Giving Kids the Right Tools

Retired CEO supports array of programs for youths

Arthur M. Blank’s suit is so crisp, his mustache so carefully trimmed, he could step onto a stage set. He doesn’t look

like the kind of guy who would go shopping at Home Depot stores, which he co-founded, on the weekends. “To the extent that I’ve seen him lift a hammer, he’s all thumbs,” says his oldest daughter, Dena. “But he gets home improvement. He appreciates how people get excited about building something themselves.”

Helping others build for themselves is a theme Mr. Blank carries through to his foundation, which awarded $29-million in 2001. The biggest challenge, he says, is “to help young people build their self-confidence and self-esteem.” He adds: “If they feel good about themselves, they’re going to be successful in whatever they do, whether it’s family relationships or personal development.”

Mr. Blank’s childhood in New York was not easy. He grew up in a tough neighborhood in Queens, and he and his friends struggled to find their own paths. He says he succeeded in large part because his parents were strong role models and very involved with their children, and because he was able to participate in sports, the arts, and other outlets for his youthful energy. He overcame a pronounced stutter that dogged him throughout school. “That was a personal issue for me,” he recalls. “The more I worked through that, the better I felt about myself.”

Mr. Blank believes no single approach will build self-esteem in children, and his foundation is financing an array of groups working with youngsters. For instance, it has provided $97,000 to the National Wildlife Federation for programs including environmental clubs in high schools, and $45,000 to Take the Field, which is rebuilding public-school athletic facilities in New York City: “There are many people who can’t find themselves in school who are able to find themselves in the arts, or in sports,” says Mr. Blank. “People find themselves in a variety of settings.”

Preserving Green Space

While about 90 percent of the funds the Blank Family Foundation gives away each year are for youth projects, other causes also receive support. The foundation gives to many Jewish causes. It also has a new program to create or protect parks and other green space to help make up for urban sprawl that has eaten away much of Atlanta’s open spaces. Last month, the Blank Family Foundation announced its first round of grants, $6.5-million, to preserve 430 acres of space within the city. Those grants are part of the $20-million to $30-million the foundation plans to spend on similar grants over the next three years. The foundation also makes some discretionary grants.

“It’s important for people to have a place where they can recreate and spend time with their families and children,” Mr. Blank says. The foundation would like to see other grant makers join in the effort to preserve green space in the city. “We’re only one oar in the water,” Mr. Blank says. “We’re not that large. But the more exposure we give to issues, hopefully it’s a call to action for others.”

Small Charities

Most of the groups the Blank Family Foundation supports are small grass-roots organizations, and the foundation works very closely with them.

“They’re into developing a relationship, not just funding a program,” says Mitchel D. Moore, executive director of Heart of Los Angeles Youth, which received $64,000 from the foundation last year.

The foundation’s staff didn’t just send him money, but stayed in touch and followed up with regular visits, he says.

An Arizona charity that wrote asking for funds for a youth project was astonished by the foundation’s response: a site visit from Michael Blank, Mr. Blank’s brother, who oversees the Arizona programs, and Deva Hirsch, one of the foundation’s executive directors. “This to me was unheard of,” says John A. Oyler, director of national partnerships for the Institute of Cultural Affairs, in Phoenix, and a grant seeker for more than a quarter of a century. “I’ve never seen that willingness to explore, to look for a match, instead of us having to prove there’s a match.” The institute received $20,000 last year.

Money for Planning

The Blank Family Foundation places particular emphasis on operating grants because it believes the lack of such funds hobbles the expansion of many charities. “It’s so hard for nonprofits to get money for evaluation or planning,” Ms. Hirsch says. “Sometimes organizations are afraid to ask for what they really need, thinking there is a limit on what they can do. Why shouldn’t the nonprofit look at us as an infrastructure builder? This is a way we can work with organizations to continue to do what they do best, without their having to come up with new programs to get money.”

Such grants are very important to charities because there are few sources for them, says Karen Beavor, executive director of the Georgia Center for Nonprofits. “Operating grants are scarce in general, and so the fact that they [the Blank Family Foundation] have an emphasis on it is enormous, especially since they focus on small, new organizations.” And, she notes, the foundation is increasing those grants even as larger foundations cut back.

The foundation has even offered more to groups beyond what they ask for. That is what happened to Ginny Deerin, founder of Wings for Kids, a group in Charleston, S.C., that helps schoolchildren develop emotional maturity and coping skills through its after-school program. She says that shortly after she started the organization six years ago, she sought a grant from the Blank Family Foundation.

“I did what I always do — read what they want and then pitch a program that sounds like it fits,” she says. “I asked for $10,000. Deva came back and said here’s $10,000, and here’s another $5,000 for you to strengthen your organization.”

Ms. Deerin says foundation officials said “they were very interested in us developing the board, clarifying our strategic planning, and the founder’s succession. We were a baby organization. At that point, I was the board president, founder, and the only full-time employee.” Ms. Deerin spent the money on a consultant who helped her develop a plan for those goals. The plan culminated in the election of a new board chairman six months ago.

Encouraging Collaboration

The operating grants are only one way the Blank Family Foundation is trying to help its charities develop. In June, it brought about 400 of the youth groups it supports, in programs as diverse as the environment, sports, dance, art, and literacy, to Atlanta for a conference. The conference was designed to allow grantees to share their experiences and their most-effective programs.

Before the conference, says Ms. Hirsch, “we might visit somebody in Phoenix and say, ‘Gosh, it would be great if you met this person from New York. You have similar issues.’ We kicked around the idea of actually giving money to folks to travel to visit each other. We knew there were conferences convened around specific funding initiatives. We just thought, why couldn’t we do that for all of our grantees? Why couldn’t someone in environment learn from someone in the arts?”

The conference also fit into Mr. Blank’s more general aim — helping charities spread their good ideas and expand their programs.

At the conference, Mr. Blank explained that the foundation is placing new emphasis on encouraging charities to work together. He also discussed the foundation’s decision this year to restrict its grant making to fewer locations, so it can concentrate resources in a way that could help charities expand regionally or nationally. For now, the foundation will restrict grants to five geographic areas: Georgia, with an emphasis on Atlanta; New York City; coastal South Carolina; Maricopa County, Ariz.; and Park and Gallatin Counties in Montana. Family members own property or have lived in each of those locations.

Promoting Communication

The conference was designed to show charities ways they could work together and share solutions to common problems. “It’s not like people don’t know what the issues are,” Mr. Blank says. “In most cases, they’re pretty consistent around the country.”

Charities need to communicate and help one another to become more effective, he says. As an incentive, the foundation announced $500,000 in grants that conference attendees were eligible to receive for programs that they planned to conduct in tandem or with the guidance of another organization. Most grantees at the conference were enthusiastic about the cooperation grants and spent their spare time brainstorming in hallways and lounges. But some people had reservations.

“We would be crazy not to submit something, because the pool of applicants is so small,” says Elyse Barbell Rudolph, director of the Literacy Assistance Center, in New York City. But given the poor economy and the pressure to fulfill the terms of her grants, the last thing she wants to do is start a new program, she says. Even sharing a program with another group will require staff members’ time she will find difficult to spare.

Other small charities strongly resisted the notion that they could benefit from working together, insisting that their problems were unique or that it would take them away from their mission. “I wish they had just given us all $10,000 instead of having this conference,” one grantee was overheard saying to another.

Supporting Best Programs

Mr. Blank says such reactions are frustrating but not surprising. He’s no stranger to a group protecting its turf; many regional hardware chains, local stores, and even suppliers resisted Home Depot. Ultimately, he says, he will make sure that his money follows the best programs and the charities able to expand them.

Michelle Nunn, who has worked with Mr. Blank for several years, predicts he will succeed in helping charities join forces, share ideas, and expand their programs to other places. She is the executive director of Hands-On Atlanta, which matches volunteers to schools and nonprofit groups. (Mr. Blank led an effort to expand one of its school programs.) “Arthur has an intuition around running organizations,” she says. “There is nobody who has better experience going to scale than Home Depot.”

Last month, Mr. Blank announced that he had hired Ira A. Jackson as the foundation’s first president, a move that he hopes will help the foundation further emphasize collaboration. Mr. Jackson, who was director of the Center for Business and Government at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, has worked for BankBoston, served as the Massachusetts commissioner of revenue, and been a policy adviser to mayors. While at BankBoston, he was chairman of the United Way’s Success by Six, a program that works to ensure that children receive proper care and nurturing from the prenatal period until they start school. “Ira has shown over years of public service that he has the capacity for making big ideas happen,” Mr. Blank says. “He understands that to deal with some of these societal issues, you need to have all groups lined up together.”

Mr. Blank’s departure last year from Home Depot after five years as its chief executive raised some questions in the business world, and some news reports say his departure was forced. Mr. Blank disputes those accounts. “I felt it was time to do something else,” he says. “I also felt it was very important for our company to have a smooth transition,” and he said his presence hindered the efforts of his successor, Robert L. Nardelli.

In addition to the founders, the company has spawned as many as 1,000 millionaires and may yet stimulate additional philanthropy. The former executive vice president, Ronald M. Brill, who helped start the company, is already an active donor: He gave $1-million for an endowment at the Atlanta Jewish Community Center in 1999, and disbursed nearly $700,000 last year through a charitable trust.

Mr. Blank continues to watch the company carefully, and its business success or failure will have a lot of influence on the future of his philanthropy. He says he is waiting to endow his foundation until the stock recovers its value: Home Depot shares are worth 46 percent less today than they were in January 2001. “The stock will come back,” Mr. Blank predicts.

No Successor

While Mr. Blank expects his foundation to have big accomplishments, he has made it clear that he won’t be the only motivator. His wife, Stephanie, his brother, Michael, and his three adult children from a previous marriage, Kenny, Dena, and Danielle, sit on the board. Mr. Blank divides his time among the football team, the foundation, and the three young children he has with Stephanie — Joshua, 4, and year-old twins, Kylie and Max. He will be chairman of the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce next year. In addition to leading the capital campaign for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, he is co-chair of a campaign for the Children’s Museum of Atlanta.

He has not appointed a successor as chairman of the foundation, saying his family will “sort it out” after he dies.

“Over the next 10 years, I’d like to be in a position where I’m doing less for the foundation, and family and staff are doing more,” he says. “Particularly the trustees [his family]. This work’s got to go on beyond my life. I want it to be done by my children and my wife.”

THE ARTHUR M. BLANK FAMILY FOUNDATION

History: Established in 1995 by Arthur M. Blank, co-founder of Home Depot.

Purpose and areas of support: The foundation supports programs that create opportunities for young people, enhance their self-esteem, and increase their awareness of cultural and community issues. Most grants go to youth-development projects that involve arts, athletics, the environment, after-school activities, or promoting tolerance. It also makes grants to improve the organizational effectiveness of such groups and to preserve green space in the Atlanta metropolitan area, as well as some discretionary grants.

Assets: At the end of 2001, assets were $2.7-million. The Blank Family Foundation does not have an endowment; Mr. Blank provides funds for the foundation each year.

Grants: In 2001, 303 grants totaling $29.1-million were distributed.

Key officials: Arthur M. Blank, chairman; Ira A. Jackson, president; Deva Hirsch and Elise Eplan, executive directors.

Application procedures: The organization accepts unsolicited proposals from charities in the following geographic areas: Georgia; New York City; coastal South Carolina; Maricopa County, Ariz.; and Park and Gallatin Counties in Montana.

Address: 3290 Northside Parkway, N.W., Suite 600, Atlanta, Ga. 30327.

World Wide Web site: http://www.blankfoundation.org.