October 21, 1999 | Read Time: 1 minute
Warren Buffett is known worldwide for his billions, but his sister, Doris Buffett Bryant, is making a name for herself for quite another reason: her philanthropy, administered through her low-key and “charmingly eccentric” Sunshine Lady Foundation, Worth magazine reports (October).
Ms. Bryant, 71, works from a one-room office in Morehead City, N.C., aided by 150 friends and associates whom she calls Sunbeams. Her foundation, which has assets of $16-million, has paid out nearly $4-million, $2.2-million of it in the last year. Grants have ranged from $280,000 to $58, with most totaling a few thousand dollars.
“It’s a uniquely hands-on, folksy, person-to-person kind of enterprise — the un-foundation,” Worth says of Ms. Bryant’s philanthropy. “A lot of her grant recipients are the hard-luck cases that bigger-deal foundations won’t touch: the man who became a quadriplegic after his car hit black ice on the way to work, the nearly deaf 4-year-old who needed bilateral hearing aids, the family made homeless by a tornado, and the policeman who required a bone-marrow transplant for his leukemia.”
Ms. Bryant avoids what she calls the SOB’s — the symphony, opera, ballet, as well as “other high arts whose glitzy patrons too often carry ‘multiple-type agendas,’” Worth says.
“It’s homey,” Ms. Bryant comments on her philanthropy, which she calls “virtue capital.”
“We try to keep it real clean, real simple.”
The article is available on the magazine’s Web site at http://www.worth.com.
