Rob Hale is worth an estimated $5 billion from his controlling stake in Granite Telecommunications. The billionaire has written checks in the tens of millions of dollars to prominent institutions like Boston Children’s Hospital, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and his alma mater, Connecticut College.
Rob Hale with his better half are ready to give precisely $52 million to somewhere around 52 different charitable groups or, roughly $1 million every week. Most of these gifts are going towards laying out enrichments at grassroots organizations.
Charity endowments, like those controlled by universities, are pots of money, typically invested in stocks, bonds and mutual funds. Nonprofits with endowments can tap a portion of these funds–typically 5% per year–to finance new initiatives, cover payroll and keep the lights on.
The goal of charity endowments is to bring “financial clarity” to smaller charities, as per Hale.
Hale’s first company, Network Plus, which he founded in 1990, went bankrupt during the Dot Com crash. His second company, Granite, thrived wholesaling retailers’ many landlines, but now must adapt as phone systems migrate online.
The Hales wrote their first endowment check in March to the New England Wild Life Center, which provides veterinary care to injured and orphaned wildlife. Since then, the Hales have given (or are in the process of giving) endowment gifts to another 21 organizations; of these, 15 have net assets (what they own, minus any debt) of less than $10 million.
A majority have annual revenues–essentially contributions from donors and fundraising campaigns–of under $5 million. Recipients include the likes of the Joe Andruzzi Foundation, a provider of financial support to New England cancer patients, and Cambiando Vidas, a Connecticut-based group that builds homes in the Dominican Republic.
Some of their grantees are especially tiny. For example, the Kerry Jon Walker Fund, which chaperones financially underprivileged Boston high school seniors on service trips to Rwanda, reported $47,515 in donations received last year.
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Its board members and employees work as volunteers. With its new endowment–which effectively doubles its annual budget–the Fund plans to launch a second program: domestic service trips for high school juniors to Native American reservations.
To structure these donations, the Hale family office draws up gift agreements, which stipulate an annual drawdown limit of 5%. That’s equal to $50,000 per year–if the cash goes uninvested. The hope, of course, is for the funds to be invested and grow over time, enabling larger dollar amount drawdowns every year.
As of September 27, they’d written checks as much as $28.5 million, shared among 29 organizations (including $17 million worth of non-endowment gifts). Another 11 organizations have been pledged money – most of which has been earmarked for endowments – pending paperwork completion. That leaves 12 more charities still to be identified.
Hale traces his endowment initiative to a charity group started by some of his employees at Granite in 2011. In exchange for dressing casually on Fridays, colleagues encourage one another to donate $3 to a charity selected by one of them, which the company then matches dollar for dollar. Many recipients are smaller nonprofits with community ties.
MacKenzie Scott, the eighteenth richest American, as per The Forbes 400 list, has been at the vanguard, offering $12.7 billion to in excess of 1,250 organizations since mid 2020. Other unmistakable extremely rich people – including Twitter Cofounder Jack Dorsey and Facebook fellow benefactor Dustin Moskovitz and his better half Cari Fish have given enormous totals to GiveDirectly, a charity that gives out cash awards to people.
Moskovitz, as well as 30-year-old crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, profess a philosophy of effective altruism–earning money primarily to give it away and help the greatest number of people.
