Tenacity and Warmth Bring Gifts to Hospital

By Brennen Jensen

Ann Isaly Wolfe has raised more than $400-million for Nationwide Children’s Hospital here, in part because of her tenacity (a local businessman recently gave $5-million to Nationwide following a decade of dogged pursuit by Ms. Wolfe) and warmth (she’s been known to bring pots of homemade soup and cookies to donors’ homes).

She’s also not shy — “unapologetic,” as she puts it — about asking for $100,000 or more, which is vital as she leads the organization through a campaign to raise $250-million.

This is her second time chairing a campaign for the hospital, and she has helped it land one of the largest gifts ever made to a Columbus institution, a $50-million grant from Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company. Those efforts are a key reason the center ranks No. 331 on the Philanthropy 400, The Chronicle’s ranking of the charities that raise the most money from private sources.

But the key to her fund-raising success can most easily be distilled to one word: passion.

“It’s a very emotional thing for me,” she says, her voice catching a bit as it often does when she thinks about the hospital’s mission. “For me it’s the right thing to do, as I feel so strongly that children need to be taken care of.”

Daughter’s Ailment

First opened in 1894 as Columbus Children’s Hospital, the sprawling facility just east of downtown now has more beds than all but three other pediatric hospitals in the country, according to the National Association of Children’s Hospitals and Related Institutions, in Alexandria, Va. And when the expansion effort now under way is completed, adding a million more square feet of medical and research space by 2012, it will probably have more beds than any other children’s hospital in the United States.

Ms. Wolfe got her first introduction to the hospital in 1975, when her daughter Rita was treated there for a pernicious form of hypoglycemia that ultimately required pancreatic surgery.

Her daughter made a full recovery and Ms. Wolfe was asked to join the board a few years later.

As a stay-at-home mother to three daughters, Ms. Wolfe had begun to dedicate some of her free time to nonprofit work, including serving on the board of the Columbus Junior Chamber of Commerce. The wife of John Wolfe, who owns The Columbus Dispatch and several Midwest television stations, she moved in the right social circles to come in contact with people with the potential to make large donations.

Her talent as a money raiser emerged during Nationwide’s first capital campaign, which began in 1995.

The goal was $85-million, which some people in Columbus thought was too ambitious. In the end, Ms. Wolfe, who chaired the campaign, helped the hospital raise $105-million.

“Columbus is a very generous community,” she says. “I think it’s a well-kept secret unless you live here.”

Hospital Visits

While Ms. Wolfe can speak movingly about all the healing and health research that happens at the hospital, she also knows when to let the facility’s sights and sounds convey the message.

She jokes that she’ll “do almost anything” to get potential donors to tour the hospital with her. She entertains prospective donors in her homes in both Columbus and Florida and has corralled them on cruise ships.

She does her homework, too, she says. Working with the hospital’s fund-raising staff, she discerns what a potential donor’s medical interests are and what, if any, experiences their families have had with the hospital, or with pediatric medicine in general.

“There’s nothing like getting folks into the hospital,” she says, and in some weeks, she has a different donor visit every day. “You can talk in an office all you want, but unless you’ve had a child here, you have no way of knowing what all goes on at this hospital.”

Ms. Wolfe says of the money-raising power of the personal tours: “If I get them here, I’ve got ‘em.”

Leading a reporter on one such hospital tour, Ms. Wolfe is clad in a vibrant scarlet coat. But it is obvious that she doesn’t need bright clothes to get noticed here, as physicians, researchers, nurses, and other hospital staff members alike greet her warmly by name.

One stop is the hybrid cardiac-catheterization suites, where congenital heart defects are treated with a combination of traditional surgery and less-invasive techniques involving catheters inserted into the body to install artery stents, artificial valves, and other corrective devices.

Carved out of former hospital warehouse space two years ago, the $8-million facility is where that approach to correcting heart defects was pioneered.

With its banks of flat-panel monitors and elaborate apparatuses, the suite looks like something out of a science-fiction film.

John P. Cheatham, the facility’s director, takes time to explain how nickel-titanium stents are inserted into damaged hearts and arteries though plastic tubes and how banks of cameras can capture every move.

Ms. Wolfe, he says, is a not-infrequent visitor to this cutting-edge operating suite, and he is more than happy to show potential donors his “toys.”

“Ann Wolfe helps make all this happen,” Dr. Cheatham says.

A centerpiece of any hospital donor tour is the neonatal intensive-care unit, where babies born more than two months prematurely and as small as a pound and a half reside in sophisticated plastic incubators.

“I learn something every time I walk though here,” Ms. Wolfe says. “Obviously, I’m a layperson and I can’t understand everything, but I can talk to a donor about a baby that weighed so many grams and this child wouldn’t have survived unless brought here.”

Ms. Wolfe’s visceral connection to the hospital’s mission helps motivate her in perhaps the most important part of her work: asking for money.

“Most people don’t particularly like to ask for money, let alone several million dollars at a clip,” Ms. Wolfe says. “I just feel very comfortable doing it for this institution. For children. And if someone is going to give us $25,000, $100,000, $500,000, they deserve the campaign chair to make the ask.”

Pam Farber, whose late father, Dave Thomas, founded the Wendy’s hamburger chain in Columbus, says the Thomas family has given $6-million to the hospital, most of it due to Ms. Wolfe’s efforts. “Her passion and commitment to the hospital are absolutely engaging,” Ms. Farber says. “When someone asks for a donation who feels so strongly it’s hard to say no.”

Perhaps Ms. Wolfe’s greatest example of this approach occurred two years ago, when she and Abigail Wexner, the chairman of the hospital’s board, set up a meeting with Jerry Jurgensen, chief executive of the Nationwide insurance company, whose headquarters are in Columbus.

The night before the visit, she recalls, the head of the hospital’s fund-raising office inquired how much she was going to ask the company to donate. Her answer: $50-million.

“He said we were going to get thrown out of that office,” Ms. Wolfe says, with a grin. “We were going to get tossed. Oddly enough, we had a wonderful meeting and [Mr. Jurgensen] ended up saying he was very intrigued.”

Six months later the Nationwide Foundation announced a $50-million, 10-year commitment to the hospital. Last year, Columbus Children’s Hospital became the Nationwide Children’s Hospital in honor of the donation.

Ms. Wolfe says the name change was not just a good way to honor a donor but it also dovetailed nicely with the institution’s ambitions to develop a coast-to-coast reputation for pediatric care. She acknowledges that “a lot of people like to see their name on something” and that the hospital is brimming with naming opportunities for donors. For the current campaign, she can show prospective donors graphic renderings that depict rooms and lobbies emblazoned with their names. “Those are powerful tools I didn’t have my first campaign,” she says.

Humble Approach

In 1999, when the hospital decided to honor Ms. Wolfe’s hard work by naming a wing of the hospital the Ann Isaly Wolfe Education Building, she was honored — but also disappointed.

“I probably could have sold that naming to someone,” she says. “I don’t do this for recognition and that’s what I told them.”

Ms. Wolfe and her husband have also supported the hospital directly. They have given it more than $10-million, including personal gifts as well as money from Mr. Wolfe’s company and the family’s foundation. “You have to set the example and do as much as you can,” Ms. Wolfe says. “I don’t think you can be a very effective fund raiser if you ask someone to make a major gift and say, ‘But I can’t do it myself.’”