Disability Groups Mourn Death of Dole Foundation

In May, disability-rights supporters gathered in a U.S. Senate office building to mourn the death of Paul G. Hearne, the tenacious president of the Dole Foundation for Employment of People with Disabilities.

Now, just two months later, many of those same people are facing a second loss: the death of the Dole Foundation itself. The grant-making charity, started 15 years ago by former U.S. Sen. Robert J. Dole, plans to shut its doors by the end of the month. Foundation officials say a combination of factors, including Mr. Hearne’s death, fund-raising difficulties, and new thoughts about the foundation’s mission, all contributed to the decision to close. But some disability-rights advocates blame the foundation’s demise on a lack of interest by Senator Dole.

The consequences of the Dole fund’s closing are expected to reach far beyond the loss of the $700,000 or so a year in grants the organization awarded to help people with disabilities find and keep jobs. The foundation also has been a major voice on Capitol Hill, and it was widely credited as being a key player in the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990. It has also served as a friendly agitator to other grant makers, encouraging them to consider the needs of people with mental and physical handicaps in all areas of grant making — from arts and employment to homelessness and transportation.

“The Dole Foundation’s closing is going to leave a real void,” says Gene Chelberg, a former grant recipient who is assistant director for disability services at the University of Minnesota. “At this point there really isn’t another foundation poised to step into its place.”

Even before Mr. Hearne’s death, the Dole Foundation had been considering significant structural changes.

The grant-making charity’s affiliation with Senator Dole — who created the organization on the 25th anniversary of the World War II injury that left him with little use of his right arm — had proved to be something of a double-edged sword.

Mr. Dole’s name and commitment lent the organization instant credibility and opened doors in Congress and elsewhere.

But his involvement also made fund raising difficult. People often believed, mistakenly, that the foundation was endowed by the Senator. In fact, Mr. Dole, who served as the foundation’s chairman, made no financial contributions during the past decade. Instead, the foundation received its income from a mix of individual, corporate, and foundation donors. Dole Foundation officials say Mr. Dole felt strongly that there should be a solid line separating his involvement with the foundation from its fund raising to guard against charges that donors might use the foundation to buy political influence with him.

Even so, the foundation often came under just such criticism, particularly in 1996, when Senator Dole mounted his unsuccessful bid to be President of the United States.

Last year, after Mr. Dole retired from politics, donations to the foundation dropped. Foundation officials say they are unsure what influence, if any, Mr. Dole’s departure from politics had on fund raising. They also say they cannot quantify the extent of the drop since final numbers for the year are not yet available.

Jeanne Argoff, the foundation’s vice-president, says one reason for the downturn was that the foundation was in a period of transition. Much of its time in the past year was spent exploring a merger with the American Association of People with Disabilities.

That fledgling organization aspires to become the disability equivalent of the American Association of Retired Persons, offering its members insurance discounts and other deals. Mr. Hearne helped start it in 1996, and its offices adjoin the Dole Foundation’s.

The Dole Foundation’s idea had been to become the A.A.P.D. Foundation, an affiliate of the membership group. That way, it figured, it could offer the estimated 54 million Americans with disabilities a united way to give, similar to the way women’s funds operate, whereby individual donations are pooled and then redistributed to charities working on a particular cause.

“Paul was really committed to the notion of people with disabilities as marketplace consumers,” says Ms. Argoff. By banding together as buyers and donors, she says, Mr. Hearne believed that people with disabilities could gain clout and become truly “integrated, incorporated, and included” in society.

But the merger plan was scrapped after Mr. Hearne died unexpectedly in May of complications from pneumonia at age 48.

Ms. Argoff says Mr. Hearne had been the driving force behind the plans. “He provided the visionary leadership at the Dole Foundation,” she says.

John Kemp, a Dole Foundation board member and head of Very Special Arts, in Washington, agrees. “People realized that without Paul and his focus, it wasn’t going to happen.”

Mr. Hearne’s combination of leadership skills were widely regarded to be as rare as the bone disorder — osteogenesis imperfecta — that caused him to spend much of his childhood in a body cast and that prevented him from growing taller than four feet.

Despite having to remain seated in his motorized wheelchair, Mr. Hearne had no problem looking any politician or foundation official squarely in the eye and making his pitch for the steps needed to remove obstacles that impeded people with disabilities. A lawyer by training, he was pragmatic rather than preachy, and he always included large doses of humor when making his case. The Texas native even joked about his ailment, saying that he was “proof once again that not everything is big that comes from Texas.”

Mr. Hearne’s identity was so intertwined with the Dole Foundation’s, in fact, that at the memorial service, Senator Dole told mourners that the organization more accurately could have been called the Paul Hearne Foundation.

Some disability-rights advocates, however, say the Dole Foundation made a mistake in not identifying a successor to Mr. Hearne.”Certainly a lot of the Dole Foundation’s success was due to Paul’s ability to laugh at things and speak well in front of a group and get them to see things from a new perspective,” says Heller An Shapiro, executive director of the Osteogenesis Imperfecta Foundation. “But it was also his connection, his ability to say, ‘I’m from the Dole Foundation,’ that got him in the door. It was a rare combination, but I can’t believe that there isn’t someone else who could do the same thing.”

The Dole Foundation was not alone in having problems identifying future leaders. Not long before Mr. Hearne’s death, the Milbank Foundation for Rehabilitation put aside about $100,000 a year for an awards program to encourage people with disabilities in their 20s and 30s to take on leadership roles at non-profit groups that serve the handicapped. The foundation, on whose board Mr. Hearne served, later decided to name the prizes the Paul G. Hearne Leadership Awards.

The decision to close the Dole Foundation has been met with a mixture of shock, sadness, and a good measure of criticism by many in the disability-rights arena.

Many question why Senator Dole would not step in and take a more active role at the foundation in order to save an institution that had become a well-established, credible advocate for the disabled. “It’s unfortunate that it’s being let go,” said Mr. Chelberg of the University of Minnesota. “It would have been an incredible legacy for Senator Dole to leave to this country.”

Mr. Chelberg says he worries that the decision to shut down the foundation demonstrates how much people with disabilities must still overcome. “Senator Dole faces the same stigma and societal impressions and barriers that all of us with disabilities do,” he says. “And if you want to be thought of as a powerful person and as a leader and a mover and a shaker, promoting yourself as a disabled person and putting that out front still in this day and age isn’t the way to do that. I think the decision to close the foundation speaks a lot about how much further we have to go.”

Senator Dole declined to be interviewed for this article. But Ms. Argoff says his decision to shut down the foundation represents a move forward rather than a desire by Mr. Dole to put distance between himself and disability causes. “His commitment has changed,” she says of the Senator, “but it’s an evolution. The plan to merge with A.A.P.D. was the next right step.”

Ms. Argoff says her hope, and Senator Dole’s, is that plans for an A.A.P.D. Foundation will be revived someday after the American Association of People with Disabilities gets better established.

During the Dole Foundation’s final days, its two remaining employees spend their time attending to the details of shutting down an organization: packing up boxes, sending out final grant checks, and talking to the many well-wishers who have been calling the foundation after hearing the news about the closing.

Ms. Argoff, who has been with the Dole Foundation for 12 of its 15 years, has mixed emotions about the decision. “Of course it’s sad,” she says. “I’ve been here through thick and thin — a big part of my heart is here.”

But she adds: “I really think this is more a beginning than an end.”

Ms. Argoff, whose own future is still uncertain, said she would like to see the Disability Funders Network pick up some of the Dole fund’s activities. The network — a coalition of about 100 foundations and charities — was started by the Dole Foundation about four years ago to encourage grant makers to give more thought and dollars to programs that help people with disabilities. It argued that people with disabilities had all kinds of special needs, not just medical ones, which were not being fully recognized by philanthropy.

The board members of the network, which Ms. Argoff co-chairs, will meet this month in California to talk about its future after the Dole Foundation.

“Now that the Dole Foundation is not there, other foundations will have to step up to the plate, and D.F.N. can be the trigger, the catalyst,” says Ms. Argoff.

In the past, she says, many foundations would hear the word ‘disability’ and immediately refer grant seekers to the Dole Foundation. “Now, if people don’t want to say No, they might have to look at their own grant guidelines.”

Adds Rayna Aylward, president of the Mitsubishi Electric America Foundation, which devotes most of its grant making to helping young people with disabilities: “This makes it more incumbent on us all to keep the visibility high. We realize we no longer can ride the Dole Foundation’s coattails.”

A Sampling of Dole Foundation Grants

Following is a sampling of the grants awarded by the Dole Foundation for Employment of People with Disabilities since its incorporation 15 years ago:

Amy Dudley Center (Atlanta): $14,874 in 1997 to purchase hand-held, electronic prompters for people with memory problems to use at their jobs. The prompters provide picture and voice reminders of the steps necessary to complete different tasks, such as how to clear and re-set a table at a restaurant.

Austin Resource Center for Independent Living (Tex.): $50,000 in 1997 to help people with disabilities find temporary jobs — which they can use to learn new skills and to enhance their resumes — as a step toward permanent employment.

Berkeley Center for Independent Living (Cal.): $40,000 in 1989 to coordinate with homeless shelters and other charities in the area to help homeless people with mental illnesses and other disabilities get counseling and job training.

Great Plains Paralyzed Veterans of America Education Center (Omaha): $50,000 in 1995 to train people with mild mental retardation for jobs as “personal care attendants” for people with physical disabilities. Such jobs include preparing meals and helping with feeding, dressing, and other activities with which a person may have difficulty.

Heritage Farm (Bouckville, N.Y.): $12,000 in 1986 to buy 400 hens, farm equipment, and other items needed to teach people with severe mental retardation the skills they need to become farmers. The Dole Foundation gave the group an addi tional $12,000 in 1989.

Stanford University (Palo Alto, Cal.): $25,000 in 1994 to come up with alternatives to visual, “point-and-click” computer-software programs, which are difficult for people with vision problems to use.

Washington Very Special Arts (D.C.): $30,000 in 1995 to help young artists with disabilities get jobs in arts-based retail shops or other local businesses by providing them with retail and other vocational training, helping them find paid internships, and helping them with job placement.

Wilderness Inquiry (Minneapolis): $32,664 in 1996 to train and place people with disabilities in outdoor-recreation jobs, such as teaching them to serve as park rangers.

World Institute on Disability (Oakland, Cal.): $15,000 in 1995 to organize a conference of technology-industry, government, and disability-rights leaders to come up with ways to design future telecommunication tools that are accessible to all people, including those with disabilities. The Dole Foundation also helped persuade other foundations to contribute an additional $70,000 toward the conference.