Uncompromising Position

Couple’s crusade for moral integrity in philanthropy wins praise from many — and ruffles feathers of some

Charities that get money from the Everett Foundation, in New York City, need to be prepared for the strings that come attached. Those strings are attached to Edith and Henry Everett, the foundation’s benefactors, who make a point of regularly visiting every project they support, examining the books, talking to a grantee’s employees, and inundating them with phone calls and faxes.

They don’t hesitate to praise charities they think deserve it, but when they are not pleased, they are sharp, insistent, and often public in their criticisms.

It doesn’t matter whether the project is big or small, or where it is located. In recent months, the Everetts’ main target has been United Jewish Communities, the national umbrella group that represents Jewish federations and other charities. Longtime antismoking advocates and strong supporters of Jewish causes in the United States and Israel, the couple say it was wrong for such an influential group to nominate James S. Tisch, chief executive of a company that owns a major cigarette company, as its new chairman — a decision Ms. Everett calls “moral bankruptcy.” But they have not put all their energy into that fight. They also spent time this spring chastising Joseph Elul, mayor of Hatzor HaGelilit, a small town in northern Israel where the Everetts financed construction and operation of a school. The Everetts didn’t like Mr. Elul’s choice for principal — his brother-in-law — and successfully persuaded the mayor to choose the candidate preferred by the school’s teachers and other educators the Everetts had consulted.

The Everett Foundation, which has nearly $25-million in assets, is small but has had significant influence, in part through the tenacity and creativity of its donors. Nonprofit officials say other donors often follow the lead of the Everetts, in part because they can count on the couple carefully vetting every project they support.

In addition to their grants, which go to the arts, education, human services, Jewish causes in the United States and Israel, and a wide array of other projects, the Everetts are trying to influence the next generation of nonprofit leadership through a summer internship program that pays for college students to work at charities and learn about career possibilities. They also have tried to encourage their grantees to join their crusade against tobacco, urging charities to refuse to accept money from any donor associated with the cigarette business.

The Everetts, who do all the work for their foundation and have no paid staff members, say they give considerably more directly than they do through the fund, but they wouldn’t say how much or provide estimates of their net worth.

Paying ‘Rent’

Now in their 70’s, the Everetts began their philanthropic activity well before they had large sums to give away. In fact, they set up their foundation not, as many do, when retirement was approaching. They did it five years after they were married, in 1955, when Mr. Everett was working as a research director and economist at the Abraham & Straus department store and Ms. Everett was teaching in a New York City public school and working on her master’s degree in education.

“We wanted to do philanthropy, and this represented a commitment that some of our income would go to charity,” Mr. Everett recalls. “We felt we had to pay rent on this earth as beneficiaries of the ovarian lottery.”

The foundation’s first grant was $300. It went to a high school in the Bronx that the Everetts heard about on television. According to the news report, the school’s football team had no money for uniforms and no place for its team to practice.

“We called the principal of the school, but he told us that some people from the New York Stock Exchange had already gotten together to pay for the field and the uniforms,” says Ms. Everett. So they decided to give the principal the money to use at his discretion.

“We just said, ‘We only ask that, after you’ve dispensed it, tell us what you did with it,’” she recalls.

When they received his report, she says, they were surprised to see what the money had accomplished.

“He gave $20 to a kid who’d had his shoes stolen; another kid wanted to go to college but didn’t have money for the application fee, so he gave him $10,” she says. “It brought us around to the understanding that small sums of money can be very significant, and can make a big difference to some family.”

In 1961, the Everetts’ income began to rise. With the encouragement of a friend, Ms. Everett left teaching and became a broker at an investment company in Manhattan, then moved to Herzfeld & Stern in Brooklyn, to be close to home and her two children. She is now senior vice president at Gruntal & Company, which acquired Herzfeld & Stern in the 1980’s. A few years later, Mr. Everett set up his own financial-services company, Lexington Associates, and though he focuses a considerable part of his time on his philanthropy, he continues to work with selected clients. “I felt that working for a big firm, I wouldn’t be able to exercise my moral conviction,” he says. As their earnings rose, so did the couple’s giving. They became supporters of the United Jewish Appeal, the Child Welfare League of America, and educational projects.

Their activity extended to Israel after they made their first trip to the country in 1968. Looking to support education there, the following year they were given a list of towns that needed schools. Mr. Everett says he asked which was “the hands-down worst place on the list. They said Hatzor. I said, that’s where we’ll go.” Building the school wasn’t the end of it. “We’re on the phone maybe twice a week with the principal,” Mr. Everett says.

In addition to exerting influence over the choice of the three principals who have headed the school during its existence, the Everetts have been involved in designing programs for the school, such as one in which kids learn how to be guides at the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum in Beit Lohamei HaGetaot.

Each time they visit Israel — usually about twice a year — they stop by the faculty lounge to hear the teachers’ concerns. During a trip in May they dedicated a teacher-training center they helped finance at Tel Hai College, where teachers from Hatzor and elsewhere in the region will be able to take courses and learn new techniques.

Battling Over Tobacco

The scuffle over the principal is just one of the scrapes that the Everetts have gotten into during their years in philanthropy.

Their opposition to tobacco has been at the root of many controversies, and Mr. Tisch, who is chief executive of the Loews Corporation, which owns Lorillard Inc., manufacturer of Kent and other brands of cigarettes, has been an object of some of the disputes. Four years ago, the Everetts unsuccessfully opposed Mr. Tisch’s nomination to head the UJA-Federation of New York for the same reason they are now protesting his leadership of United Jewish Communities. In a letter to the head of the search committee, Ms. Everett said the choice of Mr. Tisch “leads me to believe that the leadership of the American Jewish community should file for moral bankruptcy.”

Mr. Tisch will not comment on the Everetts’ opposition, but few Jewish leaders agree with their view.

“Jim is an absolutely outstanding community leader,” says Daniel Shapiro, a New York lawyer who was the head of the search committee. Mr. Tisch’s tobacco holdings are “a lawful business,” Mr. Shapiro says, and it “doesn’t mean that he’s foreclosed from continuing to provide service to the community.”

No one expects the Everetts to succeed in this campaign against Mr. Tisch any better than they did in 1997, when their wrangling took a strange turn.

In the spring of 1997, the Everetts withdrew a $3-million pledge to the Wildlife Conservation Society, in New York, for its children’s zoo in Central Park, over a dispute about how the money would be used. A week after that news became public, Mr. Tisch’s father, Laurence, and his uncle, Preston Robert Tisch, directed their foundation to replace the Everett gift and add up to $1.5-million more, and the zoo promised to name the zoo after the Tisches. The episode led to accusations in the press and among friends of the Everetts that the Tisch gift was designed to embarrass the Everetts for opposing James Tisch’s leadership of the New York federation, though the Everetts say they don’t believe that was the motivation and the Tisches said they made the gift without knowing the identify of the donors who had reneged.

In any case, the gift controversy hardly led the Everetts to back down: Ms. Everett told reporters she was very upset that a children’s zoo would end up bearing the name of a family that made its money in part from tobacco. People who know them point out that the Everetts’ concerns about Mr. Tisch’s leadership is not only about the issue of smoking — it is also about how Jewish groups in the United States choose their leaders.

“It’s a question of what the definition of a Jewish leader is, whether leadership should be determined by the size of a person’s bank account,” says Avinoam Armoni, executive director of the Israel office of the Gilo Family Foundation, of Woodside, Calif.

A Moral Influence

Nevertheless, it is the Everetts’ stand against tobacco that has attracted attention throughout the nonprofit world. In 1998, Mr. Everett resigned from the board of the International League for Human Rights after it honored the chief executive officer of Philip Morris, Geoffrey Bible.

They also encourage their grantees to refuse money from companies or individuals who make their money from activities related to smoking.

At Teach For America, which has received $1-million from the Everetts for its endowment drive, Wendy Kopp says that “at one point, they really pressed us to look at our policy around promoting gifts from tobacco companies, and I really appreciated the respectful, yet uncompromising way they pushed us on that.”

In the end, the charity decided not to reject all tobacco money but to refuse to participate in any advertising or public-relations efforts of tobacco companies or other businesses that pursue activities that could be harmful to schoolchildren. “There have been points where the Everetts’ moral leadership has inspired me to take steps to ensure that everything in our organization is aligned to our values,” she adds.

Their activism to end smoking wins praise from people such as Timothy Smith, former executive director of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility. The Everetts’ financial contributions to the center’s efforts to end smoking have been relatively modest, he says, but they provided “imagination, sweat equity, endless hours working on this with us.” He added: “They’re always coming up with good ideas.”

Tobacco is not the only topic that influences their philanthropy. The Everetts say they take a large number of moral concerns and causes into account when they choose to serve as trustees of nonprofit causes. “Before we join a board, we examine the letterhead very carefully to see if it includes anyone involved in things like handguns, campaign-finance abuse, and pollution,” Mr. Everett says.

The Everetts’ ethical stands, along with their detailed examination of projects seeking support, means that other donors look to them.

“If the Everetts give a sign that an organization is on the up and up, others will give,” says Laurie Heller, a consultant in Jerusalem to many nonprofit groups. Mr. Everett says that he spends a lot of his time urging other philanthropists to give money to causes he thinks worthwhile. Often, Ms. Heller notes, the Everetts will pledge support for a project — but only the final sum of money needed. The organization can then use the Everetts’ promise of support to help raise the rest of the money from other sources.

They also find other ways to assist nonprofit groups. They created a public-service internship program to provide much-needed manpower through the program, in addition to encouraging young people to consider nonprofit careers. This year, Mr. Everett says, they received 20,000 applications for 200 positions.

“Kids who’ve gone through the program and graduated have come back to get jobs here,” says Judy Green, senior vice president at People For the American Way, one of the organizations that has received interns each summer since the program began in 1989. Ms. Green said one reason for the success of the program is the Everetts’ personal involvement in choosing the interns and participating organizations and in organizing dinners, speakers, and seminars for the interns.

To many who know the Everetts, it seems like they never sleep. Stories abound about sudden calls at all hours, especially if they have come up with a plan for giving away their money and want to share it with others.

Eliezer Jaffe, a professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem who specializes in the study of nonprofit organizations, recalls being woken up late one night. “Edith was on the line,” Mr. Jaffe says. “She said, ‘It’s our anniversary and we’ve decided that to celebrate we want to give money to some people we think are doing nice work. So we’d like to give $20,000 to the charity of your choice.’” The result, Mr. Jaffe said, was the establishment of a no-interest loan fund for needy families to acquire necessities.

The Everetts’ philanthropic generosity is matched by an equally strong desire to spend modestly on personal needs and to instill such frugality in their children and grandchildren.

“We’ve never owned a car, never had a second home,” Mr. Everett points out, and he proudly boasts that their children, while financially comfortable, also don’t have second homes or other luxury items.

“You know when I knew we’d gotten our message across?” Ms. Everett interrupts him. “It was last month. I took our grandchildren to a play at Lincoln Center, and we went into a coffee shop for something to eat. One of my grandsons is crazy about salmon, and there was salmon on the menu. He fidgeted and looked up at me and said, ‘Grandma, it costs $18.75. Can you afford that?’”

The Everetts say they hope to give as much of their money as possible away before they die. Any money that the couple has left when they die will go to the foundation, and their children will be in charge of disbursing it. Like many other wealthy philanthropists, they were very upset by efforts by lawmakers and President Bush to end the estate tax, and they joined a group of more than 100 wealthy people who backed a campaign to support the tax led by William H. Gates Sr. Says Mr. Everett: “We always tell people the best way to handle the estate tax is to give all your money away.”