Alan Shawn Feinstein makes fighting hunger a way of life
Last month, soup kitchens and food banks across the country announced that they had raised nearly $33-million during 11 days in February.
The remarkable fund-raising blitz came after Alan Shawn Feinstein, a Rhode Island man who years ago became a philanthropist almost by accident, promised that he would match, dollar for dollar, every donation food banks raised from February 4 through 14, up to $1-million.
More than 3,500 food banks took up the challenge and were able to overcome the sluggishness of giving in February -- typically the most dismal month for fund raising because so many people make major gifts around year’s end and have little enthusiasm or extra money to donate.
While Mr. Feinstein, 66, is not well known nationwide, the former financial publisher and schoolteacher is famous in his home state for his extensive and highly visible crusade against hunger. To date, he has donated more than $50-million and created the Feinstein Foundation, which has $29-million in assets. He has also paid for billboards around the state that bear his picture and implore passersby to join him in his fight against hunger by calling the toll-free number on the advertisements. He has paid for similar radio and television spots too.
Mr. Feinstein’s name has also become synonymous to Rhode Islanders with community service. As part of his drive to solve hunger, he has put about $20-million of his donations into establishing community-service programs in schools and colleges. His goal is to educate young people about how they can help others and to influence them to become lifelong philanthropists and volunteers who are aware of poverty and hunger.
His influence in the state’s classrooms is extensive:
* Among 306 public and private elementary schools in Rhode Island, 301 have adopted the “Good Deeds Program,” which was designed by Mr. Feinstein and a group of schoolteachers. Teachers are provided with cassette tapes, journals for students, and teaching guides that help them with lessons and class projects on how children can help others, such as bringing blankets to homeless shelters, as one class did.
* Eighty-seven middle and junior-high schools are participating in “World Hunger Brigade,” a Feinstein-designed program that teaches students facts about world hunger and recruits them to participate in projects to alleviate poverty in their own area, such as running food drives.
* He gave half a million dollars toward the founding of the Feinstein High School for Public Service, which opened in Providence in 1994. About 350 students attend. Students design their own volunteer projects, and teachers weave class volunteer projects into as many of their lesson plans as possible.
* Eighteen high schools, which received $25,000 each, have established community-service classes for credit.
* Feinstein Scholarships are available to high-school seniors who have exemplary records of volunteer work and plan to attend Rhode Island colleges. Last year, 51 scholarships, worth $10,000 each, were awarded.
* Providence College, which received $5-million, has established what its officials say is the nation’s first bachelor’s-degree program in community service.
* Seven colleges and universities, which received $1-million each, have established mandatory community-service requirements for graduation. Johnson & Wales University, among them, received an additional $500,000 to found the Alan Shawn Feinstein Community Service Center, which disseminates information about community-service programs to other institutions, and $2-million more to endow scholarships for students doing exceptional work to relieve hunger.
* Brown University received $1-million in 1984 to establish the World Hunger Program, an institute that conducts research and takes other steps to find solutions to hunger around the globe.
Outside Rhode Island, Mr. Feinstein is beginning to gain attention. One reason is the success of the national drive. Another is that his donations and programs have begun to cross state boundaries. Mr. Feinstein gave $15,000 to the University of Nicaragua to help the Latin American institution establish a community-service requirement for all its students. And secondary schools in all 50 states have adopted either Mr. Feinstein’s “World Hunger Brigade” or “Good Deeds Program.”
While his reputation is growing, Mr. Feinstein’s frugal way of life has not changed since he was a schoolteacher 30 years ago.
He still lives in the same house in the same middle-class neighborhood here that he and his wife bought when they first moved to Rhode Island. It is a two-story white house with a simple brick walkway up to its front door that is next door to the Feinstein Foundation offices.
“I’m not a spender,” says Mr. Feinstein. “I have never been interested in most of the things that money could buy. I have had an interest all along in what good it could do.”
He adds: “My car, for example, it’s nine years old. I would be embarrassed -- I could afford it, but I would be very embarrassed -- if I got a new car. What do I need a new car for? To impress someone?”
Mr. Feinstein earned his millions almost accidentally.
When he moved to this Providence suburb from Boston over 30 years ago, he was an instructor of English and social studies. He adored his work -- “I love children; they respond to me,” he says. But he also loved to write and he had been a successful investor of his own money. So in 1974, he started publishing “The Insider’s Report,” a newsletter that he packed with financial advice for laypersons.
Though he had intended only to earn enough money to allow him to sustain the newsletter, by the 1980s he had 30,000 subscribers who paid $45 a year for the publication, and he had become a millionaire. At its peak, the newsletter reached 500,000 subscribers, but two years ago he decided to give it up so he could have more time to devote to his philanthropy and family.
Mr. Feinstein’s career as a philanthropist started almost as accidentally as his publishing career. About the same time that the newsletter was taking off in the early 1980s, Mr. Feinstein received a call from a social worker to visit the Elmwood Community Center in inner-city Providence. Until then, Mr. Feinstein had made some charitable donations and had volunteered but was not a significant philanthropist. He agreed to go.
The visit turned out to be a turning point.
“It was early in the morning and I see this bread line,” he says. “It goes out the door and around the corner. People standing in the street, waiting for a loaf of bread.”
“It never dawned on me,” he says. “I never knew that there was such overt hunger in Rhode Island. No one ever talked about it.
“I was very taken by that. When I saw it, I was encouraged to help.”
He made a donation on the spot to the community center. When other fund raisers for soup kitchens and food pantries asked for help, he agreed, typically giving $1,000 to each group.
In a couple of years, Mr. Feinstein was writing $1,000 checks to about 50 or 60 charities a year. But, he noticed, bread lines were not getting shorter: “I realized that no one person could really make much of a difference with hunger by himself.”
Mr. Feinstein approached administrators at Brown University in the hopes that Brown, with its wealth of resources and academic leaders, might be able to start a world-class institution set on solving global hunger. He talked to officials, and in 1984, Brown founded the World Hunger Program using the $1-million donation from Mr. Feinstein.
After working with the institute for 10 years as an adviser, Mr. Feinstein found it to be a disappointment.
“I had hoped that the Brown World Hunger Program could really make a difference,” he says. “But after 10 years with Brown, I realized that it would even take more than a prestigious university program.”
The university and Mr. Feinstein officially cut ties last year, and Mr. Feinstein is no longer supporting it.
“It became too academic for Mr. Feinstein,” says Edward Danbruch, executive director of the Feinstein Foundation since 1992. “He prefers action, and he wants to make real progress. He doesn’t like to sit around and think about things.”
Each time Mr. Feinstein has felt that his philanthropy has failed, he has tried a new approach.
The evolution of his philanthropy has led him to his current efforts to put community-service programs in classrooms and to lead fund-raising challenges, like the one in February, that stimulate other donors to give.
His community-service push is not popular with everyone. Numerous educators and policy makers are skeptical about incorporating community service, particu larly mandatory programs, into schools and colleges. They question whether students -- and society -- really benefit. And they question whether schools are the appropriate place for teaching such lessons, rather than churches or households.
Mr. Feinstein counters: “It’s so worthwhile to the child’s development. Children instinctively want to help others. They really do. They want others to love them, to appreciate them. And this just opens their heart.
“When that child sees that he or she is impacting positively simply because they gave a little time or a can of food, it makes such a difference in their own lives.”
He also points to a study conducted by a school system in Sharon, Mass., which found that some of the students who said they received the most benefits from doing community service were the same ones who said they were the least likely to sign up for it.
“That’s why we wanted it to be a requisite,” he says. “We wanted to get it to those youngsters who wouldn’t take it if it was just a course they could choose if they wanted to or not.”
Besides encouraging children to be philanthropic, Mr. Feinstein also hopes to influence wealthy adults to give away more money.
He says he sympathizes with rich people who are reluctant to give. “It’s difficult for a person who has spent all his life making a great deal of money to suddenly turn around and give it away,” Mr. Feinstein says. “It’s a wrench to change, to turn around and start giving it away, but there are so many advantages to it.”
“What you give to others comes back to you,” he says.
The national drive proved to be even more successful than he had hoped, bringing in nearly $33-million from other donors.
However, some charities may have felt let down by the final results. Since Mr. Feinstein capped his matching donation at $1-million, the more than 3,500 groups that raised the $33-million had to split his gift evenly. That left each group with only about $285. Or, together, they received about 3 cents to every dollar they raised.
Still, anti-hunger leaders applaud Mr. Feinstein for sparking the flood of gifts in February.
“He caused charities of our nature to go out and ask donors for money during a time when charities and the hunger issue don’t tend to do so,” says Kathy Super, national development director for Second Harvest, the largest food-bank network in the country.
Ultimately, Mr. Feinstein hopes that the fund-raising challenge shows political leaders that Americans are deeply concerned about persistent hunger problems.
“If we can show the government of this country, by an outpouring of response to an appeal such as mine, that the public, the people, are really interested in ending hunger, maybe it will convince the government to give money toward this,” he says. “That is really what I want -- to show the government that people care, that Americans care about hunger.”
He adds: “That the richest country in the world experiences hunger is a disgrace.”