Shaped by the ‘60s, Widow Takes Free-Spirited Approach to Giving

When Ann Lurie’s husband, Robert, died in 1990, she was left with a fortune worth hundreds of millions and six kids — ages 5 to 15.

She could have chosen to become a full-time mom and put philanthropy on the back burner.

Instead, she quickly became a calculating grant maker, coupling lessons in business that she had received from her husband during the two years that he battled colon cancer with a “save the world” outlook that she says lingers from the ‘60s.

She has given away well over $100-million since Robert H. Lurie died at age 48, generally spurning requests from nonprofit groups with undistinguished records and concentrating her gifts on some of the world’s biggest problems, including hunger, cancer, and inadequate health care.

Her current philanthropic passion is a mobile medical clinic to treat rural villagers in Kenya, an idea that she came up with on her own. Ms. Lurie, a former pediatric nurse, has been to Kenya three times in the past eight months to start the clinic and get it running. One day last month, she was on her knees for three hours scrubbing the clinic’s floor to bring it up to her standards.

“I always get involved personally,” says Ms. Lurie, who has spent more than $1-million on the health clinic and other grant making in Kenya. “I want to see the change that the gifts engender, and I don’t think you can do that if you’re not participatory in some way.”

University Beneficiaries

The bulk of Ms. Lurie’s philanthropy has gone to two institutions — the University of Michigan, which is Mr. Lurie’s alma mater, and Northwestern University, where Mr. Lurie received cancer treatment.

Ms. Lurie and her foundation, the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Family Foundation, based in Chicago, have given more than $60-million to Northwestern, including a $40-million gift in 2000 to create a medical-research center. She has given $45-million to Michigan, including a $25-million pledge last year to the College of Engineering to create programs in biomedical engineering and integrated microsystems.

The initial gift to Northwestern, a $10-million endowment for the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center in the early 1990s, helped that center receive federal designation as one of only 39 comprehensive centers in the country. The designation means that the center receives a federal grant of around $4-million per year, according to Steven T. Rosen, the center’s director and Mr. Lurie’s doctor during the cancer battle. “That initial gift transformed the cancer center,” Dr. Rosen says.

Ms. Lurie says her grant making is heavily influenced by the management guru Peter Drucker. She digs into a nonprofit group’s finances to make sure it’s already making good use of its resources. “Drucker’s philosophy is that you don’t help the mediocre,” Ms. Lurie says. “You help the people who are doing good do better.”

‘Hippie Look’

The former Ann LaSalle met Robert Lurie in an apartment elevator in Chicago in 1973, while both were heading to do their laundry.

“He played dumb and asked me about sorting his clothes. It turned out that he had been doing his own laundry for years. It’s the only time I know of that he was deceptive with me, and it worked.”

She was taken by his long hair and “hippie look” (the 57-year-old Ms. Lurie has attended two Rolling Stones concerts in the past six months), and had no idea that he was quickly assembling great wealth.

Mr. Lurie went on to earn a spot on Forbes magazine’s list of America’s 400 most affluent people, by working with his business partner at Equity Group Investments, Sam Zell, to find undervalued real estate and troubled companies poised for a turnaround. Mr. Lurie was worth $390-million the last time he was on the Forbes list.

The Luries established their family foundation in 1986, giving away up to $100,000 a year, a modest portion of their income.

“Bob’s attitude was that he wanted to keep on making the pot bigger,” Ms. Lurie says.

In the years after Mr. Lurie’s death, Ms. Lurie and Mr. Zell took much of the real estate public, in part to allow her to do as she pleased with the money. She continues to share ownership of some real estate with Mr. Zell.

During his illness, Mr. Lurie grew close to Dr. Rosen at Northwestern, and endowing the cancer center was one of two major philanthropic decisions that the couple made before his death. Mr. Lurie also urged his wife to “do something” for the University of Michigan when the time seemed right. She has gone on to do many things for Michigan, giving $12-million for an engineering center and tower, $5-million for an institute for entrepreneurial studies, and $2-million to endow a professorship and to support part of a fellowship at the School of Social Work.

Her most recent Michigan pledge, $25-million to the engineering college, will be used on interdisciplinary research. The engineering college and the School of Dentistry recently demonstrated that polymers could be used to encourage new blood-vessel growth; the breakthrough could lead to improved treatments for coronary artery disease.

“The world needs more people of means who think like Ann Lurie,” says Brad Canale, executive director of college relations at Michigan’s engineering college. “There’s a multiplier effect if philanthropy is done well and right, and her commitments have really done that because she’s been willing to step up with larger commitments to major institutions.”

Identifying Projects

The Lurie Family Foundation had more than $40-million in assets as of the end of fiscal 2001, but Ms. Lurie also makes many gifts from her own checkbook, and she says the grant-making process in both cases is identical. The foundation has no paid workers — its operations are handled by employees of Lurie Investments, the family’s financial holding company. The only reason she maintains the foundation, she says, is for estate planning.

Her ambivalence about the foundation reflects her preference for identifying her own projects, rather than responding to solicitations. “In general, I give to things that I stumble across that really appeal to me or that have I some personal interest in,” she says.

A notable exception is the Greater Chicago Food Depository, to which she gave $5-million in December 2001, kicking off the organization’s $30-million capital campaign. Before making the grant, she knew only a little about the depository, which provides food to 600 soup kitchens, pantries, and child-care centers.

Mike Mulqueen, the depository’s executive director, asked her to take a leadership role in the campaign without requesting a specific dollar amount. He explained that the center, which is building a 217,000-square-foot food bank and training center, spends less than 10 percent of its budget on administrative costs, and can turn every donated dollar into four well-balanced meals.

“She said she’d get back to me,” Mr. Mulqueen says. “She called two weeks later with the $5-million gift. I was floored.”

Ms. Lurie says she’d rather support the depository than “try to pick a soup kitchen.” She adds: “Starting from the top down allows my gift to have more leverage.”

Health Care in Africa

Ms. Lurie’s interest in Africa dates to 1998, when a friend introduced her to the Maasai people in southeastern Kenya. After giving funds to create a nursery school, she noticed that many of the children had symptoms of disease, but nowhere to go for treatment. She spent two years planning her mobile medical clinic, a converted Airstream trailer that roams a game ranch providing health care to the indigenous Maasai. The clinic, in operation since June, has a Kenyan physician and a state-of-the-art microscope, and treats patients for ailments ranging from gonorrhea to malaria.

“We’re basically practicing Western medicine in the bush,” Ms. Lurie says. “For the most part, the Maasai lead a very simple life and they’re happy. I’d like to make them healthier without changing their culture.”

She’s now exploring the idea of creating an operating foundation that would start similar clinics in other areas of rural Africa. She says she’d need outside support to make the project financially feasible. “It could be as ambitious as other donors are willing to help make it,” she says.

Ms. Lurie also will soon announce a $10-million gift to endow the extensive garden area in Millennium Park, which is adjacent to the Art Institute of Chicago. She already has given $1-million for the park’s music and dance theater.

Although much of her philanthropy has focused on universities, she says she’s unlikely to give to any institutions other than Michigan and Northwestern. And even with those two, she doesn’t see any imminent additional gifts. “I feel that I’m topped out in that particular area at the moment,” she says, “but it depends on what comes along.”

She’s also unsure whether she’ll give most of her money to charity during her lifetime. “It depends on how the spirit moves me,” she says.

Ms. Lurie has long fretted that her six free-thinking children might chafe at the burden of carrying on the family foundation, or might strongly oppose some of the organizations that the foundation supports. A few of the children, for example, oppose the use of animals in research. Ms. Lurie supports such research, in a limited fashion, because it is viewed by many scientists as essential to finding a cure for cancer. To head off any friction after her death, Ms. Lurie last year established individual foundations for each of the six children. She declines to say how much she gave to each child to establish the foundations, but, as required by law, each of the six children gave away 5 percent of their foundation’s assets in 2002. Several of the children supported environmental causes, and one gave funds to social-service organizations that aid American Indians.

Now that the kids are mostly grown up — the youngest will graduate from high school in June — one would think that Ms. Lurie would have more time for her own philanthropic ventures. She’s not so sure.

“It is getting a little easier,” she says, “but it seems that kids need moms for a lot of things for a lot of years. And that’s good — moms don’t want to be disposable.”