by philanthropy. The High Line, a “linear park” pictured here that snakes through Manhattan along an abandoned rail bed, was built (and is operated) by a private nonprofit fueled with more than $100 million of donated money. It instantly became one of the most popular greenspaces in the world, and a spur to an estimated $2 billion of private redevelopment in surrounding neighborhoods. Similar donor-driven parks have recently garnered spectacular public acclaim in dozens of U.S. cities.
lawyers to represent their interests. He attended the court proceedings himself every day, organized a public-relations campaign, and eventually got the Africans freed after pushing their case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. His personal devotion and single-handed financing turned abolitionism into a cause célèbre. If the campaigning of the Tappans on behalf of slaves was impressively personal, the devotion of Joseph de Veuster to miserable lepers was out-and-out heroic. Better known as Father Damien after he became a Catholic priest, de Veuster thought it inhumane that when leprosy
Gifts where the giver and recipient are involved with each other, familiar with one another’s character, and committed to each others’ flourishing, are some of the most successful forms of philanthropy. 24
PHILANTHROPY
Wasabi Bob
We are living in a golden age of new and rehabilitated urban parks—all driven
reached the Hawaiian Islands, victims were forced to live in isolation on a wild peninsula without any buildings or goods or services. The newly diagnosed would be dropped off with nothing but a few tools and some seeds, and proceed to live miserably in shelters made of sticks. Father Damien moved into the leper colony himself in 1873, brought anti-social residents into line, rescued orphans, provided medical care, and organized building and gardening efforts. He marshaled fundraising letters that brought in donations sufficient to pay for his improvements, and to bury the 1,600 people whose funerals he presided over in a period of six years. He died himself at age 49 from complications of leprosy. The sacrifices made by Father Damien are especially piercing, but there are many examples of philanthropists who risked happiness, health, and even life itself to carry out their good works. Philanthropy regularly grows out of pain. The death of John Rockefeller’s grandson from scarlet fever in 1901 cemented his desire to build a medical-research facility that could banish such afflictions. The result was Rockefeller University, whose researchers over the years have been awarded dozens of Nobel prizes. The organizer and funder of today’s wildly successful National Kidney Registry, which matches donors to patients with organ failure, acted after his ten-year-old daughter was nearly lost to kidney disease. America’s most fecund artist colony, known as Yaddo, was created by Thomas Edison’s financial partner Spencer Trask and his wife, Katrina, as a cathartic effort after the couple endured the profound pain of losing all four of their young children, in separate incidents, to disease and early death. The Trasks envisioned a place where “generations of talented men and women yet unborn” would be “creating, creating, creating.” Since its opening in 1926, Yaddo has nurtured 71 Pulitzer Prize winners, 68 National Book Award winners, a Nobel literature laureate, and countless other productive musicians, playwrights, and novelists. The Trasks sweetened and softened a world that may have felt hard and bitter when they started giving. Though it sometimes grows out of pain, philanthropy is more frequently sparked by emotions like gratitude and joy. The first charity hospital in America was created in, of all places, 1735 New Orleans—at that point a ragingly ragged and largely ungoverned city first populated just 18 years earlier by people drawn from jails, poorhouses, and urban gutters. The hospital benefactor was a dying sailor named Jean Louis, who had made some money for the first time in his life by going into the boatbuilding business in the brand-new French colony. He wanted to pass on his good fortune. And his Charity Hospital offering free care to the indigent became one of the most useful of its type, finding a vast market in a town known even then for creativity in vice.