Compassion and Conservation

Donor champions rights of both humans and apes

Jon L. Stryker first started a foundation in the mid-1990s as part of his estate plan, with the

intention of giving away money after his death. But then he realized just how little support was

going to charitable groups he cared about — and what a significant impact his wealth could have.

Mr. Stryker, a 49-year-old heir to the Stryker Corporation, a medical-technology company in Kalamazoo, Mich., has since poured more than $247-million of his approximately $2-billion fortune into two causes of particular importance to him: gay rights and great-ape conservation. He plans to give at least another $120-million to the Arcus Foundation, which he created in 2000, over the next four years.

Today, his fund gives more than any other grant maker to charities that advance the rights of gay people. About $65.6-million, or roughly .01 percent of all foundation dollars, went to such causes in 2006, according to a report by Funders for Lesbian and Gay Issues, in New York. Mr. Stryker’s fund gave about $11.8-million in 2007 alone to efforts to promote inclusiveness for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people.

The Arcus Foundation’s giving to protect chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, meanwhile, totaled $4.9-million last year. The grant maker is the biggest financial backer of many of the conservation groups it supports, both in the United States and overseas.

Mr. Stryker has also spent millions of his fortune on political campaigns to elect lawmakers supportive of causes he cares about.

‘A Big Responsibility’

Sitting for the first interview he has given to a news organization, in the former train depot he purchased in 2002 to serve as the foundation’s headquarters, Mr. Stryker discusses his transition from occasional donor to foundation president. An architect by training, Mr. Stryker says he is reluctant to talk about himself but has chosen to speak out now because he believes doing so will bring attention to causes he supports.

He once gave mostly to arts and environmental organizations, but he grew dissatisfied with how difficult it was to measure the results. About the same time, he came out as a gay man, which led him to assume a role in advancing human rights.

“I’m probably one of the wealthier gay men in this country, and I felt I had a big responsibility,” says Mr. Stryker. “I’d never been involved with civil-rights work so directly before, and I just felt it was a calling. There were very few individuals involved, and I felt I could have a big impact.”

Dual Missions

Mr. Stryker’s decision in the mid-1990s to come out was not an easy one. Growing up in Kalamazoo, he didn’t know any openly gay people, and he says the city’s culture was less accepting than it is today. He was worried, in part, about how people involved in the local charitable causes he supported would view his announcement.

“I was on a number of boards, and initially I thought, Would I lose my position on those boards?” he says. “I did feel like I was stepping out into the light, and it was a little scary.”

Mr. Stryker named his new foundation after the Latin word for “arc” or “arch,” he says, to suggest the idea of bridging a gap or offering shelter.

The term also refers to rainbows, a symbol of diversity.

Since those early years, the fund has significantly expanded its operations. It now has 21 staff members and four trustees, including Mr. Stryker, as well as three offices — in Kalamazoo, New York, and Cambridge, England (which focuses exclusively on the grants the foundation makes to aid great apes).

The fund’s civil-rights and conservation programs may seem like an odd pairing, but Mr. Stryker says that they help to inform each other.

“It’s amazing the cross-fertilization that has happened,” he says.

The foundation has been “more advanced” in thinking about gay-rights issues outside of the United States because of its familiarity with international grant making and long experience supporting conservation groups overseas, he says, and has refused to support AIDS research that might involve chimpanzees.

He adds that both programs promote ideas about compassion and justice.

Urvashi Vaid, the foundation’s executive director since 2005, says that the two grant-making programs have led the fund to think more deeply about its identity and how to communicate its mission.

“We talk about this all the time, and what we’ve decided is we’re not two foundations, we’re one foundation working in these two important areas,” says Ms. Vaid, a gay-rights activist who worked at the Ford Foundation before joining Arcus.

Rescuing Chimps

Mr. Stryker has been committed to conservation throughout his life. When he was a teenager, he persuaded his mother to buy him a pet monkey from the local mall. But keeping the creature at home began to seem inhumane.

“It’s been one of my missions ever since to tell children who want pet monkeys to go live in the jungle,” he says.

But his monkey didn’t end up in a laboratory. He wrote zoos across the country asking them to take the animal, and finally Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo agreed.

Over the years, he maintained an interest in primates. He studied biology at Kalamazoo College, where he is now a trustee, and conducted tropical-ecology research on bats in Costa Rica.

In the late 1990s, he stumbled upon the Web site of Save the Chimps, an organization in Florida that was trying to rescue chimpanzees that had been used for study by the Air Force. The Air Force was shutting down its chimp-research projects, and the animals were to be sent to the Coulston Foundation, a biomedical lab in New Mexico that had been charged with violating federal animal-welfare laws.

Mr. Stryker called Carole Noon, the primatologist who started the group, and invited her to visit his home in Palm Beach, Fla. They became friends, and Mr. Stryker’s initial gifts helped Ms. Noon purchase 200 acres for a permanent sanctuary in Fort Pierce, Fla.

After the Coulston Foundation offered to sell its facility to Ms. Noon, she and Mr. Stryker visited the lab, which Mr. Stryker describes as a “glorified dog kennel.” The chimps had been living in solitary confinement for decades, in small, dirty, dark cages.

Gifts from the Arcus Foundation, which today total nearly $26-million, helped purchase and refurbish the lab and transport many of the chimps to the Florida sanctuary.

He has also offered hands-on support, Ms. Noon says: When the sanctuary first opened, Mr. Stryker and his two children, now ages 18 and 13, visited frequently. They would bring Fig Newton cookies, juice boxes, and dill pickles for the animals. Sometimes they would clean cages. The chimpanzees started to recognize their minivan.

More recently, the Arcus Foundation has expanded its giving to include the preservation of great apes that live in the wild. Poaching, hunting, and deforestation have depleted the animals’ numbers, pushing many species toward extinction. There are now only about 150,000 chimpanzees left in the wild, compared with at least one million in 1900.

The Arcus Foundation has helped create a wildlife sanctuary in Kenya and has supported preserves for apes across Africa and Asia.

It is also helping to influence public policy. In 2006, the foundation donated $450,000 to establish an advocacy department at the Jane Goodall Institute, which Ms. Goodall, the primatologist, says “has enabled me to get a higher profile in the Senate and the House.”

Recently, the organization, which conducts research and raises awareness about chimpanzees, was key in the passage of legislation that prevents great apes in the United States from being returned to laboratories after they have already been placed in sanctuaries.

Ms. Goodall says that private money for great-ape conservation has been hard to come by. Many foundations are turned off by the complexities of the work, which often requires finding sustainable ways for local people to live so they don’t destroy the apes’ habitats. They also wrongly assume that governments are taking the lead to help animals, she says.

“The situation is so grim, and it does require a large amount of money, so that makes it very difficult,” she says, adding that she hopes Arcus’s giving will prompt other donors to take on the cause.

A Reluctant Spokesman

Mr. Stryker says he is committed to finding other sources of support for the issues he cares about and drawing attention to the work of grantees. But the role of spokesman is not something he relishes.

“I value my privacy,” he says. “If I had my choice, I wouldn’t be speaking. I wouldn’t be doing interviews. But I feel like there’s a really big value in doing philanthropy publicly.”

Mr. Stryker, who left his architecture practice a few years ago to devote more time to philanthropy, says that the foundation’s headquarters, an eye-grabbing building on one of Kalamazoo’s busier downtown streets, reflects that commitment to openness.

Built in 1874 as a passenger train station, it has long had significance to Kalamazoo residents. As a kid, Mr. Stryker attended birthday parties there. And, he notes, it once served as the site of the town’s first gay bar.

Today, one wing of the building houses several local nonprofit groups. Charities are also encouraged to hold meetings and events in its conference rooms.

As Arcus grows, Mr. Stryker says, it is also becoming more sophisticated and thoughtful in its grant making. Last year, it added two new giving priorities to its grant-making program on gay and lesbian causes, one that supports groups that work in “religion and values” and a second that fights poverty and racial prejudice in Michigan.

Religious institutions are a critical battleground in the fight against discrimination, says Ms. Vaid. “We realized from talking to people that a key obstacle to acceptance of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people was the mischaracterization of us as sinful and immoral. And yet we also found that there’s this vital movement within every faith tradition that’s advocating for a different treatment of gay and lesbian people,” says Ms. Vaid, who works mostly in New York but spends one week per month in Kalamazoo. “There were opportunities for investing in those voices and those leaders.”

The Arcus Foundation is also giving more and more to gay and lesbian organizations overseas. Mr. Stryker cites the dearth of support for such causes — about $10.5-million in 2005, according to Funders for Lesbian and Gay Issues. In 2007, his foundation gave $1.1-million to international gay-rights groups.

“People are being put to death, put in prison, they’re being stoned,” he says of how gay people are treated in many foreign countries. “Right now we’re just tiptoeing into the international work, but there is a huge need.”

Other grant makers say the changes Arcus has made could influence other donors who finance gay causes to focus on religion and overseas support. “It’s very cutting-edge and ambitious,” says Tim Sweeney, executive director of the Gill Foundation, a Colorado fund started by Tim Gill, a software entrepreneur who is gay.

Promoting Diversity

In addition to its grant making, the Arcus Foundation aims to promote pluralism in more subtle ways. All grantees are required to sign a policy that protects workers from discrimination based not only on race but also on sexual orientation.

Although some charities initially resisted this request, only one refused, Mr. Stryker says — and its leadership later changed its mind.

While the foundation has expanded globally, it still contributes some money each year to Kalamazoo charities and those working statewide. Last year, the foundation gave about $2.9-million to groups in Michigan, which has been battered by job losses in recent years.

Some of that money went toward a new program that supports charities that serve poor people and minorities. Ms. Vaid says the foundation decided to focus on those groups both because of the economic realities in Michigan and because of the importance of connecting gay rights with the fights for economic and racial justice.

The grants from Arcus go toward helping charities strengthen their operations, an approach that has won praise from grantees.

“They’re brave enough to do what a lot of folks won’t do,” says Tim Terrentine, executive director of the Douglass Community Association, a social-service group in Kalamazoo that has received $55,000. “Arcus says, ‘We’re going to invest in you and your capacity, so you can deliver your programs better. And then you can tell us about your programs.’ Others say tell us what you’re going to do and then do it, and we don’t care if it works or not so long as you do what you said you were going to do.”

Envisioning the Future

Mr. Stryker says he would like to see the foundation exist in perpetuity. He plans to continue giving annual contributions of $30-million or $40-million over the next four years, increasing the endowment to approximately $300-million in that period. After that, he says, he will probably scale back his contributions, although he plans to give some money to the foundation through a bequest.

Although he holds no position with the company founded by his grandfather in 1941, he owns 10 percent of it. While the foundation receives most of its money in the form of Stryker stock, it has diversified its holdings in recent years, says Ms. Vaid. About 20 percent of the foundation’s endowment is held in the company’s stock.

Mr. Stryker says he is concerned that the foundation not lose its vision and ability to innovate after he is no longer around to guide it, but he points to the steps he has taken to strengthen Arcus’s board and staff. He wants the organization to remain nimble and respond to future trends, like the growing need for support to gay-rights groups overseas.

Mr. Stryker’s children might also play a role in the foundation, he says, or get involved in philanthropic work of their own.

“I’ve got this inheritance, and part of this process has been figuring out what’s the meaning of it and what’s a positive change in the world I can make,” he says. “My kids will also inherit huge wealth, and I want them to not just hear me preach, but look at me and look at what I’ve done, and see it’s possible to have a huge impact.”