Clinton Juggles Roles as Charity Leader, Author, and Fund Raiser

As Bill Clinton raises money for his William J. Clinton Presidential Foundation to build an ambitious

library and museum complex in Arkansas, he’s also tackling a range of issues that his administration had promoted, including fighting the global AIDS/HIV pandemic. And he’s finishing his memoirs and soliciting donations for Democratic Party presidential candidate John Kerry.

But Skip Rutherford, who oversees Mr. Clinton’s organization, says the former president wouldn’t have it any other way. “A former president might be expected to say when he left office, I’m first going to build my library and then later I’m going to do my policy initiatives. But President Clinton says, No, let’s do the library, my policy work, my AIDS programs, all my stuff, and do it all right away. It’s very Clinton, and it’s great.”

The modern era’s youngest former president has spent much of the past three years delving into charitable work.

In addition to his AIDS programs, he has tried to spur economic development at home and abroad, foster racial, ethnic, and religious understanding, and encourage citizens of all ages to engage in community service at home and abroad (The Chronicle, October 17, 2002).

In fact, Mr. Clinton, now 57, says he realized with a start a few weeks ago that he had made the transition from president to charity leader. “It is funny,” Mr. Clinton said in an interview with The Chronicle at his Harlem office. “I mean, literally, I was shaving one day, and I looked up in the mirror and said, Holy God, I’ve become an NGO!”

Combating AIDS

The William J. Clinton Presidential Foundation — a charity that is run by nearly two dozen staff members and many interns and volunteers in Little Rock and New York City — in recent months has accelerated its activities, especially in its high-profile campaign to combat AIDS.

Mr. Clinton says one of his strengths has been his ability to understand the roles that governments, charities, and companies can play in tackling problems, and then to use his connections and influence to help find the best approaches.

“One of the things that I can do that some can’t do is to at least try to have an impact on government policies” of developing countries, Mr. Clinton says. “If you can do something systematic with a government, that changes the fundamental capacity of a people to deal with a problem — we’re talking about AIDS, but we could also be talking about water pollution, soil erosion, education, crime, anything.” Over the long run, he says, “that’s the only way you ever solve these big public-health and other problems.” He adds: “It may not sound all that interesting sometimes, but changing systems is profoundly important.”

In the Caribbean and in Africa, Mr. Clinton’s organization has worked with governments and nongovernmental organizations in 16 countries and territories to set up countrywide AIDS care, treatment, and prevention programs. To do so, it has recruited volunteers with expertise in business, health-care management, and education to form teams with volunteer experts in AIDS care, treatment, and research. At the same time, the organization has secured funds from the governments of Canada, Ireland, Norway, and Sweden for AIDS programs in countries that are assisted by the Clinton organization.

Mr. Clinton last fall announced that his charity had reached an agreement with four drug manufacturers to reduce the price of AIDS medicine to make life-saving pharmaceuticals more widely available to people in Africa and the Caribbean. The hope is that up to two million people will receive the medicine by 2008.

In January, the Clinton organization worked out a plan with five medical-technology companies on a cut in the price of HIV/AIDS laboratory tests that is expected to benefit as many as five million people in Africa and the Caribbean by 2008. The agreement is expected to reduce costs of important tests by up to 80 percent for people with HIV/AIDS; in South Africa alone the savings is expected to amount to $300-million.

In the meantime, the South African government, after consulting with the Clinton charity, approved a nationwide treatment program for people with AIDS that drew praise from the former president.

In the worldwide fight against AIDS, “I’m by nature impatient,” says Mr. Clinton. “I mean, in South Africa alone you’ve got 600 people a day dying, just in that one country. I just think we need to move more quickly.”

‘Water Problem’

Beyond AIDS, the former president says that U.S. charities and foundations need to be preparing for the “next big round of issues” in developing countries.

“For example,” says Mr. Clinton, “given the fact that there is small-scale technology to provide pure water in tropical areas where there’s a lot of water but it’s not pure, there ought to be a really systematic effort by the philanthropic community that cares about those issues to mass-produce water-purification instruments and machines, and get them out there.”

The “water problem” is worsening in the world, he says, leading to illnesses that cause widespread deaths in developing countries. “Many of them are little kids who never got a clean glass of water. That ought to be the next thing we really think about.”

Mr. Clinton’s other philanthropic goals include expanding his charity’s program to aid small businesses beyond Harlem to include the Bronx and eventually other cities.

And the charity has formed a partnership with the Princeton Review, a company that provides test-preparation and college-admissions services, to help elementary- and middle-school students from low-income families in 10 cities improve their scores on standardized tests.

Promoting Service

Mr. Clinton, who considered the creation of the AmeriCorps national-service program to be one of the hallmarks of his presidency, has continued to push citizen service. For example, a third class of young people from South Africa, called the Clinton Democracy Fellows, has been selected to soon spend several weeks in the United States to share ideas for “building democracy,” and the Clinton charity plans to expand the fellows program to other countries.

Mr. Clinton says he made a personal appeal to President Bush last year when Congress for several months did not provide key funds for AmeriCorps amid reports of management and budget problems at the parent Corporation for National and Community Service.

“I actually called him and asked him to try to help fund it, and he said he would,” says Mr. Clinton. “But there was this hiatus of quite a long while, when the funding was really cut. And the speculation was that, if not the White House, at least some of the people in Congress wanted the hiatus so that they could take down programs they didn’t like and then fund ones they did.”

Lawmakers eventually did approve a substantial increase in the AmeriCorps budget. “It’s not important who did what and when on the money cut, now,” says Mr. Clinton. “The important thing is we got the money back, and we have to make sure that we don’t have another hiatus in the future.”

Role of Philanthropy

Mr. Clinton’s focus on the status of AmeriCorps is just one example of the way the former president mixes his concerns about politics and philanthropy. Wearing his hat as a charity leader, Mr. Clinton this winter told the 2004 Family Foundation Conference, held in New York by the Council on Foundations, that today “there is a greater need for private philanthropy than ever before,” as the federal government cuts back on domestic social-service programs and as global crises such AIDS continue to balloon.

The former president sharply criticized the Bush administration and Congress, saying that they had wrongly drained the Treasury by enacting tax cuts for high-income Americans, a category in which Mr. Clinton included himself.

Because of the tax cuts, said Mr. Clinton, “there is a lot more ‘walking-around money’ out there in the pockets of wealthy people than there used to be.”

He added, “If these tax cuts are made permanent, they will eventually be worth to the Americans in the highest-income categories about, on average, $180,000 a year. And since we [the wealthy] don’t need it, and shouldn’t have got it, we ought to give it all away. And you ought to ask for it.”