Rolling Up His Sleeves

By Elizabeth Schwinn

When it comes to philanthropy, Bernard Marcus wants to be in control of everything he can. His foundation,

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which last year provided $38-million to charity, gives mostly to groups that Mr. Marcus, a co-founder of Home Depot, learned about as he delved into the causes he cares about most: Medical research, children, the promotion of free enterprise, and Judaism command most of the foundation's grants. No unsolicited grant proposals are accepted.

"A foundation to me is a very personal thing," he says. Although members of his family are on the board and are involved in "some segment" of the foundation's work, he says they also have their own foundations.

Charity officials who have been the beneficiaries of his largess say that when he is caught up in a cause he will do everything he can to advance an organization's work, including soliciting other donors to support the effort. But he has raised hackles among some philanthropists because he rarely gives simply to support the cause of a friend or colleague, as other donors do. He gives only if he firmly believes in the cause, he says.

Mr. Marcus says he hopes to give away the bulk of his fortune before he dies so that he can oversee where the money goes. And just in case he does die before that happens, he has filmed a video of himself talking about his priorities and style of giving to be shown to foundation trustees who don't know him personally.

Preference for Anonymous Gifts

Mr. Marcus prefers that all information about his foundation and its grant making come from him, and he likes to keep most of his giving out of the public spotlight.

Although he granted two interviews for this article, Mr. Marcus was reluctant to provide other contacts. Staff members who responded to queries were cordial but emphasized that it is Mr. Marcus who speaks for the foundation. Neither Mr. Marcus nor the staff members released information about the grants from the foundation; instead, details were obtained by examining the informational tax returns the foundation must file annually with the Internal Revenue Service.

"We don't publicize what we do," Mr. Marcus says. "The word 'tzedakah' means you give, and you don't get recognition in return." Jewish teachings about tzedakah, a Hebrew word that literally means "righteousness," identify different levels of charity. One of the most valued types of giving is anonymous, where neither donor nor recipient knows the other.

Still, Mr. Marcus has made several highly public philanthropic gestures -- providing roughly $70-million to a medical-research center that bears his name and making a pledge last year to provide $200-million to build an aquarium in Atlanta.

The criticism that has erupted over the aquarium could be one reason Mr. Marcus is reluctant to discuss his philanthropy in detail, say people close to him. Mr. Marcus says he made the gift because he wanted to find a way to pay back the people of Atlanta for supporting the first Home Depot stores. "We were broke," he recalls. "They became our customers, they taught us what was right and wrong, what we should carry. I'm a great believer in paying back people who helped me."

While many in Atlanta's business world saw the aquarium as a useful way to add a tourist attraction to the city's downtown, other people were quick to point out that established Atlanta institutions, such as the zoo and the symphony, need money. In addition, some Atlantans said that nobody sought an aquarium and that it would have been better to create such an institution as part of a comprehensive downtown development plan.

"You can't satisfy everybody, and I have no intention of satisfying everybody," Mr. Marcus says of the flap. "I didn't do it to get elected." He adds that he discussed his plan with Georgia's governor, Roy Barnes, who assured him the aquarium would be welcome.

Making Large Grants

While the aquarium gift was the biggest he has ever made, it is not unusual for Mr. Marcus to make large commitments. He says he would rather give large amounts to a smaller number of programs than to spread his money among many groups.

For instance, he has poured a lot of money and time into helping mentally retarded children, largely through the Marcus Institute for Development and Learning, in Atlanta, which serves children who have brain disorders and their families. (The name of the institute seems to contradict Mr. Marcus's desire for anonymity: "It was a moment of weakness," he says. "I really don't like to do that.")

He got interested in the cause more than a decade ago, after a Home Depot employee whose child had suffered a brain injury was forced to seek assistance from centers as far away from Atlanta as Boston. He lured Peter S. Fanning away from the Kennedy Krieger Institute at the Johns Hopkins University, one of the leading national centers for the study and treatment of brain disorders in children, to head the institute.

The Marcus Institute became an affiliate of Kennedy Krieger in 1998, in large part with the help of $45-million provided by Mr. Marcus. The merging of the two centers is part of a plan to establish a national network of services to help children with brain disorders and their families deal with difficulties in learning, eating, and other such functions.

Mr. Marcus is helping to build other sources of support for the institute and occasionally shows potential donors through the building. "When he gets committed to something, he goes all out and becomes just your biggest advocate," says Mr. Fanning.

Mr. Fanning says he has more personal interaction with the Marcus Foundation than he has had with other foundations. "They'll invite me in to talk about the programs and be accountable for the programs," he says.

The medical-research institute isn't the only place where Mr. Marcus encourages others to support his favorite causes.

He often pushes other business leaders to follow his example. After teams at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention responding to last year's terrorist and anthrax attacks found themselves working out of auditoriums with pagers and cell phones, Mr. Marcus donated $3.9-million for a new emergency-response center. He also went on a CNN television program to ask companies to donate or reduce prices on equipment for the emergency center.

The idea was to help the disease-control centers "at the speed of business, not the speed of government," says Charles Stokes, executive director of the National Foundation for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a fund-raising arm that seeks private funds to supplement the center's government budget. The appeal was successful, Mr. Stokes added: Dell and Motorola were among companies that donated equipment to the emergency center or offered substantial discounts.

The idea of helping "at the speed of business" illustrates Mr. Marcus's view that charitable groups that work to help society can benefit from a broader adoption of business methods. His foundation always examines the management team of a potential grantee and the way the group handles finances before it decides whether to make a gift.

Mr. Marcus likes to support nonprofit enterprises that are focused on transferring business approaches to other segments of society, such as Business Executives for National Security, an organization through which corporate leaders offer their take on security issues. The group has critically examined Defense Department spending and suggested ways the Pentagon can save potentially billions of dollars by improving its business practices. Mr. Marcus donated $150,000 to the group in 2000, the most recent year for which figures are available.

His foundation makes numerous grants to support organizations that promote free enterprise, including $244,500 to Acción International, a charity that provides credit to small-business owners who are too poor to qualify for commercial loans. The capitalist system "is the best system in the world, even though it does have faults," Mr. Marcus says. "You cure those, but the system that creates jobs for people is very important."

Mr. Marcus says he learned the value of charity at a young age. "My mother used to take away my ice-cream money and give it to build trees in Israel. At the time, I missed the ice cream, but I learned to live without it. I learned that was just what you do. You give, it's what's expected of you," he says.

A lifelong interest in medicine and early exposure to intolerance of Jews helped develop Mr. Marcus's philanthropic interests. Mr. Marcus's great ambition was to go to Harvard Medical School and study psychiatry, but he was told it would cost him an extra $10,000 to circumvent the school's quota for Jews. His father, a carpenter in Newark, could not afford the cost, nor could Mr. Marcus, who had helped pay his way through college by working as a busboy. "My entire family had never seen that kind of money, let alone possessed it," he recalls. Instead of studying medicine at Harvard, Mr. Marcus went to pharmacy school at Rutgers University.

Looking back, he says he remains interested in medicine but is not bitter about what happened to him. "I never really felt too much anti-Semitism in my life," he says. "You can't dwell on things, or they'll end up ruining your life. Isn't it grand I had the ability to go back and do some things I wanted to do with medicine?"

What happened to other Jews had far more impact on his philanthropy, he says. "The Holocaust is something that affected me very deeply," he says. "At an early age, survival of the Jewish race and religion became very important to me. When I see anti-Semitism rising again, as it is in Europe, it's frightening, absolutely frightening."

As a result, Mr. Marcus is deeply committed to Jewish programs. He helped found the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Jerusalem, in 1991. George P. Shultz, secretary of state under Ronald Reagan, is the honorary chairman of the organization, which hopes to develop a democratic constitution for Israel. "Bernie is extremely committed to the survival of Israel, and believes that once it's past its current crisis, it will need political and economic development to grow," says Jay Kaiman, whom Mr. Marcus hired six months ago as his foundation's director of Jewish causes. To date, Mr. Marcus has given about $15-million to the democracy institute.

Despite his generosity, Mr. Marcus has raised some hackles in the often clubby world of Jewish philanthropy, according to donors to Jewish causes and their advisers, all of whom asked to remain anonymous. Not only are his political views more conservative than those of many of his peers, but he doesn't participate in the common practice of donating widely to others' causes.

Mr. Marcus shrugs off such criticism. "I don't believe in a quid pro quo," he says. "I give to what I believe in. I think that people should not give to anything they don't believe in. But if somebody comes to me with something that is their charity, that they believe in, and they can convince me, I'm with them."

Some observers say that Mr. Marcus is developing a significant new philanthropic project, possibly related to Jewish issues, and they say they have been asked numerous questions by Mr. Marcus and his advisers about the broad issues facing Jews.

Mr. Marcus, however, says he is not at work on a new program, adding that he has enough to keep him busy right now. "One problem with giving money is we stay involved. We generally follow up on all of these things, work with the project. You can't do too many at one time." But he acknowledges, "In every area that I'm involved, we're looking at the big picture."

That places Mr. Marcus in a relatively small group of Jewish donors, according to one expert.

"It's rare for a funder to look at holistic problems that are national or international or generational in scope," says Mark S. Charendoff, president of the Jewish Funders Network, in New York City. "Bernie is taking a look at the issues facing the Jewish community today and 25 years from now."

Mr. Charendoff says he is looking forward to seeing what the foundation does next.

"Bernie's the type of guy who's not afraid to experiment," he says. Mr. Charendoff notes that if the Marcus Foundation continues to spend as it has, "it will become one of the largest Jewish family foundations in the United States."

With his retirement from Home Depot last year, Mr. Marcus says he is devoting more of his time to philanthropy. The size of his foundation staff is growing, too. He recently added two program officers and plans to hire two more, and may eventually allow charities to apply for grants, according to Frederick S. Slagle, the foundation's executive director.

He has also recently added members to the board of his foundation, appointing a number of business leaders to serve alongside his relatives.

Every board meeting is a "learning experience" where he explains his giving goals, he says. "I've left a videotape, written documents, saying what I've given money to in the past, what I want them to give to, what I don't want them to give money to."

He says too many foundations don't respect the founder's wishes. As an example, he recalls a 1995 Forbes article about the Ford Foundation, headlined: "Donor Beware: Poor Henry Ford. The foundation bearing his name finances causes he would loathe."

"It's very disheartening to see some of these foundations," Mr. Marcus says. "Not that I agree with Henry Ford -- he was an anti-Semite if I ever heard one. But it's the principle. After the entrepreneur is gone, most of these foundations trash the things that started them."

Mr. Marcus says he recently spoke with the executive director of a foundation whose founder died 15 years ago. The executive director wanted to change the philosophy of the foundation to fit his own image, Mr. Marcus says. "I said, 'Oh, God, lightning should strike you on the way there. Did you make any of that money?'"

History: Established in 1989 by Bernard Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot.

Purpose and areas of support: The foundation supports programs for those who are struggling to become independent or to support themselves. Its program areas include groups that focus on children, medicine, promotion of free enterprise, and Jewish causes.

Assets: At the end of 2000, the most recent year for which federal information returns are available, assets were $2.4-million. Mr. Marcus provides money for the foundation each year but has not provided an endowment.

Grants: In 2000, 85 grants totaling $9.9-million were distributed.

Key officials: Bernard Marcus, chairman; Frederick S. Slagle, executive director.

Application procedures: The foundation does not accept unsolicited proposals.

Address: 2455 Paces Ferry Road, Building C, 22nd Floor, Atlanta, Ga. 30338-4024.