How can you be smarter when it comes to philanthropy? Ann Lurie, one of Chicago’s biggest and most effective donors has it figured out. Ann Lurie likes to encourage people to pick up a dictionary and look up the word “philanthropy.” Its purest definition is not about money; it is a “love of mankind.”

“I try to encourage people who feel they want to help that help doesn’t need to be connected to a monetary donation,” Lurie says. “We should change the perception. Not everybody could give away $150 million, but people shouldn’t feel they can’t contribute because they don’t have my resources.”

This sentiment comes from a soft-spoken Chicagoan who has given away $148 million from the estate of her late husband, real estate investor Robert Lurie, who died in 1990 at age 48 of colon cancer. Despite her efforts to maintain a low profile, the Lurie name graces a cancer center and a medical research center at Northwestern University, buildings at the University of Michigan (Robert’s alma mater), a garden at Millennium Park and even a street on Chicago’s South Side that is home to the Greater Chicago Food Depository, one of Lurie’s causes.

Before his death, Robert Lurie identified his alma mater and cancer research as two beneficiaries of his estate, managed by the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Foundation. Finding the best recipients has been up to his widow, who acknowledges that in the early years after his death, she gave money more than time because she was raising the couple’s six grieving children.

In the past few years, however, with the children grown, Lurie has become more involved with the nonprofit groups to which she donates money. And she’s developed a set of guidelines about how to choose recipients—principles that can be helpful to all philanthropists, regardless of the sums they’re planning to give away.

Most important, she says, is to pick your target based on your interests. Don’t just write a check. “You must get hands-on,” she says. “Take them for a road test of sorts. I’ve done that and walked away. Either there’s a connection or no connection.”

A case in point: Before her husband died, he suggested she use some of the money to open a soup kitchen. Months later, Lurie visited soup kitchens; the one that turned her off required patrons to sit through a 45-minute sermon in return for a meal. It just struck her as wrong.

She also advises other philanthropists to look at the would-be recipient’s financial workings, to ensure that donations trickle down to those in need, not those who want a raise. She also tends to steer clear of grass-roots organizations, explaining that while their mission may be worthwhile, they generally lack infrastructure. Personally, she steers clear of political contributions because, she points out, “There are hungry Republicans and hungry Democrats.” Finally, she recommends making sure that a group is a registered 501( c)(3) organization, so that financial donors can receive a federal tax deduction.

“Often it’s difficult, because there are so many agencies doing good things,” Lurie says. “Even if you had an unlimited budget, you couldn’t help everybody.”

What Chicago lacks, in Lurie’s view, is an umbrella agency that would match philanthropists and their interests with a charitable organization. She has already made inquiries about forming such a group. In the meantime, she recommends that people who are interested in international philanthropy contact the Chicago Global Donors Network (chicagoglobaldonors.org) to get them started.

The desire to have her money help large groups of people is the reason for her initial interest in the Greater Chicago Food Depository, to which Lurie first made a monetary donation in 1990, according to agency records. The depository acts as a food bank for 600 member agencies.

Six years later, she toured the facility, and subsequently increased her donations significantly. In 2000, while she and two of her children were volunteering there, washing dirty beverage cans so they could be distributed, Lurie learned of the depository’s quest to build a new facility. She asked a lot of questions and made the lead $5-million gift of a $30-million capital campaign; in 2004, the agency moved into its new building. She has since made other significant, but quiet, gifts to the agency.

“It’s a little bit like having a fairy godmother out there,” says Kate Maehr, the agency’s executive director. “It sent a really strong message to the philanthropic community that human services are things we need to pay attention to. There’s an incredible cachet in being involved with the Lyric (Opera). Ann, in making the gift she did, sent a very strong message that this was something she valued, and (given her status) as a real leader in Chicago, people noticed.”

Lurie credits her altruistic tendencies to her mother, who encouraged her to do a good deed daily. Even as a teenager stuffing envelopes as part of a service project, she found that doing those good deeds gave her pleasure. Today, she calls her philanthropy selfish because it makes her feel good.

Her from-the-ground-up involvement in a project in Africa is probably the best example of carrying philanthropy through to fruition. In the late 1990s, while on safari, Lurie was asked to help build a nursery school for the Maasai people in remote southeastern Kenya. When she returned to Chicago, she sought out information about the formation of the Head Start program, and she, a former boyfriend and her daughter created a nursery school program for the Maasai, even training the teachers. On subsequent trips to the school, Lurie, a pediatric nurse by training, saw that children frequently missed school because of illness. She started asking about the region’s health care and found herself deepening her involvement.

“I said, here I am in the middle of nowhere and I see this need and I have the means to do something about it,” Lurie says. “It was an ‘aha’ moment. Virtually everyone I talked to discouraged me. What I had in mind was bringing Western medicine there.”

Back in Chicago, she bought a 28-foot Airstream trailer, had it converted into a medical clinic, shipped it to Kenya and hired a physician, a lab technician and a nurse. The mobile clinic began traveling the region on a regular schedule in 2001. Two years later, she launched an HIV/AIDS program through the clinic. And in January 2004, the initiative opened a permanent, 24-building medical compound that operates with solar power.

The project, Africa Infectious Disease Village Clinics, has treated more than 25,000 patients; last year, Lurie spent five months in Africa. “We’ve taken a community that was bereft of health care and we’ve transformed lives,” she says.

With her interests so widespread, in terms of both cause and geography, Lurie admits she’s often asked herself whether the foundation’s resources would be more effective if she’d identified only one cause. “I have a lot of divergent interests, so—to satisfy my own interests—my philanthropy is diverse,” she says. “But sometimes, people who choose one particular passion may be more productive and see the fruits of their labors. I don’t think that would have worked for me.”

–Mary Ellen Podmolik

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 14th, 2006 at 5:49 pm and is filed under Community Involvement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.