is studying properties of algae that may be used to improve biofuels.

Before Atlantic came along, says former government official Peter Beattie, “Queensland was largely beaches.”

Part of Feeney’s aim in making heavy donations in Australia was to begin to instill a culture of philanthropy in a country that did not have one to speak of. Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd remembers convening a gathering where Feeney described the value of giving while living. “I will never forget that meeting. We had a tableful of rich Australians, and Chuck, in his well-worn suit and well-worn shoes, regaling them with his fervent belief that giving all your money away before you go was the best course of action.

It was a brilliant presentation…. I have never heard such audible clearing of throats as they slunk deeper into their chairs…. He hammered his message home.”

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These photos and accompanying information are largely drawn from the new book Laying Foundations for Change: Capital Investments of Atlantic Philanthropies.

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Atlantic has given $135 million in capital funding to Stanford, much of it for a Center for Biomedical Engineering and Sciences that is intended to bridge the gap between lab and clinic. Here a student shakes hands with PR2, an autonomous robot capable of language recognition, sensory detection, advanced navigation, and basic motor skills. It can cross campus by itself, fetch a cup of coffee for its sender, and return before the steam is off the latte.

Stanford faculty and students conduct groundbreaking research at the center in

interdisciplinary areas like artificial intelligence and neural prosthetics.

The space and facilities provided by Atlantic’s capital investment have enabled the institute to attract top-flight talent and follow-up grants from funders who only give to programming (of which there are many today).

“I suspect we have already begun work that’s going to lead to a future Nobel Prize, because the quality of work going on is absolutely at that level,” says Stanford president John Hennessy.

Chien Chi Chang, Magnum Photos; Cornell University Photography

visit to the country and saw great human potential but deplorable physical conditions. His foundation’s gift of $26 million for this biology center and school of public health have boosted the university into an African research power and educator of medical professionals addressing AIDS and other health crises endangering their communities.

Gideon Mendel, Magnum Photos; Alessandra Sanguinetti, Magnum Photos

Encouraged by his success at pulling Ireland toward prosperity by building up universities, Feeney decided to try the same thing at two other countries with fraught recent histories: Vietnam and South Africa.

Pictured here is the Life Sciences Building at South Africa’s University of the Western Cape, a historically black institution. The building was created at Feeney’s instigation after he toured the campus on his first

Chien Chi Chang, Magnum Photos; Cornell University Photography

On Feeney’s first visit to Vietnam, he toured one of its two central hospitals to find patients camped out on mats in the hallways, with walls crumbling around them. The experience was repeated at other hospitals. He met inspiring leaders at these places; the problem was simply lack of money.

“Chuck places bets on people, as well as on projects,” says Atlantic president Christopher Oechsli.

Feeney asked one director what was most needed. A new pediatric wing, he said. Feeney built it. What next? A

c­ ardiovascular center for patients who can’t travel to the city. Done. In all, Atlantic spent $182 million on 40 capital projects in health and education in Vietnam. Among them was the construction of the Da Nang Eye H ­ ospital, whose patients you see above. Cataracts, which can be fixed by a quick operation costing about $200, were widely uncorrected until this facility opened. “Suddenly, someone who was blind and dependent on others becomes someone who can see and take care of himself,” reports surgeon Tran Minh Phuong.

Atlantic’s very first capital grant—$2 million in 1983—was to Cornell’s Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts, pictured here. Since then, Feeney’s giving to his alma mater has topped $1 billion. This has gone toward technology centers, residential and athletic facilities, cultural venues, and an advanced underground library for special collections.

Like his hero Andrew Carnegie, Feeney has made libraries a special focus of his philanthropy, fondly remembering how going to the library as a young boy in working­­ class New Jersey opened his horizons. Feeney views “libraries as a metaphor for knowledge and what’s possible,” says Oechsli, and more concretely as steppingstones to progress.

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Feeney’s latest and largest donation to Cornell—one of the largest ever to any university—was $350 million to jumpstart a whole new technology campus and business incubator, Cornell Tech, on Roosevelt Island in New York City. (For more on that initiative, see our Fall 2014 issue.) It is predicted that Cornell Tech could spur a kind of Silicon Valley East in New York—precisely the kind of effect Feeney has always tried to catalyze with his bricks-and-mortar projects. For decades after Atlantic closes its doors next year, Feeney’s buildings will continue to influence events—and without his name on even one of them.

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The A Public rt of Philan Policy thropy (first in a three-

part ser

ies)

The Battle of Ideas

Kim Dennis When Kim ­Dennis started as a program officer at the John M. Olin Foundation in 1980, the body of funders and nonprofits trying to influence public policy from the right “was a very small universe. They were working on economic policies, but it wasn’t fine-grained down-in-the-weeds empirical studies. It was more about the broad principles of free-market economics. The principles weren’t practiced in policy at that time; people were rediscovering them.”

“By the end of the ’80s, people came to understand that free markets were much more efficient and produced more prosperity and freedom than redistributed socialistic ways of organizing. The disappointment for a lot of us now is that society seems to have forgotten much of what it learned.” But at least there is much more expertise on the power of markets.

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The second installment, in our Winter issue, will zero in on the nuances of investing in litigation and court challenges. Installment three, published next spring, will look at the last generation’s most successful public-policy philanthropy effort: school reform.

These expert testimonies are condensed from the new Philanthropy Roundtable book Agenda Setting: A Wise Giver’s Guide to Influencing Public Policy, which can be viewed at philanthropyroundtable.org/guidebook/ agenda_setting

“I’ve seen a huge proliferation of research groups. We have a lot more niche players focused on specific issues.”

“Olin invested broadly in people and institutions where it saw potential. The foundation was never a micromanager of the groups or individuals it funded. It was trying to build a movement, a broad-brush effort to expand and strengthen conservative ideas across a wide range of cultural and economic issues.”

Now Dennis leads the Searle ­Freedom Trust, endowed by the late Dan Searle with proceeds from the sale of the­ G. D. Searle pharmaceutical company.

Like Olin, the Searle Freedom Trust concentrates on academic research. “Our grants are focused on certain people and projects, and we avoid bureaucracies. We deal directly with the faculty we want to work with. A lot of donors think that you need to go through the university foundation, but that’s not true.”

It’s crucial to choose the professor wisely. “Academics have a trail of work and research, so it’s pretty easy to read the PHILANTHROPY

papers they’ve done and know what you’re dealing with. We also get a lot of information from talking to other academics we trust, or people in the policy world who are good judges of their work.”

“It’s very hard to find academics who want their work to be read by more than 100 specialists, who really want to make a difference in the world. When we find ones with motivation, we work with them.”

Agreeing on research agendas can be tricky. “There’s a bit of push and pull.

We’re always looking for where we can make a difference right now. For example, at this current time there’s not much going on in tax policy—one of our big economic interests—just because of the political stalemate. But regulation is also an interest, so that’s an area we’re focused more on now. These things shift as political opportunities come along.”

“Even when we don’t see a lot of potential for policy movement on certain issues, it’s not like we drop the priority.

If you stop supporting all the tax economists, where will we be when there’s an

Bri Hermanson

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

In this installment, our authorities take up the broad subject of investing in ideas.

Why would a donor want to? How can he or she succeed?

opportunity? So you tread water on some issues while you’re pushing others.”

“We also respond to what’s out there.

We see someone talented who is driven to work on a subject, and we say, ‘Let’s support it and see what comes of it.’”

“It’s often impossible to track progress in policy work. We do look at things like the number of citations of a study, and how many times it was downloaded. But how does attention translate to enacted policy? And even when policies that have been promoted in studies get enacted, who gets credit? When cap-and-trade legislation was defeated in Congress, every single group and researcher we funded on that topic claimed credit for it. And a lot of them did play some role.”

“The process is very serendipitous.

Often the best studies we fund don’t get much traction, while some lesser study catches a wave at the right time. A lot of it is timing that you can’t predict.”

“One frustration for lots of new donors is how slow, indirect, and fuzzy policy change can be. They think they can apply their business talents to charitable giving and get quick results.”

“Dan Searle did this at the start. When I began working for him, he would fund what he thought was a great study on, say, Social Security reform. It would be released, and he would say, “This makes such sense. Why don’t we have reform?

Why hasn’t it happened?”

“For donors who go into this area, it helps if they understand from the outset that it’s very hard to track what their investments produced. Major reforms rarely flow in direct linear fashion out of any particular intervention.”

Bri Hermanson

Gara LaMarche Gara LaMarche leads the Democracy Alliance—­ America’s savviest network of liberal large-scale policy and politics donors.

Roughly 100 of the country’s wealthiest

left-leaning philanthropists, like George and Jonathan Soros, Tom Steyer, Chris Hughes, Weston M ­ illiken, and others, participate. They collectively channel around $70 million per year of donations to nonprofits anointed by the Alliance as carriers of the progressive torch.

“Democracy Alliance was organized around the idea that there were institutions on the progressive side of the spectrum that needed to be created or built up,” LaMarche explains. “To a great extent we were inspired by people on the right who had invested over a period of 30 or 40 years in key institutions that were p ­ olicy-focused. The B ­ radley Foundation or the Olin ­Foundation, for instance. We saw donors giving multiyear support to organizations like the ­Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation.

The right really understood the need for i­ nfrastructure-building.”

“On the progressive side we saw gaps in think tanks, media work, and leadership development. So the Democracy Alliance looks for investments that can build policy and politics infrastructure.

Our donors agree to be advised by us on key investments and give to causes and institutions that we identify. We are like a venture-capital organization for progressive institutions. And we also work with recipient groups on their business plans, funding needs, and metrics.”

“The organizations we recommend for donors are a mix of 501(c)(3) charities and 501(c)(4) advocacy groups. For instance, the progressive counterpart to the ­Federalist Society is the American ­ ­ Constitution ­Society. It’s a (c)(3) operation that runs ­campus c­hapters for students very similar to the F ­ ederalist S ­ ociety’s. Organizations like ­the Center for American Progress, on

the other hand, have both a (c)(3) and a (c) (4) action arm.”

Prior to becoming president of the Democracy Alliance, LaMarche was a top executive at two of the largest left-wing foundations: Chuck Feeney’s Atlantic Philanthropies and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. “Soros’s early philanthropy was to promote democracy and independent media in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, so he had many conservative allies circa 1993-1994.” Then Soros took up domestic issues like euthanasia and drug legalization.

On drugs, Soros felt that “the costs associated with the war on drugs were arguably more harmful than the drug problem itself. For many years, we faced opposition from all parts of the political spectrum. We funded a social movement to enable communities of color and families of people incarcerated to agitate for change. We supported organizations like Families Against Mandatory Minimums and the Drug Policy Alliance. Now we have a bill, the REDEEM Act, sponsored

by Rand Paul and Cory Booker together.”

“The general lesson in any significant social change is that it is a long-term proposition. Immigration reform has slipped from our grasp for the moment. The last significant immigration reform was almost 30 years ago. It’s a long-haul proposition which involves steady investment.”

“When Atlantic Philanthropies put $27 million into advocacy for health-care reform, we were following the failed efforts of the Clinton administration. We made a grant to launch a coalition of labor, civil rights, and religious groups backing what became the Affordable Care Act. We were holding town hall meetings, advertising, and meeting with legislators. A member of Congress might be greeted at the airport by people congratulating his vote on health care. There was polling. There were all the elements of a modern campaign.” (Because Atlantic

Electing the right people is only a predicate for change, not sufficient.

You can’t short-circuit movement-building and the development of ideas.

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47

Roger Hertog When Roger Hertog retired as a leader of one of the world’s top investment firms in 2000, he launched a second career as a philanthropist. His donations—through both his personal philanthropy and his chairmanship of the Tikvah Fund, founded by his late business partner Zalman ­Bernstein—have included many unusual investments in ideas: supporting think

tanks, newspapers, magazines, scholars, and students. By the end of 2014 he had given away roughly $200 million to various intellectual causes and institutions, ranging from the free-market Manhattan Institute to the Jewish Review of Books to his own Hertog Political Studies Program seminars that unite promising students with outstanding teachers and great documents.

Hertog understands firsthand the power of ideas. He grew up in a one-bedroom apartment with a single mother. The first book he recalls reading at a library was The ­Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. He has early memories of searching for titles about Franklin Delano Roosevelt—wanting to know why the wartime President had not done more to prevent the Holocaust, which claimed many of Hertog’s relatives. (His parents left Germany in 1938 and he was born three years later in the United States.)

Nowadays, Hertog aims to fuel good ideas by investing in the people who generate them and the institutions that promote them. “It’s a lot like investing in a business,” he says. “Sometimes you see returns right away. But it can also take years before the investment pays off. If you invest in a magazine or a think tank, you quickly get a sense of the scholars. You have to have quality before you can have impact. You may not see the impact right away.”

Having impact in the philanthropy of ideas and public policy is tricky, says ­Hertog. “A few big rules apply to i dea-driven p ­ ­hilanthropy in particular. First, you have to know what you believe in. You have to have a strategic vision, and you need the clarity of mind to describe what it is. Aristotle said that a small mistake at the beginning of a

One frustration for lots of new donors is how slow, indirect, and fuzzy policy change can be. They think they can get quick results.

48

PHILANTHROPY

j­ourney is a large error at the end. You need to think about this early.”

Next comes people. “At the organizations you support, you need the best people in leadership, and you must broadly agree with their worldview. Don’t be too impressed by intellectual pedigrees. That can be a good place to start, but often what matters more is what’s in the heart and soul and mind of an individual.”

Then there’s the board. “This is about good people too,” he says. “Great board members don’t need to be area experts. They should have common sense and life experiences. Sometimes that can lead to argument. That’s good. You need to stay sharp, and competitive discussions can help.” Too much collegiality can actually pose a threat to excellent philanthropy. “When you’re giving away money, people will agree with you even when you’re making a mistake.

You want principled board members who will warn you when you’re wrong.”

“Anything that furthers intellectual debate can be a part of the philanthropic package,” he says. “Often that means giving to a nonprofit group, but on some occasions it makes sense to invest in a venture organized instead as a business. Even if it will lose money, when the people are strong and the vision is consistent with your own, that can be an excellent donation.”

In his own career, Hertog has put cash into nominally for-profit organizations like The New Republic (a political magazine) and the New York Sun (a New York City daily newspaper), recognizing that they were unlikely to make any returns but could still be considered successes as philanthropy. Of course, “you have to use private funds. You can’t do this through your foundation.”

In 2010, he created the Hertog ­Political Studies Program. “We’re trying to build a new generation of leaders,” he says. The program pays some of America’s best college students to attend its courses, putting them into classrooms with firstrate teachers who lead them in lectures and conversations about great books, political theory, and the good life.

“We began with the observation that the academy is increasingly politicized and

Bri Hermanson

Philanthropies is based in Bermuda it was able to fund direct lobbying and some other activities forbidden to U.S. foundations.)

“Once you pass a major piece of social legislation, you can’t just go away. You have to focus on the implementation.

Obamacare shows that very clearly. We stayed involved for a couple of years afterward in defense of the act.”

In the war of ideas, LaMarche is somewhat skeptical of shortcuts. “One of the things those of us on the left admire about conservative policy philanthropy was that it took a long view. It was very ideas-focused, and it didn’t expect change to happen tomorrow. More recently, though, there has been a lot of focus on elections.”

“It’s a false dichotomy—if you’re interested in politics of course you need to be electorally engaged, but electing the right people is only a predicate for change, not sufficient. Politicians need to be held accountable or pushed. The idea that you can short-circuit movement-building and idea-building and just elect the right person and go home doesn’t really work.”

narrow,” says Hertog. “Political science keeps dealing with smaller and smaller questions. Our idea is to take a different approach, bringing together theory and practice.” Students read the texts of Machiavelli, Tocqueville, and others, then hear from practitioners such as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, columnist Charles K ­ rauthammer, or Harvard professor ­Harvey Mansfield. “Our idea is to catch students at the start of their careers and prepare them for writing, advanced degrees, the diplomatic corps, and so on.”

Hertog won’t live to see the full return on this investment—a complete measure of the impact of these programs won’t be possible until the students have finished their careers. Did any of them become great American statesmen? Did they develop policies that met new challenges? “As time moves on, new problems and solutions emerge. This is especially true in the philanthropy that’s oriented to ideas.”

Bri Hermanson

Chris DeMuth From 1986 to 2008, Chris DeMuth presided over the blossoming of the American ­Enterprise Institute into one of ­Washington’s most influential think tanks. From that work, and his other experience in government, academe, and corporate life, he has become an expert in how good national policy is made— and ­thwarted—and the vital role that private donors play in nudging debates toward p ­ roductive ends.

“Think tanks produce different kinds of work than universities,” he notes, work “that is more applied than theoretical. The first think tanks were seeking a better here and now.”

This mission created its own funding strategies. “Universities will go after donors by implying, ‘this school made you everything you are, and now you should help the next wave succeed.’ ­Historically, think tanks went after people who had a concern with politics, ­p eople who thought A ­ merica needed a ­p olicy revolution. Brookings mostly went after liberals. It got a lot of money from the Ford F ­ oundation, for example. AEI and ­Heritage went after successful e­ ntrepreneurs and businessmen worried about the fate of the ­p rivateenterprise system.”

“There are many areas where the contributions of think tanks have been distinct from anything in university research, and dramatically influential. For instance, the antitrust revolution of the late 1970s and ’80s, the movement abolishing regulation of airlines and trucking, and the reform of financial markets were essentially researched out of Brookings and the American Enterprise Institute. Donors like Smith Richardson and Searle were staunch supporters.”

“Important entrants keep coming in, like the state think tanks. The Goldwater ­Institute, for example, has been doing terrific work in Arizona. It’s easy for people with distinctive ideas to hang up a shingle and go to work on strategies for government reform.”

The donors willing to write checks to think tanks have changed over time.

“When I first came to AEI we did not have any endowment to speak of, but we did have regular annual support from many corporations. If you look up the speeches on government policy made by the presidents of big corporations in the ’50s and ’60s, they were fierce, unabashed champions of the private-enterprise

s­ ystem. Today, CEOs are likelier to be apologetic about their work.”

“Fortunately, advocates for refreshed public policies are emerging from other sectors. We now have a very strong entrepreneurial culture that produces people of great energy and principle. Finance has changed also. In the past, it was heavily concentrated in the big money centers and a couple of investment banks. Today we have hedge funds and widely scattered investment vehicles of various kinds. A lot of people in finance have done well and have strong political views—on the left as well as on the right.”

DeMuth sees many opportunities for donors to guide public policy in innovative ways today—especially the nimble entrepreneurial givers. “They’re spending their own money. They’re not bureaucratic. And they are successful businesspeople who understand real-world problems.”

DeMuth hopes that these Americans won’t shy from the difficult work of keeping our governance on track. “Preserving a large sphere for civil society and private institutions is important to keeping us free and self-reliant. We need to relieve government of the tendency to want to solve every problem itself, to convert every micro-group into clients and every policy issue into an electoral strategy.”

“Contriving new institutions that preserve limited government and prevent the bureaucratic state from encroaching further on private life is imperative.

P oliticians and corporate executives ­ aren’t going to lead that crusade. Private donors might.” P

The antitrust revolution, deregulation of airlines and trucking, and financial market reform were ideas researched by Brookings and AEI with donor support before they became growth-spurring laws.

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49

ideas Renaissance Ahead?

Catholic schools are on the cusp of resurrection

BY ANDY SMARICK AND KELLY ROBSON

who would like to attend—hundreds of children in some places. While more than a million students now wait to get into charter schools that lack room for them, desks sometimes sit empty in nearby high-quality Catholic schools.

Some parents feel they cannot afford to pay tuition (unaware of how much scholarship aid is now available). Others simply don’t know that Catholic schools are a good option for their families.

Donors can bridge this gap.

Organizations like Families Empowered in Houston help families on charter-school waitlists learn about and access other high-quality school options, including ­Catholic schools. Families Empowered provides information about schools in various neighborhoods, details of enrollment, and more. The organization uses phone calls, e-mail, social media, and choice fairs to communicate with families about their other charter, district, magnet, Catholic, and independent school options.

W hen parents apply to either KIPP or YES Prep charter schools in Houston­ ­­­ — both of which are high-quality but heavily oversubscribed networks—they can check a box to have their information shared with Families Empowered. If the household ends up on a KIPP or YES Prep

Eyes on the waitlist A 2014 Georgetown University report found that 53 percent of Catholic parents identify tuition costs as “somewhat” or “very much” a problem when deciding whether or not to enroll their children in Catholic schools. Half of the parents who ultimately enroll their children say the same thing. Eliminating this barrier is the most direct way to help more students access a high-quality Catholic-school education. Our new book on this topic includes lots of information on the best ways to offer scholarships that boost both students This article is adapted from The and schools.

Philanthropy Roundtable’s Philanthropists can also improve new guidebook Catholic access to Catholic schools by helping Catholic School School Renaissance: A more parents understand that such Renaissance Wise Giver’s Guide to schools are an excellent option for their Strengthening a National children. The best urban charter schools Asset by Andy Smarick and Kelly Robson of often have large waiting lists of students Bellwether Education Partners.

Catholic School Renaissance

A Wise Giver’s Guide to Strengthening a National Asset

Over the last generation, Catholic schools have been buffeted by a confluence of winds: changing demographics in the urban neighborhoods where many of their facilities are located, the disappearance of nuns and priests from classrooms, new competition from tuition-free charter schools, and other factors. Enrollments tumbled. 6,000 schools closed. Financial pressures thinned instructional resources.

Yet two million children remain in Catholic schools today. This includes a great many low-income and minority youngsters for whom Catholic schooling is a lifeline in an otherwise dysfunctional neighborhood. And Catholic schools get enormous bang for their educational buck—posting graduation rates, college success patterns, and levels of pro-social behavior that much exceed peers attending conventional public schools.

Donors never gave up on Catholic schools. And in recent years they have begun to be rewarded for their loyalty. The last decade has brought a burst of fresh management structures, teacher pipelines, back-office mechanisms, helpful technologies, support groups, education-reform allies, private investors, and state and local funding programs that leave Catholic schools in their best position for future success in more than 50 years.

It is now possible to see the outlines of an influential Catholic-school renaissance. And it is donors who are leading the way. This practical guide describes hundreds of opportunities where savvy givers can lead in this field— where there may be more opportunities for society-changing philanthropy than in any other corner of our nation.

SMARICK and ROBSON

50

expand their operations. There are many opportunities here: Helping the sector secure top teachers, principals, and business managers. Replicating successful campuses.

Supporting new governance arrangements.

Pioneering new curricula. Enrolling new categories of families. Launching shared central-office capabilities.

And there will be certain donors who want to encourage systemic change. This can include advocating for improved public policies or funding ambitious c­ itywide reform agendas. Whatever path you choose, the possibilities of achieving high returns on comparatively modest investments in Catholic-school education are now encouragingly high.

CATHOLIC SCHOOL RENAISSANCE

For 50 years, American K-12 Catholic education had been in a quiet retreat.

Thousands of schools were shuttered.

Enrollment plummeted by millions.

Though heroic educators and generous donors stemmed the tide in many places, even creating exemplars of what was possible, forecasts were bleak. Education journals carried articles titled, “Can Catholic Schools Be Saved?”

But thanks to an unprecedented wave of social entrepreneurialism and some innovative public policies—both fueled by philanthropy—we may be witnessing the dawn of a renaissance in Catholic K-12 education. New approaches to organizing, governing, funding, and staffing these schools are showing that this sector can be financially sustainable, in addition to producing terrific student outcomes.

D onors impressed by the ways ­Catholic education strengthens our society now have many exciting opportunities to support these schools. In this era of reinvention, Catholic school donors will need to be creative, experimental, and tolerant of some risk. Investments in new and sometimes unproven approaches will be necessary if this large and valuable but still-fragile social sector is to be updated.

There are three broad categories where rich opportunities exist today to bolster Catholic schools. Some donors will be most interested in direct aid that helps students access Catholic schools. Scholarships can help families find, understand, and afford religious schooling.

O ther donors may want to help schools improve their programming and

A Wise Giver’s Guide to Strengthening a National Asset Andy Smarick and Kelly Robson

PhilanthropyRoundtable.org (202) 822-8333

Free copies of this guidebook are available to qualified donors.

Print and e-book versions are available from major online booksellers.

PHILANTHROPY

waitlist, Families Empowered contacts them and provides information about other available options.

Families Empowered has worked with the Houston Catholic ­Archdiocese from the beginning, publicizing local Catholic schools and scholarship opportunities. “This is a win-win for everyone,” explains FE director Colleen Dippel. “Charters can’t serve all the kids on their waitlists, but they still want them to be successful. We’re committed to supporting Catholic schools because we need them to be a viable option for parents. There’s huge potential to close the gap if all the waitlisted kids get into

application process, take them on cam- c­oncentrate on spiritual and moral pus tours, and ultimately serve them as guidance, where they are best qualified. enrolled customers.

These new arrangements have in several instances produced chains of schools Rethinking governance that are both academically excellent and There is a consensus today that the tra- financially sustainable. ditional Catholic school run by the local To make this new structure work, a church is unsustainable in many places. diocese must be willing to devolve most When The Philanthropy Roundtable school-governing authority to the new asked Catholic-school donors about bar- management organization. In some cases riers to the sector’s growth, 69 percent a bishop grants complete operating and named “diocesan bureaucracy.” management authority over a set of schools Understandably, many priests and bish- to a board, foundation, or other entity that ops are hesitant about altering longstanding functions as the governing body. There customs and formulas. But resistance are limits on the jurisdiction of these new seems to be softening. Unprecedented new operators, but many of them look and act

Gifts to Catholic education—from providing scholarships, to improving programming, to advocating for better public policies—can now produce very high returns per dollar spent. other good schools. Making Catholic schools a viable option for families further accelerates the flywheel of choice.”

This year, Families Empowered piloted an “open-seat campaign.” School leaders identify the number of available spaces in their schools, and Families Empowered reaches out to the families in its database, while simultaneously sending schools a spreadsheet containing contact information for prospective students. The schools follow up with these families directly.

F amilies Empowered plans to expand this effort to include additional Catholic schools next year. A local donor has funded this work, allowing Families Empowered to provide the referrals free of charge. Catholic schools that receive these lists of interested families are required to have the infrastructure to manage increased inquiries and enrollments. This means having staff to answer phones, respond to questions, get back to parents, walk families through the

arrangements for governing the Catholic schools that have been put into place in prominent locations like New York City and Philadelphia are speeding change. The question is no longer whether Catholic schools should be run differently; it’s about how.

P hilanthropists are heavily involved in these conversations. By insisting on updated structures and helping to pay for them, donors are having a powerful influence on this crucial transition.

New organizations are being created by philanthropists to privately manage groups of Catholic schools. These nonprofits provide strong leadership and mission, create business-like common operating practices, and allow schools to share knowledge and services.

The new networks have central offices that standardize budgeting, hiring, fundraising, procurement, curriculum, and building acquisition and management. Principals are freed up to focus on instruction, and priests FALL 2015

a lot like the charter-school chains that set consistent standards across their campuses.

Between 1999 and 2004, large philanthropic gifts helped the D ­ iocese of Memphis reopen several closed Catholic schools. In 2010, former ­c harter-school leader David Hill was named director of academic operations for the so-called Jubilee Schools, and he instituted changes across the network— extending the school day, strengthening school culture, putting more emphasis on attracting and retaining high-quality teachers and principals.

Financial challenges, h ­owever, continued. The schools ser ve the most impoverished families in the region, without public funds, and the ­housing-foreclosure recession forced the network to dip into its donor-provided endowment. So in ­October 2014, Bishop Terry Steib announced that the nine ­Jubilee Schools would spin off from the diocese as the Jubilee Catholic Schools 51

ideas

Network, with Hill as president. It is intended that the network’s new independence will make fundraising easier.

Hill is now in charge of all aspects of the schools, including academics, business, and development. He reports to overseeing directors. “We now have a new board that governs these schools exclusively,” he notes, and have “been given broad latitude and autonomy to make decisions.” He intends to “increase the work of the network while reducing the operational demands on principals.

We want to free them to focus more on being academic leaders.”

The first major change since becoming an independent network has been a new school calendar and correlated

donors will strengthen and improve the new school networks, and the renewed energy and entrepreneurialism they represent, they have potential to become one of this era’s major contributions to Catholic education.

The living endowment Prior to 1960, nearly all Catholic-school teachers and principals were members of religious communities—sisters, priests, or brothers. Today less than 3 percent of full-time Catholic-school staff are from an order. That transition has not been easy.

Catholic schools were spoiled by the essentially free work of generations of religious men and women—what was sometimes called “the living

Two University of Notre Dame priests—Tim Scully and Sean McGraw— demonstrated this by founding the Alliance for Catholic ­Education Teaching Fellows program. Often referred to as the “Catholic version of Teach For America,” their fellowship places highly talented college graduates into Catholic schools in underserved communities for a two-year service experience.

It combines professional training, spiritual development, and personal support, and for years has attracted some of the top students coming out of Notre Dame.

ACE teac hers take gr aduate ­coursework during their fellowship, and ultimately earn a master of education degree from Notre Dame and are eligible for teacher licensure in the state of

The question is no longer whether Catholic schools should be run differently; it’s about how. changes in teacher and principal compensation. Starting with the 2­ 015-2016 school year, the Jubilee Schools will operate on a 200-day, year-round calendar. Hill stresses that formation of the independent Jubilee Schools ­Network will in no way alter the schools’ Catholic foundation: “Our schools will not lose their Catholic identities through this transition. If anything it’s going to strengthen our Catholicity.”

N ew management organizations like the one in Memphis have exciting potential to bring not only good performance but also sustained expansion to Catholic schooling—something the old Catholic school structure has found almost impossible for generations. While largely autonomous parish-run schools will forever be an important part of K-12 Catholic schooling, we’re now seeing useful variations on that theme. This experimentation is a positive sign. If 52

­e ndowment.” Lay educators require wages, benefits, and retirement plans that are at least reasonably consonant with district-run and charter schools.

The average base pay of a public-school teacher was $53,100 in 2012, compared to just $40,200 for private-school teachers of all sorts. Lower pay brings higher turnover. Of all private-school teachers today, 24 percent are in their first three years of teaching, compared to just 13 percent of public-school teachers.

Recruiting a new endowment of devoted educators into Catholic ­schooling is eminently doable. The important work being done in urban Catholic schools is invigorating, l­ife-enhancing activity. It’s not easy, but it’s not difficult work that scares away talented people—it’s lack of vision and reward. If top teachers and leaders are given support and latitude, they can fuel the resurgence of neighborhood schools that are indispensable buttresses to their communities.

PHILANTHROPY

Indiana. They live together in groups of four to seven peers during their placements, which helps fellows share burdens, successes, useful information, and emotional energy. The program immerses fellows in retreats, Masses, prayer services, and pastoral support.

The ACE program has trained more than 2,000 Catholic-school educators since its founding. And Notre Dame has nurtured similar intensive teacher-education programs at other Catholic universities. In 2005 the University Consortium for Catholic Education solidified as the umbrella group. The UCCE consists of 13 university-based alternative teacher-certification programs that collectively place more than 400 teachers in Catholic schools each year.

This pipeline of talent has become important to Catholic-school principals, especially those in innovative networks.

“We’re trying to tap every elite Catholic college in the country” when hiring new teachers, reports Kathleen P ­ orter-Magee of the Partnership for Inner-city ­Education, which operates six Catholic schools in New York City.

Advocating for change Sometimes, simply making the wider public aware of the importance of Catholic schools can achieve good things. In Wichita, Kansas, all C ­ atholic primary and secondary schools have been tuition-free since 2002. It began when local pastor Thomas McGread ­ ercent challenged his flock to donate 5 p of their incomes so all children in the parish could attend the elementary

­ atholic schools turn a corner is the spread C of school-choice programs that allow at least a modest flow of public resources to follow a child when he enrolls in a Catholic (or other religious or private) school. As of 2015, 57 different school-choice funding programs existed in 29 states. Vouchers and tax credits are the commonest offerings.

The number of children with access to school-choice assistance has grown from just 29,000 in 2000 to 354,000 in 2014. At the moment, six s­ tates— Florida, Arizona, Pennsylvania, I­ ndiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin—account for nearly nine out of ten of the students who have school-choice benefits. But thanks to active donor support the expansion of school choice is likely to

Its sister organization the A ­ merican Federation for Children is a 501(c)(4) equipped to lobby and advocate with officeholders and thought leaders. A third partner, the American ­Federation for Children Action Fund, is a 527 political action committee that supports candidates for political office who have been helpful to the cause of school choice. This tripartite structure of information and local support, lobbying, and political backup for allies is a time-tested way to advance educational reform.

In addition to national groups like the federation, there are lots of state and local groups supporting C ­ atholic schooling. Boston Advoc ates for ­C atholic Education, Tomorrow’s Hope

The number of children with access to government school-choice programs has grown from just 29,000 in 2000 to 354,000 in 2014. school for free. When his congregation rose to the challenge, he asked them to donate 8 percent so the parish could pay the Catholic high-school tuition of any local child. Again, parishioners stepped up. With this broad donor support, ­Catholic schooling in ­W ichita continues to grow—enrollment now stands at its highest level since 1967.

A nother coalition acting to support Catholic schooling formed in March 2015 when donors like former American Express president Alfred Kelly and former PricewaterhouseCoopers CEO Samuel Di Piazza formed a new political action committee aimed at preserving New York’s Catholic schools. Catholics Count will raise $10 million to help it compete meaningfully in the state’s capital for public policies that are more friendly to Catholic education.

Another important innovation of the past decade or two that is now helping

extend further, perhaps into states like New York in the near future.

Donors who want to feed this expansion of school choice payments can support the advocacy organizations that are enabling it. For instance, the American Federation for Children Growth Fund is a leader across the nation in organizing and providing information on behalf of school choice that includes private and religious schools. It publishes data on school choice, basic information on programs by state, model legislation, and the annual School Choice Yearbook.

The AFC Growth Fund invests in states with potential for enacting or expanding school-choice programs—developing state leaders, communicating with policymakers about the importance of school choice, reinforcing parent advocacy, and helping implement choice programs.

As a 501(c)(3) it does not partake in ­lobbying or direct political work.

FALL 2015

(Long Island, N.Y.), Parents Alliance for ­Catholic Education (­Massachusetts), and Ohio Advocates for Catholic Schools are examples. Donors eager to build wider understanding and support for Catholic schools need not start from scratch; in many cases they can reinforce organizations with networks and infrastructure already in place.

Exactly how you invest in ­Catholic schools will depend on your interests and expertise, your objectives, your funding levels, and your risk tolerance. But any donor with even modest resources and some creative force has the chance today to reimagine, retool, and reenergize a storied A ­ merican institution. The upside is large, as ­Catholic schools undergo a modern-day renaissance and pull 2 million schoolchildren, many of them with bleak options outside of their classrooms, to a brighter future. P 53

{books in brief }

The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically

BY PETER SINGER

Do you think the suffering of human beings is more important than the suffering of other animals? Do you think it’s valuable to know the people who run a charity you support? Do you think it’s reasonable to relieve the suffering of Americans, even before every person in other countries escapes extreme poverty? Do you respect someone who donates to cancer research after a spouse dies of the disease?

In his new book, controversial bioethics professor Peter Singer argues that these views and behaviors are mistaken. His outlook is based in utilitarian philosophy, whose reigning principle is “the greatest good for the greatest number.” This sounds sensible enough on its face, but it has proven to be a way of thinking about the human condition that leads to a dangerous coldbloodedness, enabling its adherents to advocate for things such as (in Singer’s case) eugenics and infanticide. Under the mantle of altruism, utilitarians divide the world into enlightened beings who can calculate the greater good and lesser mortals whose personal judgments just get in the way.

In The Most Good You Can Do, Singer makes his case for a version of utilitarianism known as “Effective 54

Altruism.” He defines it as “a philosophy and social movement which applies evidence and reason to working out the most effective ways to improve the world.” Common practices among adherents include living modestly while donating a large part of their income; choosing a career in which they can earn the most they can so they can give more; researching which charities are the most “effective” (and generally finding those to be ones that are either animalrelated or focused on the extreme poor in developing nations); and pressing the gospel of Effective Altruism on others. Singer drops repeated hints that he himself is the sine qua non of this movement, having struck the spark with his 1972 article “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” and fanned it into flame with subsequent books and op-eds.

For most citizens, though, Singer’s stern mathematical parsings of good and evil won’t mesh with natural emotions and what many would call common sense.

Singer himself confesses that something has held him back from obeying mathematical analyses by giving one of his kidneys to a stranger. And he even approves of an Effective Altruist couple who drew “a line beyond which they would not let the goal of maximizing their giving prevent them from having something very important to them.” How’s that’s for a subjective, nonmathematical loophole that prevents Effective Altruism from being over-demanding of its adherents?

Some of what Singer says here is true and good. The problem is that what’s true is not new, and what’s new is not true.

For instance, it’s true that wealthy people shouldn’t spoil their kids with luxuries, that donors should be thoughtful about their giving and its effects, and that they shouldn’t use giving to aggrandize themselves.

Any religion, or common decency, would teach you the same things. Singer sometimes notes in passing that you can find significant points of agreement between his views and those of Roman Catholic thinkers like Thomas Aquinas, who insisted we should help the poor; PHILANTHROPY

Methodism founder John Wesley, who exhorted Christians to “earn all you can, give all you can, save all you can”; and Buddhist nun Cheng Yen, who founded a charitable organization that has attracted 10 million supporters. But neither Singer nor the leading Effective Altruist charity rater, GiveWell, are likely to give these sorts of philanthropists good ratings, because their traditional, life-enhancing emphasis on compassion and love for all can’t find a foothold within Singer’s crabbed numerical reasoning.

In his book’s most amusing chapter, Singer has to admit that utilitarian number-crunching ends up calculating that the “most effective” giving imaginable—perhaps the only giving that is wholly justified—would be focused on lessening the tiny chance the planet will be wiped out by a huge asteroid collision or similar catastrophe. Singer backs away from this with the help of common sense, but not enough to actually question the theories that led him there.

He shows no embarrassment when he reports that GiveWell’s top recommended charities of recent years are limited to two organizations that specialize in treating parasitic worm infections and GiveDirectly, which hands cash directly to the poor in developing countries. Are those really the only ways donors can do good?

Mother Teresa said, “it is not how much we do, but how much love we put in the doing.” Philanthropy is not simply a matter of quantity but of quality. That’s one reason we should start with the persons closest to us, even if, like Mother Teresa herself, we later end up helping lots of people on other continents. She would be shocked at Singer’s idea that you only need math to help people, that a stranger thousands of miles away ranks above a struggling neighbor at your door, that a movement proclaiming selflessness should be deeply conflicted over whether anyone should even have a child.

Singer’s brand of humanitarianism is simply inhumane. But even that is old news. Say a prayer that philanthropy, which does deserve plenty of thoughtful criticism, receives better gadflies. —Scott Walter

THE ALMANAC OF AMERICAN PHILANTHROPY

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president’s note 25 Ways to Strengthen America

One of the principal services of The Philanthropy Roundtable is to connect donors and foundations with best-in-class strategies, experts, and other funders in the philanthropic fields where they want to make the greatest difference. Here are 25 ways that funders can strengthen our free society through their charitable giving. Please let us know if you would like to expand or strengthen your giving in any of these initiatives, and the ­Roundtable will be at your service.

Invest in think tanks, litigation centers, and grassroots organizations committed to limited, effective government, a vigorous market economy, a flourishing civil society, a strong national defense, and the protection and advancement of religious, political, intellectual, and economic freedom.

Support human-service providers that offer a hand up, not a permanent ­handout, helping people to become self-reliant through active participation in work.

Instill greater understanding and appreciation of the lives and principles of our Founding Fathers and other great leaders in middle and high schools, colleges and universities, books, websites, and documentaries, and the creation and growth of outstanding museums.

E n c o u r a g e mu l t i p l e m o d e l s of disruptive innovation in teacher ­training, building on the dramatic success of philanthropists in supporting diverse charter-school networks where ­low-­income children excel.

Expand character-building institutions such as Scouting, athletic leagues that emphasize sportsmanship, professional associations with a strong ethical foundation, and schools and colleges that integrate character formation into the core of their curriculum.

Invest in the next generation of business, political, academic, and national 56

security leaders who will understand, protect, and advance freedom.

Finance movies and videos that tell great stories of heroism, moral integrity and courage, and the creativity that flourishes in a free society.

Develop new business models for K-12 and higher education, combining online personalized learning, competency-based badges, and apprenticeships with employers, along with the best of traditional classroom instruction and extracurriculars.

Support religious, educational, economic, and cultural organizations in other countries that foster the rule of law and respect for individual freedom and dignity.

Expand the number of high-quality religious and other private schools, especially in states with strong school-choice programs such as Indiana, Wisconsin, Ohio, Arizona, Florida, Nevada, and Louisiana.

Develop affordable health-care pilot programs that offer low-income families a superior alternative to Medicaid.

At a time of declining defense expenditures, invest in key military R&D initiatives that will keep America and our allies strong and free, building on the crucial leadership of philanthropy in developing radar and cryptography.

Enable veterans to apply their leadership, teamwork, and problem-solving skills and talents in the workplace rather than become dependent on disability or welfare payments.

Reduce one of the greatest obstacles to upward mobility by reversing the catastrophic collapse of marriage and the family in working-class communities.

Experiment with innovative ideas, and test unconventional hypotheses and lines of inquiry in biomedical and other forms of scientific research.

Sustain the independence of houses of worship, artistic centers, colleges and universities, and other cherished institutions, and enable them to resist the political pressure that comes with over-reliance on government funding.

PHILANTHROPY

Move America closer to M ­ artin Luther King’s dream of a country where people are judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.

Jump-start our sputtering economy by promoting a revival of entrepreneurship, and the removal of frivolous regulatory impediments to growth.

Strengthen community colleges, apprenticeships, and other career and technical education institutions with a strong track record placing youth and adults in mid-skill jobs.

Welcome with open arms immigrants who respect the rule of law and come to America for freedom and opportunity, not dependence on the welfare state. Help them to become active citizens committed to the Founders’ vision of a free society.

Encourage community activities and law enforcement policies that strengthen respect for the police and lower both crime and incarceration rates.

Develop models of health-care delivery and insurance that encourage innovation and competition, enable families to make medical choices, and empower nurses and doctors.

Invest in curricula and training programs that will enable American K-12 students to rival or surpass Singapore in math and science achievement.

Support environmental organizations that use the principles of private property, competitive enterprise, and technological innovation to protect the earth and its creatures.

Protect the freedom of donors and foundations to determine how and where to give away their charitable assets, and strengthen America’s tradition as the most charitable country on earth.

Adam Meyerson, President The Philanthropy Roundtable

The Philanthropy Roundtable 1730 M Street NW, Suite 601 Washington, DC 20036

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