Charity’s Colorful Style Wins Warren Buffett’s Support

In a run-down part of the Tenderloin neighborhood here, more than 400 people line up in the noonday sun to get a

free lunch from a local charity, the Glide Foundation.

“Who got a 25?” yells a Glide worker looking for the person in line with the next meal ticket. Holding a walkie-talkie and wearing a yellow windbreaker with the group’s name on the back, she guides a few hungry people into the charity’s cafeteria for kielbasa with caramelized onions.

The food program, which is the largest in the city, annually serves 800,000 meals, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It is one of more than 80 social services Glide offers to the city’s most downtrodden — homeless people, crack addicts, and ex-convicts.

It’s this focus on the poorest of the poor that attracted Warren E. Buffett to the group. While the Glide Foundation was not part of his $43.5-billion pledge last year, the billionaire raises money for the group with a charity auction on eBay, with the highest bidder winning a lunch with him to talk about investment trends.

In 2006, the auction raised more than $600,000, 5 percent of Glide’s $11-million budget. The hope for this year’s auction, which ends June 29, is to garner $1-million.

Social Justice

During the past 40 years, the Glide Foundation has earned a reputation as an organization determined to rattle the status quo, taking on numerous political, religious, and social issues.

“I can’t separate service from social justice, and I can’t separate social justice from spirituality. It’s all one,” says Janice Mirikitani, who along with her husband, the Rev. Cecil Williams, has led the charity and the church it grew out of, Glide Memorial Church, for decades.

In 1963, Pastor Williams took over the Methodist church and shortly thereafter tossed out the traditional hymn books and removed the main cross from the sanctuary, saying it was a “symbol of death” that prevented congregants from living the Gospels.

“I had come here to make sure the church would never sit on its butt and not do a thing,” explains Pastor Williams.

While conservative churchgoers balked at the bold move, it began Glide’s role as a leader of San Francisco’s counterculture and liberal causes. In the 1960s, it worked alongside the Black Panthers; in 1974, when the newspaper heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped, her father approached Glide to help gain her safe release from the Symbionese Liberation Army; during the 1980s, when the crack epidemic devastated the city, Pastor Williams stood outside public-housing buildings with a bull horn admonishing addicts to seek treatment; and while the issue of same-sex marriage has recently roiled America, Ms. Mirikitani points out that the Glide church has been performing such ceremonies for 43 years, albeit ones not always recognized as legal.

As a charitable organization, Glide stand outs for its insistence on speaking for poor people, even refusing gifts of used clothes, saying they demean homeless people, and rejecting some corporate donations. “Certain corporate funding requires certain hoops and certain demands of, We want this much visibility for this,” says Ms. Mirikitani. “If it would cause us to lose our own identity we could not do that.”

Showing Up Anonymously

With such a colorful and controversial background, the partnership with a Nebraska businessman like Mr. Buffett seems somewhat out of place.

Mr. Buffett first learned of the group from his late wife, Susan. Ms. Buffett, who owned a house in the Bay Area, volunteered in Glide’s soup kitchen and attended church services. But she did so for 15 years anonymously, perhaps a little wary of the group’s eccentricities — “She thought we were just another cult or something,” jokes Ms. Mirikitani.

Eventually, she approached Pastor Williams and identified herself. From that point on, she started donating money to the group and helped it improve its operations, such as pushing Glide to prepare for the day when its two charismatic leaders would retire.

(In part because of Mrs. Buffett’s suggestion, Pastor Williams and his wife have stepped back from overseeing day-to-day operations, and in May, the Glide Foundation hired a new chief executive officer.)

Thus enticed by Glide, Mrs. Buffett brought her husband to a Sunday Celebration, the Glide church’s unconventional, jazz-infused religious service, which attracts a broad cross-section of the city’s gay and minority population.

“He had on his khakis and a T-shirt and his eyes just got that big,” says Pastor Williams making a circle with his hands. “He said, ‘You know, this is a place that’s real.’”

“That’s what appeals to Warren because he’s a very real person, very down to earth,” adds Ms. Mirikitani. “It speaks to his value system.”

In a statement, Mr. Buffett said he supports Glide because it “gives help and hope to those society has forgotten.”

Despite the charity lunches, which Mr. Buffett started eight years ago, Ms. Mirikitani admits to feeling disappointed at being left out of the multibillion-dollar pledge he made last year, 1 percent of which could have financed Glide for decades.

“When you see something like that, you go, Oh gosh, wouldn’t that be wonderful,” she says. “I also understand that people like Warren, people who are really responsible philanthropists, know how irresponsible that can be” to give an overwhelming windfall to a small group.

Treated With Respect

To be sure, Glide indirectly benefits from the pledge; the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, which was one of five recipients of Mr. Buffett’s massive commitment, makes grants to the charity.

Mr. Buffett does not designate how Glide should spend the money raised by the auction. Glide’s leaders say the money will be used to support their myriad programs, which include job training, child care, housing for formerly homeless people, a health clinic, and drug treatment.

People who have received aid from Glide praise its range of services. But it is the intangible spiritual element Glide offers that they say has made the difference, in some cases, between life and death.

“It’s the people that make the difference. Folks are treated and respected and given the guidance to believe: You know what? I can do this. I can’t quit,” says Christopher Gardner, a formerly homeless man who relied on Glide’s service for almost a year.

In the 1980s, Mr. Gardner with Glide’s help pulled himself out of poverty and became a successful stockbroker. His personal story was chronicled in the Hollywood film The Pursuit of Happyness, which featured a brief appearance by Pastor Williams.

Mr. Gardner, who now lives in Chicago, donates to the group on a regular basis, but says he can never contribute an amount that would be satisfactory.

“How do you give enough to somebody who made the difference between you making it or not making it at the most crucial time of your life?” he asks. “Ain’t no dollars on that. We’ll never be even. If these guys at Glide weren’t there for me I wouldn’t have made it, bro. Period.”