Putting Down Stakes Near the Strip

Diverse mix of new charities hope Las Vegas will prove to be a hospitable climate

It will be another sparkling building — a three-story, 144,000-square-foot gem, built by the same development company

responsible for the Bellagio and the new Wynn Resorts hotel, with floor-to-ceiling windows that look out on the neon lights of the Strip, and a Dale Chihuly chandelier in the entryway. Only this project isn’t another hotel and casino — it’s a cancer center.

The Nevada Cancer Institute, which has raised $65-million in less than three years of existence, is the most audacious new charity in a city that is churning out nonprofit organizations at a faster pace than all other urban areas except Atlanta.

Las Vegas, with a population of more than 1.5 million, has for years been the fastest-growing city in the United States, importing 5,000 to 6,000 people per month. As the city grows, new charities are sprouting all over town. Twenty-one percent of the city’s 3,065 charities have been created in the last three years, according to an analysis by The Chronicle of Internal Revenue Service data.

But those organizations have for the most part popped up in a haphazard way, on the whims of a founder, without the coordination or financing needed to plug the gaping holes in the infrastructure of Las Vegas, which will be only 100 years old in 2005.

“We are a growing community that needs everything,” says Douglas Bell, community-resources manager for Clark County, which includes Las Vegas. “People say growth is wonderful, but most people don’t understand that growth doesn’t pay for growth. There’s a whole new population arriving that’s used to having an infrastructure in place, and then they find it isn’t here.”

A Rocky Past

Notwithstanding the growth in the number of charities, Las Vegas lags behind other cities its size in charitable giving, social services, and the arts.

Nevada’s low taxes mean the government provides less support for social services than do most other states. Las Vegas tied for second to last among 50 major cities on a list compiled by The Chronicle in 2003 that examined the proportion of discretionary income that residents give to charities. And casinos, the big employers in town, were openly criticized in 2001 by the head of the United Way of Southern Nevada for failing to do their part to support local charities.

In a city where popular and adult entertainment rules the Strip, arts organizations generally bring in little revenue. A local arts council folded a few years ago. Las Vegas has already seen two symphonies come and go, and the third incarnation struggles to get by on a modest budget.

In 2003, the National Coalition for the Homeless ranked Las Vegas No. 1 on a list of the “meanest cities,” after the city’s largest shelter closed and Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman suggested that homeless people who resist treatment be removed from the area.

“The challenge is to get people to help address the most critical needs of this community so that we don’t fall further behind,” says Paul Stowell, the outgoing president of the Business Community Investment Council, a group of business executives who meet monthly to discuss philanthropy.

Mr. Stowell argues that support for basic social services is more important than contributing to what he calls “luxury programs” like the Boy Scouts.

“The Boy Scouts is a great program, but how do you put a kid in Boy Scouts when you can’t feed him or clothe him?” he asks.

Corporate Donors

Top charity leaders here say Las Vegas’s nonprofit organizations need greater support from corporate and individual donors, and a concrete vision for meeting the city’s greatest challenges.

The Nevada Cancer Institute, now under construction on a donated five-acre parcel in Summerlin, an affluent suburb, stands at the center of those two concerns.

The institute’s fund-raising success is a sign that philanthropy in Las Vegas may be maturing. The institute has already received three gifts of $5-million apiece, and this week it is scheduled to announce that one of those donors, the Greenspun Family Foundation, has promised to match up to $25-million provided by other donors.

“We’re not just raising money for the cancer center,” says Shelley Gitomer, the institute’s vice president for development. “We’re raising the bar for philanthropy around the city.”

The idea for the institute was hatched by Heather and James Murren, who moved to Las Vegas from New York in 1997 and were disturbed to find that many people were leaving the state for specialized cancer treatment, and that others — especially low-income residents without insurance — were heading to emergency rooms for care.

The new cancer center will provide treatment for all patients, regardless of their ability to pay.

“Access to health care” was identified as one of the area’s three most pressing needs in a local assessment sponsored in 2003 by the United Way of Southern Nevada and the Nevada Community Foundation. Nearly 60 percent of respondents said that they had faced trouble paying for medical expenses in the previous year.

Ms. Murren, a former Wall Street stock analyst who is now the cancer institute’s president, notes that Nevada also has the 10th-highest cancer-mortality rate in the nation. “That tends to dispel any controversy as to whether the center is needed,” she says. Ms. Murren and her husband, the president of MGM Mirage, have contributed more than $1-million to the project.

$30-Million in Assets

The quick start for the cancer institute isn’t the only promising sign for nonprofit groups here. The assets of the 16-year-old Nevada Community Foundation have risen from $12-million to nearly $30-million in the past 18 months. The Business Community Investment Council, established six years ago, is pushing local companies to join the “Two Percent Club,” a concept already popular in cities like Denver and Minneapolis in which all members agree to give a percentage of profits to charity.

And while local nonprofit leaders say gambling companies still need to become more philanthropic, they praise companies like Boyd Gaming, MGM Mirage, and Station Casinos for their efforts to help local charities. The sentiment toward gambling companies here is appreciably better than three and a half years ago, when Garth Winkler, who was head of the local United Way, told the Los Angeles Times: “Most charitable organizations in our community don’t feel gaming is doing its fair share.”

“There’s been a fair amount of wealth created here in a short amount of time,” says Don Snyder, president of Boyd Gaming and chairman of campaigns for both the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and a proposed downtown performing-arts center. “There’s good news and bad news with that. The younger wealth doesn’t have experience in philanthropy the way that old money does in other parts of the country,” he says. “Part of the challenge we have is helping people with that process.”

The United Way is trying to fill the void left by the closure in 2002 of MASH Village, which had been the city’s largest homeless shelter. In March, the United Way plans to open the Fertitta Community Assistance Center, which will house multiple organizations that serve the homeless, including mental-health providers, and government welfare, counseling, and Social Security offices. The center, located on the campus of Catholic Charities, expects to serve 60,000 people per year, four times the number that MASH Village served.

A three-year-old charity, the Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth, is trying to raise $5-million to start the first long-term residential facility for homeless teenagers. The charity is conducting a federally required study of all homeless people in southern Nevada, and early results suggest that one out of every four homeless adults in Las Vegas was on the street before turning 18.

The organization started four years ago as an advocacy group seeking to alter Nevada law to allow shelters to take in teenagers. After succeeding in getting that change made in 2001, the effort’s leaders received a call from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation, which is based here, offering them $50,000 to set up a program similar to one called Project Safe Place, which had been successful in Tulsa, Okla., and is being tested elsewhere.

Runaways and other homeless youths can walk into any of 75 Terrible Herbst convenience stores in the greater Las Vegas area and tell the clerk they’re interested in Safe Place. The clerks are trained to give the teenagers a free snack and then call a local shelter and a family member. “We get them help before they end up on the street,” says Kathleen Boutin, the charity’s executive director.

The program, which is advertised on television, has helped 127 runaways in three years, many of whom were fleeing abusive homes. It has also put the Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth on the map; the charity now has seven employees and a $2.5-million budget.

Artistic Revival

Advocates for the arts believe the downtown performing-arts center — which is still in the planning stages — would be a boon for local organizations, including the Las Vegas Philharmonic and the Nevada Ballet Theatre. The Las Vegas Performing Arts Center Foundation is asking county commissioners to help pay for the center with a 2-percent tax on rental cars. And Mr. Snyder, of Boyd Gaming, and others are optimistic that the plan will win approval in 2005.

The Philharmonic, founded in 1998, gets by on an operating budget of only $1.2-million and has no full-time musicians. Philip Koslow, the orchestra’s executive director, says the gambling industry provides only modest support for the Philharmonic and other arts groups.

“They may look at us as a competitor — as somewhere else to go on a Saturday evening — but what we offer is so divergent,” Mr. Koslow says. “I doubt that their patrons are saying, ‘I’ll either go hear Wayne Newton or the Philharmonic.’ We’re marketing to the local people.”

The Philharmonic currently plays about 20 concerts per year, mostly at a performing-arts center at the University of Nevada’s campus here. Scheduling performances is frequently a problem, however, since the Philharmonic’s concerts play second fiddle to events held by the university.

The proposed downtown performing-arts center would be “a great catalyst for us,” Mr. Koslow says. “Las Vegas offers more than just titillation. There’s a regular community here now, and they want to do what regular communities do.”

No Grand Plan

Dan Goulet, chief executive officer of the United Way of Southern Nevada, says that on the whole, the proliferation of charities in Las Vegas has been a curse, rather than a blessing.

“There are a ton of new charities,” he says. “The problem is that you don’t have everyone agreeing on where high priorities are. Somebody has an idea because they have a child with a need, and they go find a business that listens to them, and the next thing you know we have a new charity forming.”

He adds: “They have a great idea, but no strategic plan. Most are closed within two to three years. Then we have an emerging need, but nobody to address it.”

The United Way is moving toward providing support for collaborative efforts so that charities will work together to solve the city’s problems, rather than focus on elevating their own organizations.

That message has been received by some of the city’s older charities. The Shade Tree, a shelter for women and children that has expanded from 84 to 364 beds in the past four years, has 21 active partnerships with other charities and government agencies.

For example, it passes any free razors it receives along to the men’s shelters because the Shade Tree wants to keep them away from the children it serves. And since the Shade Tree doesn’t have a van, it has agreed to share some of its donated items with another shelter that has a van and can transport donated furniture back to the Shade Tree.

“We have more charities than ever vying for the same pool of money,” says Brenda Dizon, the organization’s executive director. “If we don’t work together, we’re going to destroy each other.”