A Philanthropic Partnership With a Commitment to Public Service

When Samuel J. Heyman told his wife of 36 years that he intended to give away $25-million to form a new

nonprofit group aimed at recruiting bright people into government service, her reaction was: It’s “a lot of money.”

While the Heymans’ 2001 gift to start the Partnership for Public Service, in Washington, might be their largest — last year Mr. Heyman committed another $20-million to the group — philanthropy has long been part of their marriage.

Sitting among artworks by Joan Miró, Jackson Pollock, and Andy Warhol in their apartment off Fifth Avenue here, Mr. Heyman and his wife, Ronnie, talked about their different charitable interests and their plan to leave more grant making up to the next generation.

Mr. Heyman, 68, who in the 1960s worked as a lawyer at the U.S. Department of Justice, now chairs the Heyman Companies, in Wayne, N.J., four privately held businesses that include International Specialty Products, a chemical company, and the GAF Materials Corporation, a building-products company. He declined to divulge the family’s wealth but says that, since he acquired those two companies in 1983, the two combined have grown from $600-million to $5-billion businesses.

Mr. Heyman fondly recalls his time spent in government, and his main philanthropic priority is to encourage talented people to enter public service. “If you look at the other major issues in our country — crime, drugs, education, health care, to name only a few — there are hundreds of organizations working in those areas,” he says. “When it comes to the challenges associated with government service, however, there is little involvement from the private sector. And so I had the view that the partnership could help fill that vacuum.”

Dealing With Loan Debts

Before starting the partnership, Mr. Heyman gave $5-million to Harvard Law School, in Cambridge, Mass., of which he is an alumnus, to establish a program that offers financial support to graduates who find permanent jobs or students with summer jobs in the federal government.

The crushing debt accumulated at law school — as high as $100,000 for some graduates — can limit job options afterward, says Joan E. Ruttenberg, the program’s director at Harvard. “It’s one thing to say ‘do public service,’” she says, “but when law firms are paying ridiculous amounts and public-service employers and government service can’t go anywhere near that, you need to make up that gap in any way you can.”

After making his gift to Harvard, Mr. Heyman decided to promote public service on a larger scale. When he first spoke of his $25-million award, Mrs. Heyman, who is more interested in Jewish and health causes, urged him to give it to Harvard to manage. Her husband declined. “While institutions are often very good at running ongoing programs, I had the conviction that for the partnership to be successful it needed an entrepreneurial approach,” he says.

The Heymans also contributed $2.5-million to Yale Law School, in New Haven, Conn., for a program that pays for lectures on public service — the former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright was the inaugural speaker last year — and also covers the annual salary and health benefits of two or three recent graduates with jobs working closely with high-level leaders in the federal government. Mr. Heyman graduated from Yale, and Mrs. Heyman graduated from Yale Law School.

Yale has received several other gifts from the Heymans, including $5-million for a new tennis center and support for a kosher dining hall, and they endowed an annual award, $5,000 for this year, to a promising young faculty member in the humanities. As part of their grant making, the Heymans have hosted dinners with award recipients. “We don’t like to just write a check,” says Mrs. Heyman.

They have made other gifts to universities, several of which bear their name, including a center for corporate governance at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, in New York, and an ethics and public-policy center at Duke University, in Durham, N.C.

Mr. Heyman used to serve on the board at Cardozo, and his two-decade friendship with Joel L. Fleishman, a professor at Duke and now head of the ethics and public-policy center, led to his gift there.

Making Giving Choices

Most of the Heymans’ multimillion-dollar donations come from their personal wealth, but the family also gives through a foundation named for Mr. Heyman’s mother, Annette, in Westport, Conn.

In 2005, the most recent year for which public records are available, the foundation had nearly $12.5-million in assets and awarded nearly $2.2-million, including $23,500 to the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York, where Mr. Heyman used to serve on the board, and $96,733 to Mount Sinai Medical Center, also in New York.

Their four grown children, some now parents themselves, are also interested in supporting medical causes, says Mrs. Heyman, in part because one of her daughters experienced a difficult pregnancy. The family is connected via business relationships as well as by blood ties: Mr. Heyman’s son runs his real-estate company, and two of his sons-in-law lead the chemical and building concerns.

To teach their children about philanthropy and joint decision making, the elder Heymans have invited speakers to family meetings to discuss giving.

Several times Mr. and Mrs. Heyman have also given their children the task of conducting research on charities and then donating $25,000, with the stipulation that they had to agree on where the money would go. Among the gifts has been one to a Connecticut program to educate people about anorexia.

The younger Heymans have also been active in helping raise money for the Partnership for Public Service, organizing two fund-raising events in New York for donors mostly in their 20s and 30s. The most recent effort, in February 2006, raised $70,000.

The couple express confidence in their children’s philanthropic decisions. Unlike other affluent donors, the Heymans plan to leave much of their wealth to their children and their spouses. (The younger generation may also receive the parents’ extensive art collection; The Art Newspaper lists the Heymans among the world’s top 100 collectors.)

“Children can inherit paintings, a residence, a business — it’s such a wonderful thing for them to inherit something like a foundation and the traditions that go with it,” says Mrs. Heyman. “It’s a very positive influence on their lives.”

Mrs. Heyman also trusts that she has passed her own philanthropic interests along to the next generation. Among her chief causes is the Israel Museum, in Jerusalem, where she is the past president of the American Friends of the Israel Museum. The family has contributed more than $3.5-million to the group, as well as artworks, she says.

Mrs. Heyman says she resisted a push from the United Jewish Association-Federation of New York, to permanently endow her annual gift to the group in her estate plans.

“How do I know what the future leadership of UJA will be?” she says. “I’m much better off leaving my children the discretion to do this.” She adds: “They will do the right thing.”