LEFT TO RIGHT: FROM LEFT, HOLLY DONALDSON; DR. ROBERT MACRAE OF NEW CANAAN, HEAD OF SCHOOL AT NEW CANAAN COUNTRY SCHOOL; BETH GOLDEN OF NEW CANAAN; FROM LEFT, JACKIE LEONARD OF DARIEN, PEGGY TOCE OF NEW CANAAN, BETHANY ZARO OF NEW CANAAN, JULIE BOSTWICK OF NEW CANAAN. FROM LEFT, LISA SCHULTZ OF NEW CANAAN, WILLY OPPENHEIM, PAULA OPPENHEIM OF GREENWICH, BILL AND ELLEN OPPENHEIM OF NEW CANAAN.
Willy Oppenheim, a Rhodes Scholar who founded Omprakash, a nonprofit that connects young people with volunteer opportunities around the world, at the NCCS panel. “And I think there’s a reason for this, but people forget it. And so we talk about, ‘oh we should give back’ in this vague and warm and fuzzy sense.” He tied giving back to wealth inequality today and historic issues of oppression. This may not be how most people think of their voluntary contributions to good causes, but Mr. Oppenheim raised the issue of whether philanthropy was a way to pay back a debt or if it was an opportunity to be a better person. Giving, to him, meant being a responsible citizen. “That’s something I try to let inform the decisions I make as an educator and as a consumer, what I eat, what I wear, where I go, how I engage with politics and ideas,” he said. “It’s not just one section of my life. It’s how I try to be in this world.” For most people every donation is a deeply personal decision, whether it is categorized as charity – to relieve an urgent need, like a natural disaster – or philanthropy – to try to build something better. “In my world giving is one of the most personal things,” said Jeff Erdman, an NCCS graduate and the top financial adviser at Merrill Lynch. “People always ask how much should I give. It’s a very, very personal thing.” For him, living in South Norwalk and working in Greenwich, it came down to the division of giving money but also time. And this included the lessons that his children could learn by seeing how he and his wife Barbara thought through what they gave and why, from money to their alma maters to time spent at the Open Door Shelter in Norwalk. Holly Davidson, a young alumnae of Country School who now works for AmeriCares, the disaster relief charity based in Stamford, talked about the reality of
younger donors: they have more time than money and giving that time now is okay. But in many ways it opens their thinking to a day where they may have more financial resources to support the causes they volunteer for today. If what you give to is personal – religious, educational and medical organizations top GivingUSA’s annual list – how you give that money can make a difference. Joe Toce, a managing director at Andersen Tax, said when wealthier people seek his advice to structure their gifts they can end up having a greater impact with their dollars and saving themselves on their tax bill. “You can give more if you can be more efficient in your giving and take better consequences of your tax advantages,” he said. And once people start to give – or give back – the desire to help just multiplies and many wish they had started sooner. “For our wealthier clients, one thing we see is that they start too late,” he said. (This is not the case with Mr. Toce: he and his wife Peggy have hosted over 60 receptions for Georgetown University, his alma mater, at their home in New Canaan.) Where anyone trying to affect big change in philanthropy is going to struggle is when they’re confronted with the magnitude of the problems. Mr. Oppenheim said, “Failing to address the root causes of a given issue can risk perpetuating the status quo. And he added, “The most powerful drivers of change are getting people to think and understand the deeper issues.” Those statements are no doubt true but some problems are so large – educational challenges or healthcare in the United States – that no one person could solve them, even with billions of dollars to give. Linda Marshall, who helped start the Stepping Stones Museum for Children in Norwalk and now runs Mission Bridge, a philanthropic advisory service, had
FROM LEFT, JOHN AND BARBARA ERDMANN OF NEW CANAAN, ALAN AND BARBARA DONALDSON OF NEW CANAAN.
some consolation: a portfolio approach to giving and something of a philanthropic approach to investing. “Socially responsible investing is really thinking about how you can use your assets to create any kind of social impact,” she said. As the night ended, I was reminded of a story Michael Bloomberg told me a few months after his third term as New York City mayor was up. He was at a conference out west when a hedge fund manager approached him and his schools chancellor, Joel Klein. The manager took them behind a cactus and said that he and some friends were going to raise $1 billion over the next five years and fundamentally fix New York’s education system. When Mr. Bloomberg told the man that the annual public school budget in the city was $22 billion, the man, well meaning as he was, simply walked away. Perhaps with the biggest problems the best a philanthropist can do is make a difference on a local level and hope that similar organizations notice. But that’s a good start. And if that donor can align his or her values with his cause, that giving might give back, too. --Paul Sullivan is the author of The Thin Green Line: The Money Secrets of the Super Wealthy, out in paperback in March, and the Wealth Matters columnist for The New York Times.
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