Our family created the Laura and Gary Lauder Philanthropic Fund (LPF) in 1995 to pursue the mitzvah of tzedakah, or righteous giving. The Torah commands us to be philanthropic, and we feel significant responsibility to give back to our community and do our small part in making the world a better place. This is a huge challenge; there are so many desperately important problems.
This review is the philanthropic journey of our young family trying to act on the values that we hope to transmit to our children. We know many other families are also struggling with how to get started. We have documented our journey so that others may avoid our mistakes and gather the courage to attempt their own philanthropic expedition. Along the way, we have learned invaluable lessons from philanthropists before and alongside us. We are grateful for their wise counsel.
After 13 years of grantmaking, we took a cursory look at our philanthropic giving totals, and came to some startling realizations.
First, we didn’t realize the extent of some of our giving patterns. For example, a monumental 50% of our grants was given to help build buildings. Yes, capital grants are critical to build a community, and building Jewish life is one of our top priorities philanthropically. So we were just in time: As we were scaling up our philanthropy, the most extraordinary building boom was happening within the ten mile radius of the Palo Alto Jewish community. More than $325 million was raised and invested in these magnificent new facilities to help our children and the entire community learn and grow. Examples include:
• The Gideon Hausner Jewish Day School raised and built a $25 million campus after selling the old campus for $10 million.
• Kehillah Jewish High School built a $10 million campus.
• A new Jewish Community Center broke ground in 2007 on a $150 million facility.
• A new $150 million Jewish retirement home is going up next to the JCC.
• Congregation Beth Am, the largest Reform temple in our area, built a $3 million expansion.
All of these projects were very important to us. Of course, we couldn’t help as much as we wanted to, but we are proud that we helped as much as we could at the height of the Jewish community building boom. Now, having (barely) survived the seemingly endless solicitations, suddenly we have to face new choices about how to re-prioritize our giving in other areas.
Our second “a-ha” was that the 50% of our grants that were not capital over the past 13 years were program and operating grants. However, we made so many small gifts—to more than 400 charities a year—that we had little impact on any of them. In the programmatic area, we had to change to be more strategic. We needed to shift focus away from capital giving, and make our programmatic grants more strategic. We needed help.
We hired an organizational consultant Robyn Lieberman in 2005 to review our previous 10 years of philanthropic giving. She helped us articulate our family’s values and hone a strategic mission for the future. From there, we worked to create an operational framework for LPF in alignment with our mission. We have taken small steps over time: Last year, we created “buckets,” or categories, for grants consistent with the Fund’s mission. We made only 80 grants and limited our “relational” giving (to friends’ causes outside of our mission) to less than ten percent of total grants. The process has been cathartic and refreshing; and we realized it’s never completely finished. We are constantly refining our philanthropic focus as issues change, but we try to maintain a careful, strategic focus so we can achieve real impact.
We have deep appreciation for both Robyn and Phyllis Cook (my “rabbi” and mentor,) and to the adept staff at the Jewish Community Endowment Fund. Our philanthropy would not move forward and grow without them.
