Philanthropy Revolution

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to the 1%

‘We’re seated at the chairman’s table,’ I whispered to Josh, taking his arm as we entered the banquet hall.

This was our first major event at Hillcrest Country Club, a storied place whose members have included Jack Benny, George Burns, Groucho Marx and Sidney Poitier. Josh and I had joined a few weeks before, following a year-long vetting process – just in time, as it turned out, for the Jewish Federation’s annual fundraising dinner.

We were new to the world of philanthropy. In July of 2010, RealD (the 3D projection technology company that Josh and his partner had built from scratch) had its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange. We’d gone from living paycheck to paycheck to the 1%, literally overnight.

I still couldn’t quite get my head around the idea that I’d never have to worry about money again. It meant no more clipping coupons for Target or patching together loans to afford college for the kids, and I didn’t know how to retire the somewhat prudent approach that had always been part of my mental wiring.

The one thing I’d taken to – quite naturally, in fact – was giving. Even before Josh and his partners rang the ceremonial bell at the New York Stock Exchange, I’d pledged $1M to my synagogue. Together with Josh, I’d also started the process of endowing a chair at a major hospital. And I’d made a smaller (but still significant) gift on the advice of friends, in this case to the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, a $50M umbrella organization for social service programs, community advocacy, and Jewish engagement.

Although we’d had little interaction with the Federation before then, we were confident that it did good work. Many in the community had suggested to us that a gift to the Federation was something of a prerequisite for being taken seriously in the world of Jewish philanthropy, and that’s what appeared to have happened. That night at Hillcrest, we felt privileged to be recognized by the organization, having been seated as we were at the table of its top lay leader.

We sat through speeches and chatted with guests, and at about exactly the moment we were starting to relax and enjoy ourselves, we noticed a vinyl folio on the table in front of us. It was pretty innocuous, the sort of thing you’d get your check in at the deli. Someone had produced it, I surmised, while our attention was elsewhere

That someone was the chairman, as it turned out. He must have seen us register that the folio was in front of us, because he immediately stood and made his way to my side.

I opened the folio to see what it contained: a ledger-like printout. Standing over me now, the chairman leaned in. ‘This is last year’s gift,’ he said, pointing to a number on the printout. ‘Of course, your gift this year will reflect a significant increase.’

He handed me a pen.

I remember catching Josh’s eye above our wineglasses. We’d later discuss the fact that we sensed people watching us. Those around us were chatting, milling about, eating dessert or enjoying a coffee – but they were definitely watching. As I’ve explained, I’d made a significant donation to the Federation only a few months before. Now I had to increase it? We hadn’t been told that the gift was annual and nor had anyone from the organization sought us out to identify the extent to which we were aligned with its values and mission.

We were so embarrassed. The club has a two-year probation period (ensuring compliance with its charitable donation policy) that neither of us wanted to breach, so we were also at a loss as to what to do. We asked the chairman if we could enter the same amount as we’d donated previously and left it at that.

But, in the car on the way home, we wondered aloud whether all the other donors out there were accustomed to being strong-armed in this manner, in public.

Was this philanthropy?

Of all the freedoms I anticipated having when our lives were so dramatically altered, the one that excited me the most was the freedom to give. Specifically, to give of our money. Josh and I had envisioned ourselves as active givers who would also be involved with the organizations we funded. We had hopes of addressing Crohn’s disease (which Josh has lived with for decades) and child welfare, as well as advocating for democracy in Israel, among other progressive causes.

Today, Josh and I are the proud supporters of dozens of nonprofits, not only as givers, but also as volunteers and leaders. We both sit on boards and enjoy close relationships with executives and staff across the sector. In the last decade, we’ve also hosted nearly 200 charity events in the home we chose specifically for this purpose. In fact, our giving portfolio is such that I left my career as a businesswoman – in part so that I could give the portfolio the full attention it deserved.

So why this book?

All too often, my interactions with nonprofits have left me feeling that the only thing I’ve got is my money, and that some fundraisers have been taught from the get-go to make their single priority acquiring this money. My sense (not always, but often) is that I’m there to be ‘worked’ and coddled, manipulated into loosening my purse strings. And this has meant that everything I value – the qualities of honesty, transparency, and connection that have always governed my personal relationships, as well my relationships in business – is left at the door.

If this experience were unique to me, I’d probably just take that beautiful model I envisioned, when I sketched out our lives as givers, and put it in a box somewhere. But as you’ll learn in these pages, I’m not alone in the experience. And philanthropy is paying the price.

A Deal with God

Even before the IPO, Josh and I decided that, if everything unfolded as it appeared to be unfolding, we’d each make a major gift to a cause that mattered to us personally.

I’d chosen the synagogue, the Reform congregation where our twins (who were four years old when our lives changed) attended preschool and where I was a vice-president on the board.

The Senior Rabbi had been a source of wisdom and calm for me during the stressful months before the IPO – and believe me, ‘stressful’ is putting it mildly.

The cocktail-party version of the RealD trajectory goes something like this: years ago, Josh became acquainted with film director James Cameron. This was by way of Josh’s early work in digital-entertainment development, production, and marketing. But, in 1996, Josh and James began working on something different – something driven by the possibility that Josh could create the technology for clean and immersive 3D-viewing.

Josh is a self-trained inventor. By almost any measure, he is also a technological genius. Working at first in our garage, he set about creating a brand-new system of screens, projectors, and 3D glasses. Over the next decade, investors got on board and Josh’s technology began hitting theaters in 2005. In 2009, James Cameron’s blockbuster film Avatar, which was produced with RealD technology, showed on 4,000 screens in fifty countries, becoming the highest-grossing movie of all time.

Josh’s technology not only revolutionized 3D, it remains the industry standard today. It would eventually catapult RealD into the global marketplace, leading to its IPO in July of 2010. At that time, the company was valued at $200M. Shortly afterwards, its valuation peaked at $1B.

But getting there – well, it took an awful lot out of Josh, and also out of me.

We married in 2004, and in 2006 had our twins, Jack and Emily. I had kids from previous marriages: Sasha and Darrow were teenagers when I married Josh, and Halley was ten years old. For his part, Josh wasn’t a stranger to success; quite the opposite. He’d co-founded and sold Digital Planet, one of the first companies ever to build entertainment industry websites. But he’d put his assets back into RealD and didn’t earn a salary from the company for many years. I’d left my job as a studio executive before we married to run my own media, entertainment, and technology consulting business, and I supported the family until Josh (following an infusion of investments into RealD just before the IPO) was able to draw an income.

At that point, we were doing fine. We’d purchased a small house and we obviously paid our bills, but we also had to go deeply into debt to cover the costs of the lawyers who would protect our interests and support us during the IPO. Which, I might add, came with no guarantees. We had no idea if we were about to be able to retire in luxury or spend the rest of our lives in monstrous debt.

Josh was also traveling non-stop in the weeks before the IPO (not good, given his Crohn’s disease) and I was working, not to mention taking care of the kids, worrying about Josh and our family’s future, and basically falling apart. So, I did what you do. I made a deal with God.

If we came out okay, I’d do something major for my synagogue.

One of the first calls I made after the successful roadshow (which is the step just before an official IPO) was to the Senior Rabbi at my temple. I told her that we’d be donating $1M to the synagogue’s capital campaign. Needless to say, she was thrilled.

I was, too, until the moment she started grilling me.

The rabbi didn’t question the fact that an IPO was imminent. She didn’t have to – I’d already given her the option to buy some RealD friends-and-family shares, which is common practice in these scenarios. What she questioned instead was the gift, along with my ability (perhaps even my authority) to make a gift of this magnitude happen.

Within minutes of our hanging up, the rabbi called me back. She wanted to talk to Josh this time, because she needed to make sure, she told me, that he approved of this donation – and that I wasn’t living in a ‘fantasyland’ or just being impulsive. It seemed to me as if my friend and supporter (frankly, my feminist role model) was calling to confirm with my husband that a financial decision I’d made was credible.

I might have seen this as telling – an early indication that, where large donations are involved, people will often behave in unexpected ways. I learned later that, with this simple call to the rabbi, autonomous ‘me’ had thrown off the system, or at least the system governing major donations. There had been no early qualifying discussion with a development director, no strategy meeting, no lunch with fundraisers and no ‘ask’ for money.

Still, we were very proud a few months later to dedicate The Greer Social Hall at Temple Emanuel in Beverly Hills. All the fuss of the occasion made me think of my grandmother, who used to point out my grandfather’s plaque at the synagogue we visited on High Holidays. And it certainly would have meant a lot to my dad, who died when I was in my twenties.

As for us, it was a little surreal to see our family name on a wall. But it also felt good.

Lisa and Josh Who?

With giving now occupying such an important part of our lives, Josh and I decided that I should sell the egg-donor agency that I’d founded a few years earlier in order to help people who were struggling with fertility issues. Anyway, I was ready. Our lives had suddenly become a lot more complicated, and I wanted to dedicate myself full-time to managing our giving portfolio as well as some of our real-estate investments. In the intervening months, we’d put much of the RealD money into investments so that Josh and I wouldn’t have to work another day in our lives if we so chose – which is laughable in retrospect, since neither of us can sit still for longer than five minutes. We also established trust funds for the kids and, on the advice of friends, set up a Donor Advised Fund at the Jewish Community Foundation.

We were ready to work on Josh’s big gift.

Josh, who grew up in Toronto, was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease as a teenager. He actually taught himself computer programming in high school in order to keep himself busy during the many months he was ill, either stuck at home or in the hospital. He has endured dozens of surgeries and years of pain, and has nurtured a vision, in the process, of building an institute dedicated to Crohn’s research. We reached out to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center (a world-class hospital not far from where we live, and where Josh and our family have been treated for years) and what transpired offered us another clue that we had entered a whole new world.

A friend had opened the door for us by introducing us to the president of the board. Still, when Josh made it known that he wanted to make a major donation for Crohn’s research, we were transferred to a junior development officer. We called several times over the next couple of months, but nobody took us seriously. A full six months after we first made contact, Cedars accepted our money.

A realistic interval for a large institution? Maybe. But with new donors like ourselves, who aren’t accustomed to the delay (and who might not persevere through the silence), it’s a risky way to do business.

What if we had walked?

I did realize later that, to these charities, we were pretty alien. We represented totally unknown entities. We hadn’t progressed through any of the conventional channels of donor cultivation (such as the lunches and pitches and follow-up) and nor were we the product of prospect research. We didn’t also throw numbers around or make demands, and they had no idea how to handle us.

Cedars has one of the most well-conceived and sensitively run development plans I’ve ever seen. That’s what I realize now. The organization has even integrated its early experience with us into its development training, reframing what happened into a teaching moment for fundraisers. And without question, the day we dedicated the Joshua L. and Lisa Z. Greer Chair in Inflammatory Bowel Disease Genetics at Cedars in late 2011 was one for the books.

Even now, Josh and I feel overwhelmed by the idea that we might actually have an impact on a disease that has so profoundly affected his life. Dr. Dermot McGovern, a world expert in the field, assumed the role of Chair, and our donation has allowed him to take risks, explore different approaches, and leverage the initial seed money into additional grants and funding.

Also, the lab’s work has been groundbreaking. It has generated practicable insights into specific genetic variations of Crohn’s disease, resulting in certain customized therapies already entering clinical trial. Happily, we’ve also developed a friendship with Dermot and his wife, and Josh and I both serve on Cedars’ Board of Governors.

But the lesson remains. Until you’ve got a name and a reputation as a donor, you may well find it hard to give your money away. And for a sector that’s desperate to attract support, especially new support, so that its worthy nonprofits succeed, that’s a problem.

Off Script! Off Script!

These early experiences gave us insight into the practices and politics of the sector, but it wasn’t until I started taking meetings on a regular basis that I realized just how out of sync our philanthropic systems were with what I’d always known to be true about human beings.

It took about a year for our names to get out there. This heralded an onslaught of emails and calls, but I noted with interest the fact that, although I let it be known to fundraisers that I handle our family finances, everyone wanted to meet us ‘together.’

I found some solicitations easy to decline. If a charity had nothing to do with my values or interests, I didn’t bother. For the most part, though, I was dying to learn about the wonderful work of the organizations that were contacting me, and I very happily took the meetings – solo, more often than not – to the extent of scheduling several a week. In many ways, it was an education, an immersive ‘master class’ in charitable giving.