The Audacity of Hope

Five years later, a charity begun with a big gift and a wish to aid Africa measures its growth

One night in 1984, Donna Berber sat in her London flat watching a news program featuring

horrifying images of people starving from famine in Ethiopia. She held the remote control, but couldn’t change the channel. Instead, Ms. Berber promised herself never to forget the faraway strangers in need.

“The calling to do something and make a difference, it was always there,” she says. “If anything it got louder and louder as my life got quieter and quieter and more comfortable.”

Seven years ago, Ms. Berber, 47, got the chance to answer the call in a big way when her husband, Philip, 48, sold his online brokerage company, CyBerCorp, to Charles Schwab for $488-million.

The couple owned half the company and pledged $100-million in Schwab stock to start A Glimmer of Hope, a charity that makes grants to fight poverty in Ethiopia as well as in Britain, where Ms. Berber grew up, and here, where the couple now lives.

The gift — whose value shrank to $62.4-million by the time all of the stock sold — placed among the top donations made that year.

In the five years since the charity began, the Berbers have learned not to spread themselves too thin, as they did at first, and to work closely with local groups. The charity is now looking beyond its education and health projects in Ethiopia and is seeking a chief operating officer to manage some new programs to help Ethiopians gain self-sufficiency.

A ‘Drop in the Ocean’

Since it was created, A Glimmer of Hope has distributed more than $24-million, which has paid for the construction of water wells, schools, and veterinary and health clinics in rural Ethiopia, as well as programs that serve poor children in Austin and London.

In Ethiopia, where four of every five of the charity’s dollars are spent, the group set up its own office and works closely with local charities — but keeps a low profile among U.S. international-aid groups.

Local groups come up with project ideas and Glimmer pays grants quarterly, as the groups meet mutually agreed-upon goals. The Berbers help run A Glimmer of Hope and travel to Ethiopia annually with their three sons to check on programs. The family’s personal involvement, as well as their commitment to covering the group’s operating costs through its endowment income, has helped attract more than $4-million in donations from other sources, including nearly $1-million from the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, in Austin.

“We are humble enough to recognize we may not necessarily know the best way to help,” says Mukta Pandit, international programs director for the Dell Foundation. “Glimmer of Hope has the same approach: Let’s help the people help themselves.”

Compared with some other American groups that work in Ethiopia, the charity operates on a small budget. For example, Save the Children, in Westport, Conn., spent $24-million in the country last year, while Glimmer plans to spend nearly $4-million there in 2007.

The Berbers say Glimmer projects so far have helped two million people — but in a country of 75 million, where the average life expectancy is 49, according to U.S. government figures, Ms. Berber acknowledges her charity’s efforts are a “fabulous drop in the ocean.”

To better meet the needs there, the charity wants to develop ways to help Ethiopians earn money, such as providing small loans to entrepreneurs in rural villages.

“We can see that we are helping, but are we really helping to make poverty history long term?” says Mr. Berber, who runs the group’s operations while his wife concentrates on the Ethiopia programs. “Probably not, because humanitarian aid based on handouts is like a giant Band-Aid. Income creation, affordable irrigation, and helping them make money is likely the path that creates utopia in Ethiopia.”

Modest Beginnings

The Berbers, who married in 1985, never expected the wealth that came their way. Mr. Berber grew up as one of five children, in Dublin; his father ran a women’s clothing factory. “We didn’t have any money to give away, so my father would make hats and coats for the cantor and the choir in synagogue,” he says. “That was his way of giving back.”

After business school at University College Dublin, Mr. Berber eventually wound up working in Houston, where he got the idea to create software for people who wanted to buy and sell stocks without the aid of a broker. In the late 1990s, his day-trading company exploded with the popularity of the Internet. When he sold it, he decided to quit what he calls the “fear and greed and cut-and-thrust of business” and devoted himself to his wife’s charitable mission.

Ms. Berber’s older brother, David Gold, who runs Glimmer’s programs in London, says their “tough” childhood tipped them toward helping others. When she was 8 years old, Ms. Berber, her brother, and her mother saw her father perish in a small plane crash; her mother went to work to fend for the family.

“We were both less fortunate as children and we have a certain amount of good fortune now,” says Mr. Gold, chief executive of ProspectUs, a recruiter for charity jobs, and chairman of the advisory board of Philanthropy U.K., a group that encourages giving. “That helps you want to improve things for yourself and for others.”

Even before the family struck it really rich, Ms. Berber had embarked on her plan to help people in Ethiopia.

In 1999, she visited the Ethiopian embassy in Washington, prepared to spend $150,000 on an orphanage. But Tameru Abasaba, an embassy official who served as the liaison for American nonprofit groups working in the country, encouraged her to visit Ethiopia first.

Ms. Berber remembers crying as she traveled from Ethiopia’s airport to Addis Ababa, the capital city, and glimpsed women nursing babies in the rain in front of a tumble of iron and plastic sheets they called home. The smell of coffee mingled with the stench of garbage and unwashed bodies. She saw “vast deformities that you wouldn’t see in the Western world,” such as “feet that looked as if they were on backwards.”

Wanting to offer some immediate help, Ms. Berber ran out to buy bread, oranges, and blankets to give away on the streets.

By the time Ms. Berber made her journey, CyBerCorp had sold and she knew her philanthropy could have a deeper impact than handing out supplies. When she returned to the United States, Ms. Berber recruited Mr. Abasaba to help develop the charity’s long-term mission and become its representative in Ethiopia.

After first spreading its limited resources too thin geographically, the group now concentrates on integrating several projects in one rural location and copying this approach around the country.

For example, in Dembi Dollo, the village where Mr. Abasaba grew up, the charity has supported more than 100 projects, including spending $1-million on renovating the hospital there. “We are not fixing every social problem, but we try to ease a little bit of their daily problems,” says Mr. Abasaba, who suggested the charity focus on rural areas, which he says get overlooked by other groups because they are often hard to reach by the country’s rutted dirt roads.

Local Charities

Crucial to A Glimmer of Hope’s success, say the Berbers and Mr. Abasaba, is working hand-in-hand with local organizations.

In order to receive support, a local group forms a committee to create a wish list of projects. After determining which to support, A Glimmer of Hope signs a contract with the group stipulating that no more than 5 percent of the grant will be spent on administrative costs. The local group carries out the project and is expected to chip in with resources — such as paid or volunteer labor and, in some cases, additional money.

While a member of Glimmer’s four-person staff in Ethiopia checks on progress regularly, the relationship is one of peers, says Mr. Abasaba.

“It’s not, ‘I have the money, I am the boss, I am the king,’” he says. “It has always been a common goal and a common good purpose that we did together.”

Glimmer has pledged to support 503 projects this year, including 418 designed to provide people with clean water or improve irrigation.

The charity’s inclusive approach has earned it praise.

Tibor P. Nagy Jr., the U.S. Ambassador to Ethiopia from 1999 to 2002, says the Berbers won him over from his initial skepticism about Western do-gooders. “What I was seeing with the Berbers was real results and it was done in a process that beneficiaries were involved in from beginning to end.”

After reading Lords of Poverty: the Power, Prestige, and Corruption of the International Aid Business, by Graham Hancock, which Mr. Abasaba gave him, Mr. Berber decided that one of his goals in setting up Glimmer would be to guard against squandering resources.

“It was a pretty damning account of how little of the money was getting to the people in need,” he says. “People should get locked up for the waste in the international-aid business.” Mr. Berber’s research into how other charities operated prompted him to set up a separate office for Glimmer registered in Ethiopia, so the group would not have to use another charity or the government to channel its contributions, and therefore could avoid paying other groups’ administrative costs.

Low Profile

Aside from working with local groups, such as the Relief Society of Tigray, in Mekele, Glimmer keeps a low profile in Ethiopia and does not seek out partnerships with other international aid groups — in fact several large American charities working there had never heard of the organization.

Sahlu Haile, a senior program adviser at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, in Los Altos, Calif., who works in Ethiopia, says he has tried to contact Glimmer’s office there several times, because they support several of the same groups, but he never managed to speak to anyone.

Mr. Abasaba says that he does not recall the overtures but would have welcomed them. Mr. Berber says he plans to contact the Packard Foundation.

At least one official whose organization also works overseas says it might be a mistake for the charity to bypass other American groups in Ethiopia. “You can always learn from other people’s experiences,” says the official, who requested anonymity.

However, Ms. Berber says she would be open to sharing ideas if approached by another group.

In addition to programs in Ethiopia, the charity spends about $500,000 apiece annually in Austin and London. The grants mostly support new or evolving groups that would have a hard time attracting donations from other organizations, a nod to Mr. Berber’s entrepreneurial background. Mr. Berber says Glimmer intends to increase spending in Austin to support organizations that serve the elderly as well as young people.

The Austin and London programs are run with the same partnership spirit as the Ethiopia program.

“What we don’t want to do is serve as a taskmaster,” says David Porter, who directs grant making in Austin. Grantees “can be honest about not reaching numbers or recruiting and Glimmer will let them extend the grants. If you are open and honest with us, we will work with you.”

Melanie Moore, executive director of Badgerdog, a group that runs an after-school writing program in Austin, praises the group’s accessibility.

“I have met Philip and Donna Berber,” she says. “I have never met the head of any other foundation we get funding from.”

She also credits the group with introducing its grantees to one another at an annual lunch, and Badgerdog now works with Breakthrough Austin, another Glimmer grantee, which encourages students from poor families to graduate from high school and enroll in college. A Glimmer of Hope has given Badgerdog $40,000 to expand its programs to more schools.

Raising Money

Although the group has given away $24-million since its inception, its endowment currently stands at $64-million, more than it started with, because of investments and outside donations.

Among the group’s most-generous donors are Dave Welland, founder of Silicon Laboratories, in Austin, and his wife, Isabel, who started giving after they heard Ms. Berber speak about Ethiopia at a lunch for business leaders.

The Berbers meet annually with the Wellands, who have contributed $1.7-million since 2004, to discuss the group’s work and show them a video made on their annual trip to Ethiopia so they can see progress nearly firsthand.

“Maybe Oxfam does as well, maybe Doctors Without Borders does as well, but I don’t have the transparency that I do with these guys,” says Mr. Welland, who plans to make another gift of around $500,000 this year. “I know they run it very efficiently, very directly.”

The Berbers have no plans to hire a fund raiser and don’t spend much time raising money themselves. Still, Mr. Berber is frustrated that more wealthy people don’t step forward to support charities.

“There are many, many wealthy people, wealthier than us, that choose not to look into their own hearts, who are stuck in a place of fear, fear of losing their money,” he says.

Mr. Berber is also frustrated that so few Americans support international causes — only 2.5 percent of gifts go overseas, according to Giving USA, a national survey that tracks donor patterns. In an effort to increase this figure, Glimmer has donated $600,000 to the One campaign, started by the rock musician Bono to fight global poverty.

However, Mr. Berber acknowledges his family’s own limits as international philanthropists as well. While the Berbers contributed $1-million from their personal wealth to help East Asia tsunami victims in 2004, the family has not made a donation to groups dealing with the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, the war-torn region of Sudan.

“Part of our hallmark is to stay focused and do what we do uniquely well and keep doing it well,” says Mr. Berber. “That’s no excuse for not supporting Darfur.” Part of the problem, he says, is not knowing how best to help there.

Still, focusing on another African country, Ethiopia, will remain the family’s primary effort and the Berbers plan to eventually contribute more of their personal wealth to the charity.

The Berbers are also grooming their children to be philanthropists.

Their eldest, Ryan, now 20, interned at Glimmer and a local Boys and Girls Club. His parents have also given him $50,000 each of the past five years to donate; he has supported sports teams for poor children and a tutoring program, among other causes.

And the Ethiopia trips have affected all three sons.

“We have stayed in some places where there have been more insects than humans, there’s no running water, and a bucket for a toilet,” says Ms. Berber. “They see the scale of life, they see the scope of injustice, and they are all moved in one way or another.”