The Giver’s Dilemma

“To give away money is an easy matter and in any man’s power. But to decide to whom to give it, and how large and when, and for what purpose and how, is neither in every man’s power nor an easy matter.” — Aristotle

LAST AUGUST, WHEN George School issued a press release announcing Barbara Dodd Anderson’s unprecedented gift of $128.5 million, the floodgates, as it were, opened. While the school’s director, Nancy Starmer, said she’d expected a fair amount of media attention, nothing prepared her for the onslaught: the TV news trucks rumbling onto campus, the satellite dishes blooming like mushrooms, the phones ringing off the hook, the headlines in newspapers nationwide, all cheering Anderson’s benevolence, and the largest single donation to a private secondary school in American philanthropic history.

It gave the appearance that all this had, essentially, happened overnight: that 75-year-old Anderson, whose father had taught future multibillionaire Warren Buffett at Columbia University and made millions investing early in Buffett’s company, had, like a fairy godmother, waved her wand/pen under the cloak of night and cut a bank-breaking check, to which the administrators at the idyllic Bucks County Quaker school awoke the following morning with great surprise and delight. Actually, the process was long and, at times, complicated. “It’s called ‘stewarding a gift,’” Anne Storch, the school’s director of development, explains. “The discussion for this particular gift probably started 14 or 15 months ago.”

Anderson, a retired kindergarten teacher from Fresno, California, who graduated from George School in 1950, had previously given significant amounts to the school, including $5 million for a new library, and already was the school’s single most significant benefactor. Storch, class of ’67, had gotten to know her well, talking often with her on the phone, flying regularly to Northern California to meet with her, forging what Storch calls a “close friendship.” And so it was that when Anderson told her on the phone one day in 2006 that she’d been profoundly moved by Buffett’s donation of $37 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and was looking “to do something” herself, Storch commenced a long dialogue with her, flying to Fresno as many as seven times.

Storch needn’t have worried. That the money would go to George School was never in question, Anderson’s accountant told me.

“It was hard for me at first, because it seems like a ghastly amount of money, but it’s going for a worthy cause,” Anderson acknowledged to the New York Times in one of the only interviews she’s granted. (The money will increase the school’s already considerable $77.2 million endowment, to help fund teachers’ salaries and financial aid.) “I’m 75 years old, I have Alzheimer’s, and I’m probably not going to be around a lot longer. So I might as well see the money do some good.”