Faith and a Focus on the Elderly Poor Motivates a Foundation Leader

Shale D. Stiller probably understands better than anyone what Harry and Jeanette Weinberg wanted their philanthropy to accomplish. Mr. Stiller, a lawyer, helped write the charter for their foundation before Mr. Weinberg, a real-estate magnate, died in 1990.

He also has spent the past 10 years as a paid trustee of the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation, helping to hone the founders’ vision of how best to help poor people and give to Jewish charities around the globe.

“I’ve learned a lot about how to analyze a grant application, what questions to ask, how a nonprofit should be run,” Mr. Stiller says.

Now, Mr. Stiller, 70, is putting his institutional expertise to work in a new capacity. Named the president of the Weinberg Foundation, in Owings Mills, Md., more than a year ago, Mr. Stiller took the reins of the nation’s 22nd-wealthiest grant maker in February after a year’s apprenticeship under its outgoing president, Bernard Siegel.

Like Mr. Siegel, Mr. Stiller will function as the foundation’s de facto chief executive and said he will receive compensation similar to the $550,000 in salary and benefits that Mr. Siegel received. He will serve through 2010.

The foundation, which is now worth $2-billion, makes about $100-million in grants per year to Jewish organizations and to others that fight poverty, primarily among elderly people. It is one of the largest foundations in the United States to give a large portion of its grant-making budget to bricks-and-mortar projects.

Among big foundations it also has one of the smallest staffs: It spends about 2 percent of its grant-making budget annually on administrative expenses, and Mr. Stiller says he is expanding the staff so that it will have four program officers.

Although Mr. Stiller is well known in his profession and in Baltimore philanthropy, where he heads several family foundations and sits on numerous boards, he has rarely been in the public eye. However, he did attract attention in 1985 when, after being called upon by Maryland’s governor to represent the state against shady savings-and-loan operators, he and other lawyers saved the state government $400-million in bailout money by aggressively going after bank-held assets.

At the federal level, Mr. Stiller has been one of the lawyers representing families of Americans who have been killed in attacks by Islamic terrorists — work that will continue while he is at the Weinberg Foundation.

As head of the foundation, Mr. Stiller will enforce many of the bylaws he helped write. He may also defend them against detractors. The bylaws include a stipulation that all trustees hired after the death of Mr. Weinberg, a devoutly religious Jew, be in good standing with a synagogue. Some observers have said that rule is discriminatory. Questions have also been raised by newspaper columnists about a rule that any charity that challenges how the foundation operates will not get any money.

When asked about the bylaws, Mr. Stiller says bluntly: “I don’t care. We also made a rule that says that at least one-quarter of the money we give each year goes to non-Jewish causes. I don’t see the Jewish trustees-only rule as a problem.”

In an interview, Mr. Stiller discussed his leadership of the foundation:

What have you done to prepare for your job?

I’ve been the president of the Charles Crane Family Foundation since it was founded in 1994. You learn what questions to ask about an organization that wants grant money. I’ve spent a lot of time on boards. I’ve learned that part of being a leader is being able to communicate in plain English. You have to let people around you know that you have no hidden agenda. That’s pretty easy for a guy my age to pull off. I spent a good part of my first six months here going around to other foundations. My apprenticeship is never over because I hope to always learn.

Under your leadership, what will be the foundation’s priorities?

We are mandated by our charter to deal with only one issue: poverty. We don’t make grants to universities, symphonies, or museums. Mr. Weinberg believed that wealthy people give money to those institutions. He wanted to give to causes that they don’t give to. Under my leadership, we’ll be publicizing our two major focuses — the elderly poor and giving to Jewish causes. That doesn’t mean we won’t be giving to children in need, or to disabled people, or to help people get job skills.

We want to help the elderly for two reasons. One, when you look at the largest foundations, not one of them has the elderly poor as its focus. As people live longer, this is a problem that will become more severe. A sign of a country’s civility often lies in how it treats its old people. The Jews and the Chinese have had a reverence for their elderly and we want to become the major player in that arena philanthropically.

How has the size of the fund’s staff affected its grant making?

There are a lot of ways to run a foundation. There are some that do a lot of research and have these huge staffs that generate many, many reports on all kinds of social ills. They fill a valuable role. I don’t want to demean them at all.

The creator of this foundation made a comment once that has been repeated very often that, in effect, went like this: While many people are trying to figure out the root causes of poverty, there are people out there starving, and I want to take care of those people. He wanted us to be involved in providing direct service, not to generate reports.

Our philosophy has been to identify good organizations, then tell them what we want them to do — not spend a substantial amount of money telling them how to operate. If it’s a good organization, give them money and let them accomplish their mission.

ABOUT SHALE D. STILLER, PRESIDENT, HARRY AND JEANETTE WEINBERG FOUNDATION

Education: Earned a bachelor of arts degree in literature and philosophy from Hamilton College, in Clinton, N.Y.; a law degree from Yale University, in New Haven, Conn.; and a master of liberal arts degree from the Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore.

Nonprofit affiliations: President of the Charles Crane Family Foundation and the Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Charitable Foundation, both in Baltimore; a member of the boards of the Bright Star Foundation, the Hittman Family Foundation, and the Shelter Foundation, all in Baltimore; a board member at the Johns Hopkins University for the past 21 years and the vice chair of the board at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions for the past six years; vice president at the American Jewish Committee, in New York.

Books he has read recently: The Pity of It All, by Amos Elon; Alexander Hamilton, by Ron Chernow; Collapse, by Jared Diamond; His Excellency: George Washington, by Joseph Ellis; A Tale of Love and Darkness, by Amos Oz.

Average workload: 80 to 90 hours per week. “I love everything that I’m doing,” he says.