One Man’s Out-and-Out Philanthropy

Tim Gill uses his high-tech fortune to back gay groups, train other donors

Colorado has never been known as a haven for gay people.

That is precisely why Tim Gill, the openly gay entrepreneur who founded the publishing-software company Quark, decided to set up a foundation in the state — and to focus its giving on gay and lesbian causes.

Seated in a spacious but sparsely decorated office in the skyscraper here that serves as the headquarters of his company, Mr. Gill, 46, says the initial impetus for starting the Gill Foundation — whose endowment is currently worth $82-million — was passage of a 1992 state ballot referendum that effectively stripped homosexuals of antidiscrimination protections. Although the law was subsequently ruled unconstitutional, Mr. Gill says it provided him with the “kick in the pants” he needed to increase his giving significantly — and to focus it on gay and lesbian organizations.

“Nothing can compare to the psychological trauma of realizing that more than half the people in your state believe that you don’t deserve equal rights,” he says. Perhaps as difficult, he adds: Seeing bumper stickers on the cars of some Quark employees in support of the ballot measure.

Before the measure passed, he says, he gave less than $10,000 a year. “I was more focused on making money,” he says. By comparison, last year he donated more than $30-million to his foundation — about half his income.

Besides supporting gay and lesbian groups, the Gill Foundation, through a special fund, also makes grants to mainstream groups such as symphony orchestras and colleges. But those grants — which last year amounted to around $700,000 of the $4.4-million distributed by the foundation — are no less tied to increasing social acceptance of homosexuals than are the grants to gay organizations.

To qualify, grant-seeking organizations must have in place — or agree to put in place — a nondiscrimination policy that specifically includes gay men and lesbians. And they must also agree to acknowledge — in programs, annual reports, plaques, and other similar places — that they received money from the Gill Foundation’s Gay and Lesbian Fund for Colorado. In that way, the foundation hopes that the general public will learn more about the ways that gay people participate in society.

“Unless you have a very high public profile, if you’re listed in a symphony program simply as ‘Tim Gill,’ then to most people that’s just another example of a heterosexual giving away money to the symphony,” says Mr. Gill.

“You’re kind of hiding. You’re allowing society to have illusions, which are probably bad illusions, about what gay people do and don’t do. People are going to make much more intelligent decisions about gay people if they realize how involved gay people are in the community.”

Not hiding has long been important to Mr. Gill. He told his family that he was gay when he was still an adolescent. He was open about his sexuality when he went to the University of Colorado at Boulder in the 1970s, where he joined protests to oppose psychology courses in which homosexuality was described as a personality disorder.

“I spoke to classes and I tried to convince them that I wasn’t abnormal,” recalls Mr. Gill. “That was where society was in 1973 and 1974.”

While his interest in promoting the rights of gay people didn’t wane after he left college, he quickly became consumed by another cause: starting his computer company, which he began in 1981 with a $2,000 loan from his parents. Quark made him a multimillionaire — rich enough to land twice in the past five years on Forbes magazine’s list of America’s wealthiest people.

The responsibility that comes with being one of the wealthiest gay men in the country is not one that Mr. Gill takes lightly. In 1995, his foundation created an operating arm, named the OutGiving Project, to run educational conferences and workshops throughout the country for gay donors. Mr. Gill feels strongly that wealthy gays do not give as much as they can to organizations that seek to improve their rights and social acceptance.

Since 1996, the project has gathered hundreds of wealthy gay donors each spring in Aspen, Colo., to attend a national conference and to discuss how to be better donors. Last year, more than 100 donors participated — each of whom gave at least $25,000 a year to charity or had written a $10,000 check to a non-profit organization. In addition, the OutGiving Project holds smaller conferences around the country for regional gatherings of gay donors, each of which typically draws more than 100 people.

Mr. Gill’s hope is that the project will influence donors to rethink the giving habits passed down by their families.

“Many people — especially those who inherit wealth — get their giving training from their families, and their families typically have an area that they’re interested in,” he says. “Often, they focus on that area because that’s how they were trained to think about it.

“I want people to not necessarily change, but to at least think about whether that is really the place where the heart is — or whether they could be giving to gay and lesbian causes more.”

The project also encourages donors to do all they can to publicize that their gifts were made by a gay person.

Mr. Gill is also working on ways to make gay and lesbian organizations more effective.

For fund raisers and administrators at non-profit groups, the Gill Foundation runs what it calls OutGiving in Community seminars, which provide instruction in all aspects of fund raising, such as starting a planned-giving program and writing direct-mail appeals.

In addition, OutGiving in Community each year holds intensive management and fund-raising training programs in eight small- to medium-sized cities where resources for gay and lesbian services typically are scarcer than they are in larger urban areas.

Mr. Gill’s attempt to strengthen the operations of the gay charity world is having a major effect, observers say.

The Coalition for Equality in New Mexico, a Santa Fe group that brings together gay and lesbian groups in the Southwest and also works to improve their effectiveness, has received about $40,000 in grants from the Gill Foundation over the past four years. In addition, the foundation has sent OutGiving in Community trainers to New Mexico to teach the organization and its 35 member groups how to be more effective fund raisers and organizers.

Jo Kenny, the coalition’s coordinator, says the Gill Foundation’s support has helped her group grow from one with no paid staff and a budget of less than $30,000, in 1997, to one with a paid staff member and a budget for 2000 of $168,000.

“It’s a wonderful thing that they’re doing,” she says. “The quality of the training is always excellent,” she says — though she adds that sometimes the training is more sophisticated than the participants’ level of expertise. When that happens, she adds, the teachers are willing to adjust to the trainees’ needs.

In addition to offering seminars, the Gill Foundation also spends tens of thousands of dollars to support research by groups that study gay and lesbian issues and trends, in the hopes that such research can be used by policy makers. Research financed by the foundation has found, for example, that advocacy groups that serve gays, such as the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force and the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, collectively had annual budgets of $92.3-million in 1996 — the most recent year for which the foundation had figures. In comparison, Focus on the Family, a conservative religious group in Colorado Springs that promotes traditional family values, alone had a budget of $115-million that same year.

“The gay and lesbian community needs to make some adjustments,” says Mr. Gill. “We have got to stop playing the victim role.”

Some observers say that Mr. Gill’s actions have had a ripple effect in philanthropy.

“If you look at other people, the ‘superdonors’ in our community, Tim stands out because he is going beyond funding particular causes and organizations and helping to create some of the infrastructure to move the community forward,” says David Ring, a retired executive of the computer company Cisco Systems who lives in Sonoma County, Cal. He adds that Mr. Gill’s influence stems from his vision and willingness to innovate — skills he honed in the high-technology field — not the force of his personality. “He’s a software guy; he’s kind of introverted,” says Mr. Ring.

Other observers agree.

“Even among individual gay and lesbian people who have started their own foundations — and there are more of those — he stands out,” says Nancy Cunningham, executive director of the Working Group on Funding Gay and Lesbian Issues, in Washington. “More gay and lesbian people are accumulating wealth and being philanthropic than ever before,” she says, “but Gill is still a leader in terms of the level of grant making that he’s doing.”

Ms. Cunningham adds that the resources provided by the Gill Foundation are greatly needed. According to her group’s data, which are drawn from the Foundation Center and other sources, U.S. foundations give 0.3 per cent of all grants to gay and lesbian organizations, not including those that work on AIDS-related issues.

“It’s very important to have models to look toward when people are trying to figure out where to give,” Ms. Cunningham says.

Paul Hokemeyer, national director of major gifts at the Sierra Club, considers Mr. Gill to be just such a role model. He says that a conversation he had with Mr. Gill at last year’s OutGiving conference prompted him to start the Walt Whitman Gay and Lesbian Fund at the Sierra Club. The fund, which has raised $10,000 since its start last spring, sends appeals to gay people. Its name is then featured in Sierra Club’s annual report and acknowledged by the environmental groups that receive support, providing a way for the public to readily see the contributions of gay donors.

“Right after the OutGiving conference this year it struck me,” says Mr. Hokemeyer, who had attended each of the conferences since their inception. “Here I am, a gay-rights activist working in an environmental organization. Is there a way to bring awareness to people who understand the need for environmental activism but not necessarily for gays and lesbians?

“For me, Tim Gill was my role model in helping inspire me to say to this 100-year-old organization, ‘We need to have gays and lesbians represented and have them listed in the title of a fund,’ which leaders here were hesitant about.”

Along with the accolades, Mr. Gill has attracted criticism, largely from conservative religious groups that oppose gays and lesbians. But he is also receiving some flak from non-profit activists who believe that he could spend more on other causes, such as feeding the poor or battling discrimination more broadly. Some have questioned whether focusing so single-mindedly on gay issues is a good approach for other donors to emulate.

To his critics, Mr. Gill responds that, to be an effective donor, each philanthropist must follow his or her own personal interests. “It depends on who you are,” he says. “If you are black, you’re going to say the black community needs your money. That’s where your heart is. If you’re Latino, you’re going to say that that’s the community that needs your money. And that’s good.

“For me, the place that really speaks to my heart is the gay and lesbian community. And so that’s where I’m going to give my money away, and that’s where I can do the best job.”

Despite his philanthropic activity, Mr. Gill estimates that he spends 85 to 95 per cent of his time on his business. Consequently, he delegates many of his foundation’s activities to a staff of two dozen.

“I figure now, while I’m in my prime earning years, I should focus all of my skills on building my business and accumulating wealth,” he says. “But that will certainly change.”

One reason is that he wants to play a major role in seeing that his money is spent in the way he wishes: He does not like the idea of leaving a big foundation to exist forever.

“You see a lot of foundations that operate in perpetuity becoming calcified,” he explains. “They do the same things, and they do wonderful things. But they don’t do innovative things.”

He continues: “The question is, How long can innovation survive after the founder’s death? My foundation board would end up saying, So what would Tim have done? And they’d be basing their decisions on this very static image of what Tim was at one time. If I were around, I would be finding new things to be interested in, finding new ways to do things.”

Mr. Gill has not ruled out leaving a smaller permanent fund to support certain projects that may not require innovation, but he imagines that the majority of his fortune will be given away within 10 or 20 years of his death.

While that will amount to a lot of money — and while other donors may also step up their giving to gay and lesbian non-profit work as a result of the OutGiving Project — Mr. Gill doubts that philanthropy will ever cause homophobia to dissolve altogether.

“I don’t think we’ll ever get to that point in society,” he says. “I think there is a continuous tendency of humans to try to take groups and fence them off and stereotype them or marginalize them.”

Still, his resolve to keep trying, using his philanthropy, remains strong. “There are things that you learn about yourself and about the rest of the world by giving away money,” he says. “To deprive yourself of that is a big mistake.”