Former businessman's hands-on, 'eyeball-to-eyeball' style of giving is the inspiration for a new TV drama
Teddy Rist is having a tough time. The playboy businessman lost his son a year ago, his wife divorced him, and an isolated act of heroism has left him questioning what he's doing with his life. The solution to his malaise? Philanthropy.
Mr. Rist, the lead character in NBC's new drama The Philanthropist, sets off in the series premiere June 24 to engage in some "vigilante philanthropy." His hijinks-filled do-goodery takes him, in the first episode, to Nigeria, where he faces corrupt customs officials, poisonous snakes, and rebel gunmen in hopes of delivering a cholera vaccine to a rural health clinic.
Not the stuff that fills many annual reports on corporate giving, to be sure, yet Mr. Rist has a real-life inspiration. Bobby Sager, a former businessman whose stories provided the genesis of the show, is more sophisticated about his philanthropy than the sometimes clumsy Mr. Rist, but he is equally adventurous. Oddly enough, he's also more colorful in some respects.
A 'Quest for Fullness'
Mr. Sager sparked the interest of a producer two years ago while giving a speech at his son's bar mitzvah. The donor was describing the effect his "eyeball-to-eyeball" philanthropy had on his family, and a producer friend in the audience took notice.
Once the president of a century-old liquidation firm in Boston, Mr. Sager underwent a gradual transformation that began like this: a growing sense that amassing cars and apartments wasn't the way he wanted to spend the rest of his life.
"It wasn't like I had this moment of awareness or I said, I've been fortunate and now I want to give back," he says, recounting the story in his sprawling, three-level apartment overlooking Boston Commons. "It was about me in my quest for fullness in my life, looking at my situation and saying, more money isn't going to give me more return on investment because I already have all that I want that money can buy."
So Mr. Sager pulled his two children, then 8 and 5, out of school and embarked on a yearlong trip around the world. The family lived in Australia, Bhutan, Brazil, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Rwanda, South Africa, and Sri Lanka, with the goal of finding and supporting charitable programs.
That was nine years ago. Mr. Sager still spends most of each year developing and visiting nonprofit projects, and tapping into his list of business contacts to help make them more effective. His Sager Family Traveling Foundation and Roadshow will spend about $1.8-million Mr. Sager donated on 10 programs this year.
They include a project that introduces Tibetan monks to modern science, which came out of a conversation between Mr. Sager and the Dalai Lama at Brandeis University; a program in Iraq that teaches young people soccer and skills they will need as adults; and another that pushes a network of international business leaders known as the Young Presidents' Organization to embrace giving.
Worldwide Images
Over the years, Mr. Sager has developed a rich philosophy on giving, which creeps into the television show. He has a contractual agreement with NBC, he says, and has taken Charlie Corwin, his friend and the show's co-creator, to the West Bank to gather script ideas. Both men stress, however, that the series isn't based directly on Mr. Sager's life, which, when he isn't gallivanting around the world, unfolds in the Boston apartment he's decorated with fanciful touches that are more the stuff of a Wes Anderson film than the sleek corporate boardrooms of The Philanthropist.
Fish tanks gurgle. A submarine hatch reveals Mr. Sager's office. He's got the sink from a 747 jet in his bathroom, and three Tibetan saddles by the window. Plastering the walls are unframed photographs Mr. Sager has taken from around the world: a close-up shot of the eyes and nose of a woman imprisoned for killing her four children during the Rwandan genocide; a picture of a bespectacled Dalai Lama that highlights, in Mr. Sager's words, "the fact that this living god needs bifocals"; and two side-by-side shots of an elderly Afghan man with a long beard and jagged teeth, one serious and one smiling.
Central to Mr. Sager's photography is an idea that's also key to his giving — getting close to people and making a connection. "You have to really understand the place so you're not just telling people what's good for them," he says. "I've used an analogy from business. You can't understand the business unless you're working on the factory floor."
Key to doing a good job isn't just money, but contacts, clout, and persuasive skills, he says.
"Money matters, certainly, but 90 percent of the result of my philanthropy is a consequence of my abilities and my Rolodex and my just being on the ground," says Mr. Sager. "I get to deploy the same kind of skills I used to make money. I get to make people accountable. I know how to do deals."
Mr. Sager recruited the chairman of Palestine's largest telecommunications company, for example, to help renovate soccer fields in the West Bank. During a trip to Pakistan to hand out blankets to victims of the 2005 earthquake, he phoned an acquaintance who runs an education charity called Citizens Foundation and discussed the outlines for a program that would rebuild schools and train teachers.
And after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Mr. Sager took off to the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, calling his friend Nancy Aossey, president of the nonprofit International Medical Corps, during a layover.
'No Vibrating Energy'
In speaking about his giving, Mr. Sager also returns again and again to the theme of self-interest. He started on his philanthropic travels to improve not just other people's lives but also his family's. That approach makes giving more sustainable, he says.
"If you're doing it because it's something you're supposed to do, that doesn't have any legs," he says. "There's no vibrating energy to it. I'm not a do-gooder, I'm a doer who has figured out this hands-on, eyeball-to-eyeball philanthropy is the way to live the fullest life."
Mr. Sager says he gives abroad because the dollars go further. He talks about taking "concrete baby steps," so donors don't get overwhelmed by the scope of problems.
And he always looks for "exceptional return on investment." That has meant that, in Rwanda, he created a microfinance program that doesn't just provide small loans to female-run businesses. It also helps build business ties between women whose husbands were perpetrators of the country's genocide, and women whose husbands were victims.
In Afghanistan, Mr. Sager chose to help International Medical Corps train women doctors and health workers, because he recognized the program could not only improve the country's health services but also advance female empowerment.
A 'Unique' Donor
Mr. Sager increasingly hopes those kinds of stories will inspire other donors — and he is already succeeding.
His friend Doug Mellinger, founder of Foundation Source, says he brought a group of donors to Mr. Sager's apartment last December to hear him speak. Some in the audience have changed their approach to giving, abandoning checkbook philanthropy and getting more involved in their causes.
Mr. Sager's exact style of giving wouldn't work for most people, though, and charities couldn't handle a flood of people who wanted to hand out blankets to earthquake victims or start new organizations. But Ms. Aossey, president of International Medical Corps, says: "Bobby is a very unique type of donor, and what he's done goes so far beyond financial support, although that's critically important. He uses what he knows to inspire others to action and to mobilize people."
Mr. Sager plans to step up his philanthropic evangelism in the future. This year, the foundation will create a new "division" focused on getting the word out about Mr. Sager's brand of philanthropy. He has a book called The Power of the Invisible Sun coming out later this year from Chronicle Books.
An Evolving Protagonist
The potential to influence more Americans also explains why Mr. Sager is happy about the television show, although he is not pleased with every aspect of the protagonist. Mr. Rist's character in the pilot is bumbling and can sometimes be — Mr. Sager's word — a "jerk."
Mr. Sager could also do without the character's philandering. He laughs about explaining the show to his 76-year-old mother. In real life, he married his high-school sweetheart.
Mr. Corwin says characters need arcs and Mr. Rist will develop into a more effective donor.
Mr. Sager says he is okay with that character development. "I would certainly rather this guy came out of the box as an evolved, intelligent person," he says. "But I'll wait."
In the pilot, says Mr. Sager, "Teddy Rist isn't Bobby Sager, Teddy Rist wants to be Bobby Sager. He's starting out on his journey."
He also says Americans can still learn from the character — perhaps even from his flaws.
"I hope what people take from that is that you don't have to be Mother Teresa to engage and try to make a difference," says Mr. Sager. "I hope the second thing they get is the idea that everyone has certain skills and this guy is using his skills to get stuff done."
In a sense, the show takes Mr. Sager full circle to his days growing up in Malden, a working-class suburb of Boston.
His father owned a small jewelry business, and his mother was a homemaker and sometime activist: for example, renting apartments on behalf of black couples who were refused by landlords, and then taking the landlords to court.
At the time, Mr. Sager says he aspired to be an actor, but ultimately decided a business path would give him more control over his career.
So instead of setting off to Hollywood, he received an economics degree from Brandeis and a graduate degree in business and public management from Yale. In 1985, he joined the restructuring and liquidation business Gordon Brothers as its president.
Mr. Sager still serves on the board and owns a stake in the company, which sells about $10-billion in assets each year. But he has been a full-time philanthropist since 2000.
Over the years, Mr. Sager has maintained the leading role in his foundation, but he gets help from its six staff members.
Ken Tsunoda, whom Mr. Sager first hired to lead a charity he created to help business leaders embrace philanthropy, serves as executive director. The grant maker generally provides money to new groups and then helps them grow, either with Mr. Sager's cash or by using his connections to find other donors.
The family's philanthropic roadshow will continue next month in Kenya, Rwanda, and South Africa. But first Mr. Sager touched down in South Africa for another purpose: to watch last week's shooting of The Philanthropist's season finale.
Then he will head back to Boston briefly, where he will watch the premiere with his family when it airs next week.
Mr. Sager says he accepts that the pilot might sometimes make him squirm.
"If I'm willing to put myself in situations in the northwest frontier province of Pakistan and Afghanistan," he says, "then I can make myself feel a little bit uncomfortable with whatever comparisons there will be with someone who's not me but who wants to be me."