A Billionaire Philanthropist Finds Small Gifts Lead to Big Pledges

At the MacAndrews & Forbes holiday party last December, Ronald O. Perelman, the New York holding company’s billionaire owner, handed out checks of $25,000 apiece to four small social-service charities.

“I have some major gifts under consideration, and I know that with the troubled economy it will be even more important to step up. But what I’m excited about now is finding small organizations that perform important social services for people who just need a helping hand, whether it be housing, food, or getting help for their sick kids,” said Mr. Perelman. “I intend to make this an ongoing project.”

Such small-scale giving is a departure from the multimillion-dollar philanthropy for which Mr. Perelman is known. The 66-year-old financier, who also serves as chairman of the cosmetics giant Revlon and whose wealth was pegged at $10-billion by Forbes in March, has given more than $335million to charity in his lifetime.

Last year his giving totaled $63.5-million, including a $25-million pledge to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/ Weill Cornell Medical Center to support a reproductive-health center named after himself and his former wife, the late Claudia Cohen. And just a few weeks ago, the hospital opened a heart center named after him to honor the $25-million gift he made in 2006 to create it.

He is mulling another large-scale gift, he says, but last fall’s Wall Street meltdown had him thinking about ways to do something to help New York’s smaller charities, many of which were struggling like never before.

‘A Seal of Approval’

William E. Rapfogel, chief executive of the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, one of the social-services groups to which Mr. Perelman gave $25,000 in December, says his charity doesn’t often receive gifts that large and that this gift has helped the charity keep up with ballooning needs: Back in December, Mr. Rapfogel says, his group was helping about 12,500 households with necessities like food, rent, and children’s health care. By the summer, that number had swelled to 15,000 families and was growing.

Mr. Rapfogel says the gift helps in other ways, too. “Other people will see it as a seal of approval,” says the charity leader. “They’ll say, ‘If Ron Perelman is giving to this group, I can give to this group,’ and I think that’s a very important thing to come out of it.”

Mr. Perelman has a history of turning single donations into projects with lasting results.

In 1989 he helped found the Revlon/UCLA Women’s Cancer Research Program with a $2.4-million pledge to the University of California at Los Angeles Foundation. By the late 1990s, that money grew into a $15-million gift as Mr. Perelman financed the research of Dennis J. Slamon, an oncologist whose work helped create the breast-cancer drug Herceptin, which helps slow or stop the rapid division and growth of certain types of breast-cancer cells in nearly 25 percent of women diagnosed with the disease.

“The federal government and the [pharmaceutical] industry didn’t believe it would work. He’s the only one who believed it,” Dr. Slamon says of Mr. Perelman.

Dr. Slamon says the initial $2.4-million was the largest donation he had ever received and was several times the size of a federal grant in those days.

The doctor says Mr. Perelman’s donations, which have grown to about $30-million to date, “clearly moved the approval of that drug up by 5 to 7 years.”

Focus on Women’s Health

Since underwriting the creation of Herceptin, Mr. Perelman has viewed women’s health care as one of the main focuses of his giving.

“I’ve got four daughters, and I’ve got a business that deals predominantly with women, and I’ve had women in my life who’ve been negatively affected with cancer, and as a result, I became attracted to the deficiency that existed in funding women’s health issues,” he says. “Now it’s sort of in vogue and everybody is on the breast-cancer and women’s health bandwagon, but when we started doing it, nobody else around was.”

The gift to Weill Cornell’s reproductive center — now called the Ronald O. Perelman and Claudia Cohen Center for Reproductive Medicine — was the result of close personal connections. Ms. Cohen, who died of ovarian cancer in 2007, was Mr. Perelman’s second of four wives. They divorced in 1994 but remained close.

“She was my best friend in the world, and I thought this was an area that should get funded up more,” says Mr. Perelman.

Zev Rosenwaks, the center’s director and a longtime friend of Mr. Perelman’s, says the donor has not tried to use that familiarity to dictate how the money should be used.

“Once he decides on a gift, he basically lets the institution and the program run with it,” says Dr. Rosenwaks.

Drumming Up Donations

In addition to women’s health causes, Mr. Perelman also supports Jewish institutions and arts organizations.

Mr. Perelman, a drummer who loves to talk about rock music, has also found a way to work his artistic bent into his philanthropy on more than one occasion. He and his friend, the actor Michael J. Fox, have jammed with the likes of Elvis Costello, James Taylor, and other musicians who have appeared at Mr. Fox’s annual fund-raising event for his Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, which Mr. Perelman has chaired in past years.

“Sometimes I think he just comes to play the drums,” jokes Mr. Fox.

Among Mr. Perelman’s more notable commitments to arts groups: In 2006 he pledged $20-million to Carnegie Hall, where he serves on the board.

The gift established an endowment to finance the music education it provides to elementary and secondary students and a program to bring more music education to New York’s public schools.

With so many arts groups struggling in the recession, Mr. Perelman says he thinks top donors will be more selective about their support and, he says, “in making sure institutions are slimming down their needs and making sure they continue on with the projects for which you gave them money.”

Filling a Gap

The thread of education also runs through Mr. Perelman’s donations to Jewish groups and institutions. An Orthodox Jew, Mr. Perelman says there are a limited number of donors who have both the inclination and the means to support Orthodox institutions, and he believes he should help fill that void.

His biggest beneficiary among U.S. Jewish groups has been the Associated Beth Rivkah Schools, in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, N.Y., to which he has given a total of more than $15-million for a new campus.

His gift to the girls’ school started out as $5-million in 1988, but he eventually became the institution’s main benefactor. “There were these religious Jews being educated in terrible, terrible facilities, inadequate facilities, and not large enough to deal with the population,” he recalls. “This just fell right into my sweet spot. A beautiful facility to educate 3,000 girls and a market that desperately needed the money, so it just fit.”

His gifts to Beth Rivkah are an example of what he says fund raisers should consider when approaching a donor. “The best way to start is to have a clear vision of a very specific idea that is sort of tailored to the individual, so that it becomes exciting to them,” he says.

Although Mr. Perelman is one of the top philanthropists in the country — last year he landed the No. 26 spot on the Philanthropy 50, The Chronicle‘s annual listing of the most-generous donors — he dodges questions about whether he will give all of his wealth away in his lifetime and what his next big gift will support. He is also continuing what he started in December: giving to small charities in his home city.

“It gives me joy that I happen to be lucky enough to help others, and it’s a responsibility that I take very seriously,” he says. “And of course knowing that lives have been saved because of the projects we have funded, such as the cancer drug Herceptin — well, it doesn’t get any better than that.”