Special Edition 11: Great Philanthropists - Eli Broad and Pushing the Envelope
Welcome to another edition of "Around with Randall" your weekly podcast making your nonprofit more effective for your community. And here is your host, the CEO and Founder of Hallett Philanthropy, Randall Hallett.
Thank you for joining me, Randall, here on "Around with Randall." We jump back into our great philanthropist series talking about those who have used the cause of philanthropy to change the world or change their part of the world, and most importantly the lessons we can learn from some of their examples. Today's subject, today's conversation is about Eli Broad.
Eli Broad was, having passed in 2021, a legendary philanthropist primarily in California, and in the art or arts community. Eli was born in the Bronx in 1933 and really his wealth came from two factors. In the 1950s after graduating from Michigan State he began a company to build what would be considered tract housing in Detroit and that then built out as the company's called Kauffman and Broad into Phoenix and Los Angeles, which eventually was where and why he moved to California in 1971 as a diversification effort. For $52 million dollars he purchased an insurance company called Sun Life, which you may have heard of, because he as mentioned purchased at $52 million and sold it for $18 billion just before the turn of the century in 1998. And that's where his wealth came from. Married uh to Edith since 1954, he passed as mentioned in 2021. Kind of the big picture of Eli Broad.
What's more important to us is the philanthropy piece. If you're in the arts community or if you're in the Los Angeles area and related to art or just how arts has dominated Los Angeles then you know Eli Broad. He was the integral part of the development of downtown Los Angeles and in particular the arts community. Predominantly for 25-30 years he drove the success. As an example, the Disney Performing Arts Center in downtown was basically dead in the water. They didn't know what to do with it. He took over the fundraising efforts and now you have the Disney Performance Center. He is responsible for the Broad Museum in downtown Los Angeles. He has given hundreds of millions of dollars to bio research, to local arts education opportunities in the Los Angeles area. He has given to Massachusetts Institute of Technology for genomic research as well as Harvard. He's spent his life, at least the last 30 to 30 years of it really changing the direction of los Angeles and of medical research.
That's not the part that we're going to spend the most amount of time with or about talking about. Eli Broad also wrote an autobiography, I believe, in 2014 or 15 and indicated that he probably viewed himself as not a very popular person. And upon his death from the New York Times obituary to Los Angeles Times articles there were various quotes about, and usually at death we think about someone hopefully in the most positive light, and there were comments about that he was a pain in the butt, that he caused a lot of issues. A famous story is that he had hired frank Geary, the legendary architect, to do some work, got fed up with him and fired him and caused a lawsuit. And he just had a way of doing things and he believed his way was the right way and he was, I think as my mother would put it a bull in a china shop. The question becomes what we can learn from this. And based on my experience, it's really an interesting question about what kind of volunteer leaders we want.
Well, I think everyone has a vision of the perfect leader, the perfect volunteer director on the board, or the campaign chair, or what whatever the volunteer position might be. That person in that ideal utopian world is someone who opens doors, who makes phone calls, who is popular, who is well-respected, who gets their job done, who is revered, and can also make a large gift. The problem with utopia is that it doesn't actually exist. How many times have we been in our career, or careers, in situations where we've got volunteer leadership and they are a myriad of those things, but they're not aggressive enough, they're not hard-charging enough, and they say all the right things, they want all the right things. But they don't have the ability to get you the access or get the organization the access that you need to certain people, or they're not willing to be in a situation where they really push someone to make a gift.
One of the stories that came from one of the obituaries when he passed in 2000, in June of 2021 was he, several people quoted like he wouldn't take no for an answer. If you were a civic philanthropic leader he'd just dog you until you just said okay fine I'll give you the money. What I want to try to extrapolate from this is that there are cost-benefit analysis outcomes, reviews, whatever you want to say from someone who is aggressive and a volunteer and has such strong passion for the particular nonprofit mission. In Eli's case it's arts. The Broad Museum, the Disney, Disney Center, other other avenues that he's he chose to support and advocate for in the philanthropic world, there's cost benefit. The cost is it made some people mad, the benefit is he got a stuff done. The question we have to ask ourselves, and maybe the lesson we can learn here is, do we want people who can get things done but might push the envelope a little bit, alienate some people? Or do we like the nice people?
Early on in my career I probably would have articulated that if I had to choose one or the other, and this is not really a binary choice but let's just pretend for a moment it is, I probably chose the nice person. As I've gotten older, as I have had tremendous amazing experiences that are, really should be credited to other people who had faith and trust in me, I've realized that sometimes it's those that alienate a little bit, who push the envelope, are the ones who get the stuff done. And sometimes in our campaigns with volunteer leadership or with our boards we find people that we think are connected maybe they are connected but they're not willing to do what we need them to do which is advocate and open doors, help us get to what we're trying to get to, which is a larger philanthropic opportunity.
Collectively, individually I've worked with clients I have a couple right now where this is an issue. It's really a challenge to get the volunteers to be aggressive enough. I'll give you a practical example of where it worked well. We are, we were in a process with a capital campaign and someone agreed to make a gift and the conversation turned to a volunteer and myself and the chief development officer and the discussion was, what do we do because it's underperforming what we thought was reasonable, and that gift was going to trigger others, and that volunteer and we worked out a strategy and I was part of that strategy. And the chief development officer, those two went back to the person and frankly said we can't accept the gift at this level, it will cost us too much, and it was the volunteer who had to do it because the volunteers at their level, the chief development officer incredibly accomplished isn't one of them, and that's true on our board. Sometimes you need that person inside your board, one of them, to push the envelope for all.
In a campaign how do they help you leverage those opportunities? That's Eli Broad. He brought a passion, maybe over passion by some people's standards. But look what he accomplished. He changed the face of arts in Los Angeles from his own contributions of his art, 2,600 pieces of art or something of that nature, building a museum to the Disney to others. There are plenty of people who would say sometimes with pain in the backside, but I think the question was best asked shortly after his death in an editorial in the Los Angeles Times by Carolina Miranda she notes some of these comments from people that he sometimes alienated, sometimes he made mad, sometimes they didn't want to deal with it but the question in the title is, who's going to fill Eli Broad's shoes, philanthropic shoes? How about nobody.
If we truly believe that the mission that we serve, and the causes that we're raising money for, and the purposes that they have are truly going to affect people in a positive way, the evolution in my career in this thought process is we need people more like Eli Broad. Yes they may make a person or two not happy, a little bit uncomfortable, they make us a little uncomfortable, but if the job or the responsibility or the goal is to get the job done then that's what we need and I don't want to break any morals or ethics, I don't want to cause anybody major strife, but a little bit of pushing isn't the worst thing in the world and I think that's the lesson I want to take from this great philanthropist. He had a vision. He had, he saw what it could mean. You could agree with him or disagree with him, but the effect positively he has had on arts, on research in the medicine and genomics, on arts in secondary education ,is undeniable. I'm not saying the ends justify the means, but I'm saying a little bit of a push, a little bit of uncomfortableness, isn't the worst thing in the world. We can learn that from Eli Broad.
Check out the blogs at hallettphilanthropy.com. Two, three a week. And if you'd like to get a hold of me, podcast@hallettphilanthropy.com. Don't forget, much like the great philanthropists we talk about every six weeks or so, they're people who make things happen and they are not people who watch things happen but they're doing it for people who are wondering, are the causes, that are wondering what happened. That paraphrase on that old Gaelic saying I use and that's our mission and our goal. How do we find people to partner with us as people who make things happen, who they want to make things happen for, the things in the places and the people that are wondering what happened? That's what philanthropy and love of mankind's all about. Eli Broad pushing the envelope, little discomfort, not the worst thing in the world. we'll go back to our normal series of the tactical 20 minutes on ways to make your philanthropy, foundation, your nonprofit a better place next time right back here on "Around with Randall." Don't forget make it a great day.