Box-Office Bonanzas

A pair of retired scientists indulge a love for theater with their philanthropy

When Gilbert D. and Jaylee M. Mead first went to see shows at Arena Stage, a nonprofit theater in Washington, they were looking

for pointers.

For many years, the Meads were scientists at the Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Md., and active members of the Music and Drama club there. When the club put on Broadway-style musicals, like South Pacific, Mr. Mead directed the orchestra and led the singers, while Mrs. Mead often performed or served as producer.

“We would be so excited about how do you do the technical things that we would go as a group down to Arena Stage and see how they did it professionally,” says Mrs. Mead.

Sometimes as many as 40 club members would venture into the city from suburban Maryland to watch matinee performances at

Gilbert D. and Jaylee M. Mead (No. 50) Total Committed in 2006: $37.2-million Recipients: Arena Stage, Signature Theatre, Community Foundation of South Wood County

Arena, often followed by dinner at Jenny’s, a Chinese restaurant that used to sit nearby.

Later, when the Meads retired from long careers at Goddard, they decided to move to Washington. In the early 1990s, the couple moved to an apartment in the famous Watergate complex, and began second careers as arts patrons, giving away more than $40-million. Yet, while the bulk of the couple’s giving has focused on theater and the performing arts, they have encouraged family members to follow their own philanthropic passions.

Thirty Gifts a Year

A spate of building projects by established arts organizations and the formation of edgy new groups have contributed to a burgeoning cultural landscape in the nation’s capital. The Meads have become influential and much-loved participants in the renaissance.

Mr. Mead, 76, and Mrs. Mead, 77, contribute annually to 30 charities. They serve on the boards of directors of 12 organizations, mostly local arts and cultural groups, and have provided gifts of $1-million or more to several theaters’ campaigns to build new facilities.

“They have really transformed the community,” says Jennifer Cover Payne, president of the Cultural Alliance of Greater Washington, an association of arts groups in the metropolitan region. “You will probably find the Meads’ name attached to and associated with more arts organizations than any other philanthropist in this region. It’s really quite astounding.”

The couple’s wealth comes from Consolidated Papers, a company that Mr. Mead’s grandfather co-founded and that his family controlled until its sale for more than $4-billion in 2000.

They have since become involved in economic-development efforts in Mr. Mead’s hometown of Wisconsin Rapids, Wis., as that region struggles to deal with challenges caused by changes in the global paper industry.

Last year, the Meads’ giving culminated in a $35-million gift to Arena Stage, the site of those early theatrical research trips. The Meads’ gift was made as part of Arena’s $120-million campaign to raise money to renovate its theaters, build a smaller third theater to stage new American plays, add rehearsal and office space, build a separate education center, and increase the organization’s endowment.

Seeking a Match

The couple carefully structured their contribution — which Arena says is the largest ever made to a regional theater — to encourage other donors to support the campaign as well.

“We don’t want to be the single big donor in the bunch,” says Mr. Mead. “We’ll consider a large gift, but what we have always insisted is that that large gift is conditional upon encouraging other individuals to respond.”

When fund raisers started seeking money for the campaign, Mr. and Mrs. Mead pledged an outright gift of $5-million and said that they would pledge an additional $10-million if other trustees together committed an equal amount, which they did.

Then in 2005, Arena officials went back to the Meads to ask for an extra pledge of $35-million.

The couple turned down that request, but after a series of meetings, issued another fund-raising challenge. The Meads said they would be willing to match $15-million to $20-million in new commitments made to the campaign in the next year.

The challenge gave prospective donors a powerful incentive to contribute. But its stipulations ratcheted up the pressure for Arena’s leaders.

Only contributions of $500,000 or more would count, and there could be no more than 20 gifts to meet the goal.

And, perhaps most dauntingly, if new campaign gifts didn’t reach at least $15-million, the pledge would be null and void.

“Having worked with Gil on two challenges, if it had been $14.9-million, it would have been off,” Stephen Richard, Arena’s executive director, says good-naturedly, sitting with the Meads as they discussed their philanthropy. “When Gil makes a deal, he makes a deal.”

“We would have had to go back to the drawing board,” responds Mr. Mead, tacitly agreeing with Mr. Richard’s assessment.

In the end, the pledge that brought Arena to its $20-million goal came in on September 29, one day before the Meads’ offer expired. The Meads began payment of the $35-million commitment last year.

The beauty of the challenge was how quickly it brought in the big gifts the capital campaign needed, says Mrs. Mead. “By being very strictly crafted,” she says, “when you finished it, you really had what you wanted in the right timeframe.”

Mr. Richard says that while the fund-raising challenge “was central to getting every single penny,” it did more than just spur giving.

Stronger Donor Ties

The challenge, he says, also helped the organization forge stronger ties with donors who hadn’t made such large gifts before.

One couple, Donald deLaski, founder of Deltek Systems, a software company in McLean, Va., and his wife, Nancy, made a $2-million commitment in response to the Meads’ offer, and have since become full-season sponsors — which requires a gift of $200,000 or more — for Arena’s 2007-8 productions.

Three or four years ago, Arena didn’t know very much about the deLaskis, who had held season subscriptions for many years, says Mr. Richard. Now, he says, “they’ve become great friends of the theater’s.”

Last year, in addition to the Arena gift, the Meads also gave $1-million to Signature Theatre, in nearby Arlington, Va., for its new building, and in 2004, the couple contributed $1-million to Studio Theatre, in Washington, for its most recent construction project.

Cast Parties

While those big donations to capital campaigns often garner the headlines, the Meads also have been stalwart supporters of the musicals and plays that area theaters stage. The couple has sponsored more than two dozen productions in the Washington area, 15 of which were staged at Arena.

As the couple talks about their giving, Mrs. Mead periodically leaves the room, each time returning with another keepsake of the couple’s involvement with local theaters: a plaque from Studio honoring her service as president of the board, framed posters from musicals they have sponsored, signed by the casts.

After one trip, she brings back a small photo album with pictures from the party they threw at their apartment for the cast of Cabaret, an Arena production they sponsored last year.

The photographs show guests gathered around the grand piano that sits in their living room, singing as Cabaret’s music director played show tunes. (Having learned from past parties, the Meads keep stacks of lyrics handy, to help jog guests’ memories.)

“People were singing until all hours,” says Molly Smith, Arena’s artistic director, “till finally I had to tell everybody they had to go home so Gil and Jaylee could go to bed.”

Gifts of Service

Last year, the Meads made a gift of $75,000 to sponsor the current production of Into the Woods at Signature Theatre, which has made its reputation, in large part, by staging the musicals of Stephen Sondheim.

The money from the Meads allows the theater to do things that it couldn’t otherwise do, says Eric Schaeffer, the organization’s artistic director. Signature, for example, is able to use the musical’s original orchestration, even though it requires 15 musicians. The Meads’ support also meant that all of the costumes were made specifically for this production.

“A lot of times we can’t afford to do that. We have to end up borrowing from other costume shops,” says Mr. Schaeffer. The difference, he says, is palpable. “You can see it when you actually see the show.”

The sums of money the couple contribute can make it easy to overlook the importance of the Meads’ enthusiasm for the theater, their faith in the organizations they support, and the hard work they put in as board members, say the leaders of those groups.

Since 1990, Mrs. Mead has been on the board of directors of Studio Theatre, which focuses on contemporary plays and is located in a section of Washington that still bears signs of its devastation by riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.

She served as the board’s president when Studio made a bold decision: to construct a theater in a building it didn’t own.

“People thought, ‘It’s insane to put $1-million into building a theater when you don’t own the building. How on earth are you ever going to be able to do that?’” says Joy Zinoman, the theater’s founding artistic director.

The Meads backed the decision with a $300,000 contribution. The project proved to be a turning point in both Studio’s development and the neighborhood’s recovery. Productions in the new theater played to large, appreciative audiences, and in time, the building did go on the market. Studio bought it — and the two next to it.

“You need someone who is going to confidently say, ‘I believe that this growth is going to happen, that there are then going to be people in the seats. Going to the theater is an interesting, worthwhile enterprise. Neighborhood revitalization is dependent on it,’” Ms. Zinoman says of the Meads’ support. “These were ideas that people in the theater had, but to have someone outside affirm it made a huge difference.”

Family Philanthropy

At the same time that the Meads were starting to get involved with arts groups in Washington, they started a family foundation. The couple, who don’t have any children together, asked Mr. Mead’s two daughters and two sons from a previous marriage to join the board. But there was a twist: Board membership was conditional on making a $10,000 gift to the foundation each year — a requirement that Mr. and Mrs. Mead hold themselves to as well.

“It’s our feeling that when you give some of your own money to something, you take more interest and pride in it, and are more willing to help see how it’s operated,” says Mrs. Mead.

The children accepted the Meads’ invitation. Before they joined the board, the Mead Family Foundation had awarded one grant — to Arena Stage — and the couple assumed that the foundation would support performing-arts groups. But the children had other ideas.

“The first thing they did when they got on the board was say, ‘Dad, Jaylee, you can’t just support theater. Look at all of the other social causes,’” says Mr. Mead. So, together the family decided that the foundation would support charities that focus on education, children and youth, and strengthening families.

Eight years ago, Mr. and Mrs. Mead and his children set up a junior board to help encourage the Mead grandchildren, who then ranged in age from 11 to 21, to start thinking about giving.

The children could each make a grant of up to $1,000 to any type of organization or charitable project they wanted, but they had to write the proposal themselves and present it to the foundation board.

Many of the grandchildren’s grants have been awarded to environmental groups — one of the first grants the Meads’ granddaughter proposed paid for plantings in a park in the town where she lived — and to chapters of Habitat for Humanity.

Betsy Mead, Mr. Mead’s oldest daughter, says she respects her father and stepmother’s decision to let family members pursue their own charitable interests.

“If you don’t follow your passion, it’s hard to get excited about philanthropy,” says Ms. Mead, who heads the foundation. It’s hard for future generations to stay interested, she says, when the founders of a family foundation require that money “only and always” go to a specific cause.

Making Giving Fun

The Meads are reluctant to say exactly how much money they have given away so far. But the couple does say that during the past dozen years, they have awarded gifts of $1-million or more to seven or eight groups.

That kind of generosity, during their lifetime, wasn’t always the plan. At first, they thought about their giving largely in terms of leaving gifts to specific organizations in their wills.

“Then Jay and I at some point said, ‘Well, you know, it’s so much more fun to give it away while you’re living,’” says Mr. Mead.

That realization completely changed the trajectory of their philanthropy. Now, “we have very little in our will to anybody as a bequest,” says Mrs. Mead. “People are going to be very disappointed if they’re counting on anything.”

Mr. Mead laughs as his wife says this. But then, after a moment, he adds, “That was probably one of the most important decisions we ever made.”