People
Mainstream Medicis
Joan Oleck and Laura Collins-Hughes |
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The Big Thing in philanthropy these days
is all about doing more with less—and doing it yourself
THINK AD HOC FUNDING CIRCLES WITH SMALL MEMBERSHIPS AND SMALL- scale, targeted objectives. Armed with BlackBerrys and billfolds, today’s new mainstream Medicis are looking for the personal connection that comes from supporting an individual artist or caregiver in need, whether halfway around the world or right here in New York.
And while these new patrons may well be famous or unfamously young and wealthy, they also can be both non-famous and non-rich, jumping in simply to support projects they care about at home or in other parts of the world.
Thanks to the new paradigm, Paula Shirk, a middle-income mother from Brooklyn, is providing badly needed supplies to a Cambodian village—her adopted son’s birthplace and the place where his birthparents still live. A small group of professional New Yorkers, joined by the world-famous public health doctor, Paul Farmer, are rallying around a medical student from Burundi who is building a clinic in his war-torn land. A Hunter College professor is establishing a library in the rural outback of Uganda, and a publishing executive is building another library in Tanzania—all projects only organized charities could have carried out ten or 15 years ago.
Photographs by Dan Demetriad
Paula Shirk has formed a small group of Brooklynites to help lift the Cambodian family of her adopted son, Rudi, 6, out of poverty
The striking thing about these new Medicis is how up close and personal their efforts tend to be. “All philanthropy is either local or if it’s not, it’s certainly personal,” says Jeanne Donovan Fisher, who is partly responsible for the fact that playwright Charles Mee’s works have been appearing this season in a prominent off-Broadway theater. “I’m not a student of centuries-old arts patronage,” adds Fisher, “but I’ve always understood the power of it and the place of it and that it is a centuries-old tradition.”
Charlie Wolf, a patron of the doctor-to-be from Burundi, puts it this way: “There’s always been a problem with philanthropy in general, that it’s often detached from the individual donor. But not anymore. Being a patron gives it some kind of personal identification, some kind of personal experience.” And there are other benefits. “With smaller-scale philanthropy and these new small funding groups, you know where the money is going,” says Farmer. “It doesn’t get trapped in the United States or squandered on consultants, and smaller organizations are much more nimble, much more able to respond to changing conditions and challenges as they occur.”
CONTRIBUTE looks at four of these new give-get relationships: a violinist and a former football executive; a business leader’s wife and a playwright; a Brooklyn mom and her adopted son’s village elders in Cambodia; the world-renowned public health specialist and a Burundi-born survivor of genocide, now studying to be a doctor at Harvard.
“It takes a village,” that health specialist, Paul Farmer, says. Indeed. Herewith, some of its residents:
Paula Shirk/Ysa Osman
BROOKLYN BRIDGE TO CAMBODIA
A small group from Brooklyn and an Italian cow are helping sustain a family in Cambodia. The Italian cow—that’s her breed, not her nationality—is named Sylvia Poggioli, for National Public Radio’s Rome correspondent. Last April, Sylvia (the cow, not the correspondent) gave birth to a male calf, which in turn was named— because of its future as a stud—Fabio, after the Italian model.
There’s more: The cow arrived safely in the Cambodian village of Phum Thom, thanks to the efforts of Brooklyn’s Paula Shirk and her core crew of four borough supporters, who purchased the animal for $1,300 and continue to donate necessities to the village and the birth parents of Paula’s adopted Cambodian son, Rudi.
Rudi, now six years old, was born with the birth name Puth Chak to a woman named Ol Srun and her husband Chak. Because Chak left Srun when she was three months pregnant with three older children to raise, and because the family already was in desperate straits, Srun agreed in 2003, when Puth was 17 months, to give him up for adoption by Shirk.
Rudi was accompanied by a photo of his pretty, young birth-mother and three birth siblings, two boys and a girl under ten. All stared into the camera of the adoption facilitator. All were clearly bewildered, sad, their makeshift hut behind them. Their faces showed hunger. For Shirk, the photo became a motivating force. “I didn’t want Rudi at 18 to say to me, ‘You knew the despair my family lived in, and you did nothing.’”
So Shirk contacted a human rights worker in Phnom Penh who put her in touch with Ysa Osman, a bilingual Cambodian researcher who documents Khmer Rouge atrocities. Through the
efforts of the Cambodian Red Cross and Osman, the birth family was
located and it asked to write to Shirk. A letter followed.
Chak, it turned out, had returned to his family; the family had
moved to the Cambodian capital, looking for work. When Osman
found them, they were living up against a factory fence.
Sewage, Osman reported, regularly backed into their hut during
the rainy season, causing illnesses. Even so, that first family
letter, in 2005, put a positive spin on things: “We’re all fine
but homeless,” they wrote.
Shirk e-mailed Osman after hearing from the family and immediately
wired $55, which Osman used to buy five bags of a food
product called bi cheng, ten cans of milk, 12 cans of fish, vegetable
oil, two boxes of noodles, and one sack of rice. Shirk also asked
the family: Where do you want to live? What else do you need to
support yourself? Would you allow your children to be educated?
What Srun and Chak wanted most immediately was a scooter
to help them transport fish and vegetables from their village
to a market stall in Phnom Penh. Done. A few months later, in
December 2005, the photos and the letters Osman translated
showed a healthy, well-fed family. Home had become a rental in
a well-kept building. Cost: $66 a month, and the children were
in school full-time.
In April 2006, Shirk began to expand her goodwill network,
hosting a fundraiser in Brooklyn. Osman, in New York for a lecture,
spoke. More than $2,500 was raised and Sylvia, the cow, was purchased.
A core group, which included Shirk, her sister, and three
Brooklyn friends, materialized. “Brooklyn Bridge to Cambodia, Inc.”
filed for 501(c)(3) status, and Osman set up
as an NGO to coordinate further aid.
That aid kept coming. Five hundred soccer
uniforms for the classmates of Srun’s
children were shipped in autumn 2006, and
Heifer International, the big aid organization,
was asked to coordinate the village’s
economic revival. And still, Shirk wants
more. Never mind that she makes a modest
living from a small dog-walking business
and that she is supporting not just Rudi but
her biological son, Eli, 11. Already she has donated
about $3,000, and she’s just getting
started. Shirk now wants to help Osman’s village,
which was decimated by the Khmer
Rouge. Shirk also wants to help Osman,
himself, realize his dream of building an orphanage
for Cambodia’s street children. “I
don’t think of this as a mom-and-pop organization,”
Shirk says. “I think we can keep
growing. It’s only been two years and look
how much we’ve done.”
—Joan Oleck
Paul Tagliabue/
Robert McDuffie
"A SLIGHTLY FAUSTIAN DEAL"
Ex-NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue (left) and violinist
Robert McDuffie with the 1735 Guarneri del Gesu violin that Tagliabue helped to acquire
They’re an incongruous pair, or so they seem at first glance: the internationally
renowned violinist and the former commissioner of the
National Football League. But when violinist Robert McDuffie decided
to assemble a team of investors to buy a 1735 Guarneri del
Gesù violin worth $3.5 million, Paul Tagliabue, McDuffie’s friend,
not only put some of his own money into the venture but also lured
key players—including an anonymous $1 million investor—to do the
same. “I became either the quarterback or the cheerleader, depending
on how you look at it,” Tagliabue says.
The investment route wasn’t the first McDuffie tried when he discovered,
in the mid-1990s, that his ability to rise to the next level as
a musician depended on acquiring a truly great violin—in his case
the del Gesù, known as the Ladenburg. Initially, he angled for corporate
sponsorship, an approach routinely taken in other countries.
It didn’t work here. “It’s not in the American business mindset,” Mc-
Duffie says. “Culture is not America’s pastime.”
And so, in 1998, McDuffie took the first steps toward creating a
limited partnership; the goal was to sell 35 shares, each worth
$100,000. Tagliabue, whom he’d known for several years, attended
the first party where McDuffie pitched the idea. The football commissioner
then hosted two parties himself, including one in Atlanta
in 2000, when both men were on hand for the Super Bowl.
A central part of McDuffie’s pitch was the notion that American
musicians are at a competitive disadvantage against artists
from cultures where state or corporate support routinely places
astronomically expensive instruments in the hands of talented players. Still, it wasn’t until early 2001 that 16 investors, McDuffie
and Tagliabue included, finally formed their partnership.
The partnership leases the Ladenburg to McDuffie at no cost; the
terms of the 20-year lease, which dates to 1998, require him to pay
insurance and maintenance (together, about $20,000 a year) and
to play the instrument regularly to keep it in top condition. An optional
five-year extension will take the lease to 2023, the year Mc-
Duffie, now 49, turns 65. Upon its expiration, the partners plan to
sell the violin and realize a profit—which, given that it was recently
reappraised at $5 million, seems more than likely. “It’s a slightly
Faustian deal,” McDuffie concedes, but gratitude, not premature regret,
is his primary emotion. “These people did this without the tax
deduction,” he says, shaking his head in disbelief.
For Tagliabue, the lack of a tax deduction was inconsequential.
To him, helping McDuffie was primarily about helping a
friend. It was also in line with his philosophy of philanthropy. “I’m
a great believer that if you have talented people and talented leaders,
the best thing you can do is give them the resources either to
perform or to lead institutions,” Tagliabue says. “If you have great
talent, you can’t expect them to succeed without resources.”
—Laura Collins-Hughes
Paul Farmer/
Deogratias Nivizonkiza
HOPE SURVIVES IN BURUNDI
Deogratias Nivizonkiza (left)
with public health specialist
Paul Farmer, one of a small group helping "Deo" attend medical school in the U.S.
The tiny African nation of Burundi is one of the poorest, most
conflict-ridden on earth. Ravaged by malaria, TB, HIV-AIDS, and
vestiges of the bloody 1990s Hutu-Tutsi war, it’s a country where
one out of five citizens dies from water-born diseases and poor
sanitation. The average income is less than $700 per year, and 156
doctors struggle to serve nearly eight million people.
In November 2006, 250 New Yorkers gathered in a loft in Soho
to hear a Burundian talk about his country and ask for help. He
had help of his own—Pulitzer Prize–winning author Tracy Kidder
and Dr. Paul Farmer, the international health activist profiled in
Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains, were in the crowd. But
the evening—like the project they heard about, Health Works International—
belonged to the Burundian, a medical student named
Deogratias Nivizonkiza, or “Deo” for short.
A slight, handsome man in his third year of medical school at
Dartmouth, Deo regularly puts aside his books and travels to Burundi
to check on the construction of the health clinic in the village
of Kigutu, 70 miles north of the capital Bujumbura. What moves
people to immerse themselves in Deo’s project is his passion. “He
is hardbitten in his analysis (of the problems) but still able to be compassionate,
generous, affectionate,” Farmer told CONTRIBUTE. Others
agree. “He’s a human relations genius,” says Charlie Wolf, a
United Nations consultant who, with his wife Nancy, provided a
home for Deo for seven years. “What he’s trying to do,” Wolf says,
“captures and expresses very strong, very deep values of humanity.”
Born 38 years ago to a cattle farmer, Deo was influenced by an
uncle, Burundi’s first surgeon, to enroll in medical school in Bujumbura.
But when the 1993 genocide began, the family had to flee.
Deo wound up in Rwanda. Returning home a year later, his family
was nowhere to be found. A school classmate offered him a plane
ticket to the U.S., and he took it. Deo spent the next years in New
York and Boston, working on refugee immigration status and taking pre-med courses. A job materialized at Farmer’s Partners
in Health organization, which has built clinics in Haiti, Rwanda,
Peru, and Russia. Farmer gave Deo the encouragement he needed
to start medical school all over again, this time at Dartmouth.
Barbara Lowenstein, the New York literary agent, met Deo during
a trip to Africa. “We clicked immediately,” she recalls. “He was
the most charming guy in the world.” Lowenstein organized last
year’s $100,000 fundraiser in Soho, and three smaller benefits have
followed. The most poignant part of each are Deo’s remarks: about
how Burundians who cannot afford medical care are jailed, even for
modest bills; how AIDS widows struggle to feed their children; how
a boy with a belly swollen by malaria was burned by his own parents,
who wanted to take their son’s mind off his acutely painful spleen.
Despite such horrors, hope survives. Deo tells the following story:
A ceremonial visit to the new clinic in Kigutu was scheduled in
July 2006 for government ministers, the clinic’s medical director and
architect, Paul Farmer and a colleague from Partners in Health, and
a New York delegation that included Lowenstein. The clinic is six
kilometers from the nearest highway, and Deo suddenly realized that
cars couldn’t make it over the existing gravel path. A construction
company wanted $50,000 to build a road. Dejected, Deo conveyed
the bad news to the village.
Then, as Deo recounted at the fundraiser, the unexpected happened:
“A woman with a baby crying on her back said to me, ‘Do
not pay a penny for this road. We have become so sick because we
are poor. But we are not poor because we are lazy. We will work
on this road with our own hands.” The very next
day, 166 people showed up with pickaxes and hoes.
They built the road, the celebration took place,
three clinics have since gone up, and Deo’s message
proved true: hope survives.
—Joan Oleck
Jeanne Donovan Fisher/
Charles Mee
"MAKING STUFF
THAT DOESN'T WORK"
Playwright Charles Mee (right) with patron Jeanne Donovan Fisher, a theatre producer and philanthropist who has been instrumental in allowing Mee to write full-time
Almost no one makes a living as a playwright. So playwrights teach
or write for television and film—anything to support their theater
habit. The only problem is that their playwriting is usually marginalized
in the process.
“I spent most of a lifetime doing other things to make a living,”
says postmodern playwright Charles Mee, whose past includes stints
as a magazine editor and the author of political histories. “But my
love had always been the theater. It’s really what I wanted to do. I
missed it all those years. I lived in terror that if I took the step into
it, my children would die of starvation.”
“He’s not at all dramatic,” teases Jeanne Donovan Fisher, a theater
producer and philanthropist who has been instrumental in allowing
Mee to be a full-time playwright since the late 1990s.
It was then, around the time Mee turned 60, that a passel of important
theater artists wanted to work with him, and he didn’t know
how he could afford to do it without the cushion of wealth—his own
or, it occurred to him, someone else’s. “And I thought, but I don’t
know anybody who has that kind of money or would want to do that
or has any interest in the theater or would ever think of supporting
an artist to do anything. Oh! Except my friend Dick.” Richard B.
Fisher, former chairman and CEO of Morgan Stanley,
was a committed philanthropist, Jeanne Donovan
Fisher’s husband, and Mee’s friend of three
decades. “So I wrote Dick this letter, being serious but
I think also thinking, this will amuse him, saying,
‘How would you like to start a playwriting company
together? You put in all the money and I’ll write all the plays.’ And
he called a couple of days later and he said, ‘I talked to Jeannie about
it, and we’d love to do that.”
With that, playwriting became Mee’s only job. The Fishers embraced
his proposal because of its uniqueness, its brazenness, and
its appeal to partnership—and because it came from a friend whose
art and intellect they admired. “But it also just was another aspect
or angle to the way in which Dick thought about generosity, really,
and philanthropy,” Jeanne Donovan Fisher says about her husband,
who died in 2004. “He was smart about sharing.”
Mee, reasonably prolific even when he was writing in his
spare time, began to gush plays, often scripts he’d been thinking
about for decades. At the same time, his profile in the theater
rose. In August, the off-Broadway Signature Theatre Company
opened a three-play season of his work. Two of the plays, Queens
Boulevard and Paradise Park, are world premieres. “Dick at one
point said, ‘I want to see what you can do if you don’t have any
worries,’” says Mee. “So I’m experimenting, going to the edge and
falling off the edge, making stuff that doesn’t work, and trying
to find out what the form of the theater can possibly be.”
—Laura Collins-Hughes
