To Have and Have Not

Frank Giustra has spurred a keen new interest in philanthropy. How do we harness that enthusiasm and apply it to our city?

By Matt O'Grady

On the southwest corner of Main and Hastings a dozen people mill about, including a pair of men in their twenties haggling over the contents of a shopping cart, and an older woman in a wheelchair hurtling toward the curb and some unsuspecting passersby. Two police cruisers, lodged on the sidewalk, obscure the view of a suspect having his hands secured behind his back. In the background, like a mirage in the desert, sits the Carnegie Centre—fall sunlight bouncing off its dusty pink sandstone. The former library is a 1903 landmark of early Vancouver philanthropy, a $50,000 gift from one of the world’s best-known captains of industry. These days it’s also Ground Zero for what is arguably the part of Vancouver most in need of philanthropic love.

Andrew Carnegie—who famously proclaimed that “to die rich is to die disgraced”—essentially invented, along with John D. Rockefeller, the modern concept of philanthropy. The wealthy and powerful had long given to their pet causes, but their aims were parochial and their giving modest. Then along came Carnegie—who in 1868, at age 33, decided to direct all his U.S. Steel capital, beyond an annual salary of $50,000, toward establishing a foundation and building “the ladders upon which the aspiring can rise”—schools, hospitals, and, notably, libraries (some 2,500 throughout the world). By the time he died, in 1919, Carnegie had given away over $350 million—approximately $4.3 billion in today’s dollars—and firmly established the principle that true power lies not in the wealth you amass but in the legacy you leave behind.

The Carnegie Corporation and Rockefeller Foundation continue to dole out millions of dollars each year around the world. Their broad missions—to “facilitate the diffusion of knowledge” (Carnegie) and “promote the well-being of mankind” (Rockefeller)—helped underwrite Canadian arts and letters through the first half of the 20th century (prior to the Canada Council for the Arts’ arrival in 1957), and inspired generations of wealthy elite to support their local communities—including the likes of Morris Wosk, William Sauder, Martha Lou Henley, Michael Audain, and Joe Segal, whose generosity sustains Vancouver’s symphonies, galleries, and schools. And yet the Carnegie model has become something of an anachronism in recent years. Today’s big givers—instead of espousing wooly notions of social progress in local communities—are more likely to speak of global legacies, and seek out investments that can produce measurable results.

Take mining financier Frank Giustra and his $100-million donation to the Clinton Foundation. With its aim of “strengthening the capacity of people throughout the world to meet the challenges of global interdependence,” the Clinton Foundation approaches philanthropy as if it were a Harvard case study; it identifies and corrects “market failures” by aggregating buyers to make AIDS drugs more affordable, or by brokering distribution deals for expensive climate-friendly technologies. “I believe that in the years ahead,” the ex-president explained in The Atlantic, “the organization and expansion of public-good markets will become one of the most important areas of philanthropy, and will be an area where philanthropy sometimes blurs into strict private enterprise.” Such talk is the sort of clear-eyed philanthropy that Howe Street veterans like Giustra can safely support.

PAGE: 1 | 2

CONTINUE