Q and A with Greg Chaille, Former Oregon Community Foundation President (1987-2011)
When you became Oregon Community Foundation (OCF) president in 1987, OCF had $40 million in assets. When you retired a generation later, OCF was the sixth largest community foundation in the country, with $1.6 billion in assets. During that period, OCF provided more than $700 million in charitable donations to Oregonians. What is the Oregon Community Foundation and how did you accomplish this remarkable growth for OCF and establish the state of Oregon as the 14th most charitable giving state in the nation?
Right from the beginning we had a small but highly professional staff that worked in harmony with our founding board. There was a clear vision about what we were trying to achieve and what was needed to achieve it.
Together, we tapped the giving spirit of Oregonians. I always believed and advocated that Oregonians with means should be giving 5 percent of their annual income to charity. When we started, Oregonians were giving 1.5 percent. When I retired, Oregonians were giving 3 percent. I am proud of that.
The key to growing OCF was building a permanent endowment to benefit Oregon communities. To do this we needed two things: a large growing fund comprised of many individual donors and their collective leadership, and the ability to recruit active volunteers and engage them in a higher level of civic work.
These leaders created a combination of donors and synergy at OCF that helped make OCF the sixth largest community foundation in America -- a place where there are enough resources to back up good ideas, ideas that would not take flight otherwise.
We have a strong sense of what it means to be an Oregonian and that too contributed to OCF's success. Early on we were seen as "Oregon's Foundation" here to help your community. We don't want to lose that.
Which Oregon business and civic leaders were your most important professional and philanthropic mentors?
As head of OCF I had a unique position where I was able to learn and work with some of the most brilliant people who built what is modern Oregon.
Examples:
John Gray, who built Sunriver, Salishan and Skamania resorts, as well as Johns Landing, was also the chairman of the Board of Reed College for 26 years.
John grew up in rural Corvallis. His father died when he was three. The house he grew up in didn't have running water. He went to Harvard.
When he looked at property he wanted to develop, he saw the pieces of the puzzle and put them together. He walked the land in his shirt sleeves over and over before and during the construction of his resorts. He didn't want to harm what was already there. He wanted his buildings to blend in with the land, to add value to the land. He had a vision of the future and the places he built, and he persevered. He brought that same stewardship vision to his work at OCF.
Don Kerr was the creator of the High Desert Museum in Deschutes County. He had been involved with the Portland Zoo but he also loved the high desert land. Before he built the museum, there was no place for tourists in Central Oregon to go and learn about the region's history and ecology. Don, because he had connections, was able to establish a museum east of the Cascades funded by Portlanders. He was the first to get Portlanders to spend money outside of their area.
When her husband Harold died, Donna Woolley inherited his timber company in Drain, Oregon. Against tough odds and not much encouragement, she decided to stick with the company. She could have sold it. But instead she became a beloved employer for hundreds in Douglas County. No one thought she would succeed against the forces that were trying to drive her out of business -- a hostile business environment, the spotted owl, tough competitors -- but she did. Donna chaired OCF through some of its strongest growth.
Bob Chandler bought the Bend Bulletin in the 1950s. With the newspaper as his anchor property, he went on to build one of Oregon's most influential media companies, Western Communications. At its peak, the company consisted of seven newspapers, five in Oregon and two in Northern California. He flew his own plane around the state. I would hitch a ride with him from time to time, and, while flying with him he made me see how you could cut Oregon down to size and develop a statewide vision.
He also taught our OCF staff the importance of word usage, sentence structure and syntax. He would send our proposals back marked up with blue lines and edits. He made our thinking and our presentation more concise. It was just another way he contributed.
Bill Swindells was not only the CEO and chairman of the board of Willamette Industries, he was also the founder of OCF. He wanted a structure for civic involvement and charitable giving. He passionately believed that "you were responsible for the place you lived."
Ken Ford developed a long standing tradition at Roseburg Lumber to give to the community. The tradition of philanthropy in Roseburg that exists today was developed by Ken.
John Hampton, Sally McCracken and Sam Wheeler were three more of my mentors, but there were many others, including Joe Weston who dedicated his real estate fortune for the community's benefit. All of these people had a strong sense of what it means to be an Oregonian, a sense of that identity. It's critical we don't lose that.
In building OCF, you emphasized enlisting volunteers from around Oregon, not just the Portland area. Why the emphasis on building OCF offices in rural Oregon? When you were making these strategic decisions in the 1990s, did you anticipate the economic and social problems that rural Oregon faces today?
We not only anticipated the decline of rural Oregon, we were caught right in the middle of it. In the 1990s, Oregon was shaken by the decline of wood products and the spotted owl crisis, and the rise of the high tech boom. Thanks to our geographically diverse board, OCF was better able to understand how to play a more constructive role for rural Oregon. Community leaders outside of Portland, such as Bill Thorndike of Medford Fabrication and Susan Sokol Blosser of Sokol Blosser Winery in Dundee, helped us get there.
In U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse's 2018 book, "Them, Why We Hate Each Other -- and How to Heal," he focuses on the collapse of American communities. Sasse writes, "Urban studies theorist Richard Florida divides America into the mobile, the rooted, and the stuck. Community is collapsing in America because the rooted are vanishing; the stuck have too many crises in their lives to think about much else; and the mobile are too schizophrenic to busy themselves with the care and feeding of their flesh-and-blood communities."
With membership in civic associations in decline both nationally and in Oregon, be it Rotary Clubs or other civic groups, is Sasse right? Is community in America collapsing? How will this affect philanthropy -- the need for it and the likelihood of ongoing donors?
The Sasse phenomenon of community collapse is not as widespread in Oregon as the picture the Nebraska senator paints nationally. Yes, we've got challenges. The loss of the timber industry in Oregon shook the state. But there were efforts to address that loss -- constructing new civic centers, theatres, libraries, etc.
We know these days that community is fragile, that the next generation of Oregonians may not get enough support, but we've built something here to draw on.
I'm not saying things are rosy in Oregon, but charitable giving and civic commitment did not go away when the timber industry in Oregon declined. Again, we have challenges, but we still have a strong sense of community here. And that's needed in a state that doesn't have a lot of corporate wealth.
We see that commitment in the way the people in Vernonia rebuilt their town after the recent flood. The way that the local fishermen, philanthropist Mike Keiser, and others worked on the South Coast to save the endangered fish habitats.
We see it in the Oregon museums and art galleries that have been established such as the High Desert Museum in Central Oregon, and the showcasing of Oregon artists that the late Joan Austin built with The Allison Inn and Spa resort in Newberg. Yes, keeping and establishing a sense of place about Oregon has to be more than building art galleries and museums. It has to be a way of thought, feeding that sense of place -- the way that Tom McCall and John Gray did for Oregon.
Other community foundations around the country have divided their states into regions and charitable districts. New Hampshire did this. Idaho did this. But we made a strategic decision at OCF to treat the state as a whole, not make those divisions.
During your tenure at OCF, Oregon's economy made a dramatic transition from timber to technology. With that transition came big challenges to civic leadership. In June 2017, we asked Joaquin Lippincott, CEO of Metal Toad, about the reasons for the shortcoming in civic leadership from our region's technology leaders. Lippincott said:
Whether Oregon tech leaders have a duty to invest in the state is irrelevant. The answer to that is yes, but the more important question is: Will they? Unfortunately the answer to that is likely no. Due to the financial structure of most tech start ups, they have almost zero incentive to invest in anything other than their own company. They don't require infrastructure investment, and they generally live in a bubble where everyone they know is well compensated and loves their job. Layer on top of that, they generally come from out of state and have large buckets of money and investors who require progress on a one-, two- or three year horizon, and you have a recipe for almost no economic or civic engagement. I find this incredibly ironic given the progressive politics of the tech industry, but there is almost no interest in things that are not directly related to tech.
Do you agree? Does Oregon's tech community provide "almost no civic engagement"? If so, what thoughts do you have to change attitudes?
It is not inevitable that tech leaders don't show interest in philanthropy. There have to be efforts to bring them out. Lippincott is right -- they, tech, don't require investment in the city or region's infrastructure to succeed. And he's right to say that high tech executives almost have to be dragged kicking and screaming to get them involved. But those of us who are already involved need to serve as role models.
High tech people have to realize that their kids may be going to school with homeless kids.
A friend of mine is a high tech executive and his 10-year-old son is doing really well in school, but some of his classes now have homeless kids. These kids will get exposed to the issue just by osmosis.
Eventually some tech leader will become civic minded, some will step up and say this is not right. Others will say, I have a responsibility to help our community. Lippincott is a good critic, but what's his solution? But, still what he says is true.
Lippincott may be right in his critique, but the spark has to be lit -- struck between high tech and nonprofits in addressing the homeless issue. They, themselves, have to take responsibility, the way that Amazon is finally, and after all these years, doing in Seattle.
I disagree with Lippincott to this extent: I think that high tech will eventually welcome the opportunity to help. Somebody has to step forward to say, "Our community can't be this way -- let's join together."
In Amor Towles' best-selling novel, "A Gentleman in Moscow," the main character, Count Rostov, ruminates on the capricious pace of change:
As we age, we are bound to find comfort from a notion that it takes generations for a way of life to fade away ... But under certain circumstances, the Count finally acknowledged, this process can occur in the comparative blink of an eye. Popular upheaval, political turmoil, industrial progress -- any combination of these can cause the evolution of a society to leapfrog generations, sweeping aside aspects of the past that might have otherwise lingered for decades.
Rapid change in Oregon has come in the overnight dominance of the tech industry in our economy. How worried are you that the longstanding, healthy philanthropic and leadership habits of past Oregon community leaders could disappear in our state, not in decades, but, as the author says "in a blink of an eye"?
I do worry about the pace of change in our society and how it will affect philanthropy in the future. I am worried that the next generation does not have the same commitment to philanthropy that past Oregon civic leaders, such as Donna Woolley, did. However, certain Oregon philanthropic traditions are well established. John Gray who built Sunriver and Salishan was a real visionary. And John Hampton of Hampton Lumber was very determined.
Nike co-founder Bill Bowerman believed in being a community leader and carrying that tradition forward future generations. He did his giving through an advised fund at OCF.
The Bowerman family settled in Fossil and Condon Oregon during the covered wagon days. They were in the cattle business. His grandfather was civic-minded, and his father was governor or Oregon. Can you imagine today the governor of Oregon being from Condon? Unheard of.
Bowerman told me often, "I believe in the responsibility of leaving a community a better place than I found it."
It is the same civic commitment that the Freres family has shown in Lyons and Stayton Oregon. I hope to see that kind of civic commitment out of Oregon's tech community in the near future. It is a little ironic that we have to worry about the future of philanthropy in Oregon, because the tools are there now to do it easier than ever before.
As an antidote to wealth concentration in America, presidential candidate and U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is proposing a wealth tax that annually would tax 2 percent of the assets of American households with a net worth of $50 million and 3 percent on fortunes of over a billion dollars. What affects do you think such a tax, if enacted, would have on future philanthropic giving?
This depends on an individual's philosophy of giving. Some will see that their obligation is fulfilled by paying the Warren tax. Others will ignore the effects of the tax on their own assets and give as they feel is needed to support the causes they care about.
Overall, it will dampen giving among the wealthy.
Still, the tradition of giving within a community is determined by the leaders of that community.
Economist and political philosopher Frederic Hayek wrote, "Only where we ourselves are responsible for our own interests and are free to sacrifice them has our decision moral value. We are neither entitled to be unselfish at someone else's expense nor is there any merit in being unselfish if we have no choice."
Washington State Gov. Jay Inslee recently made this comment at a Seattle press conference in reaction to the death of a homeless person during February's snowstorm: "I want to say something too, and I hope it's not off-topic, but I have to say it. When I think of our community that has homeless people who actually, one of whom lost their life to exposure, and realize that we don't have a system to handle this problem in the state, it kind of drives me nuts, given the wealth that exists in the state of Washington."
Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler has also at times appeared overwhelmed by our homeless problem and has stated that it might be not possible to solve homelessness on a local level because it is a national problem.
Is homelessness in our region solvable on a local level? What advice would you give Mayor Wheeler as he attempts to deal with this growing humanitarian crisis?
People, our leaders, are afraid of the issue, and so they walk away from it. When Gov. Inslee of Washington State says we don't have a system to take care of the homeless problem, he is only going halfway. We need more leadership on the issue. Leadership that is not afraid.
We don't see homelessness as a personal problem. We see it as a broad-based community problem. But it really is a personal challenge for every one of us. For our leaders who say they can't solve it, the homeless issue is not really a structural problem as much as it is a psychological problem. We've got to believe in ourselves. In our solutions.
That said, local leaders need to have resources to solve the homeless issue. We as citizens need to know the direction we are going. The governor and the mayor need to provide that direction. But that direction has to be visible to everyone, what they and we are doing. The mayor, Mayor Wheeler in this case, has to go out and sell it. If he can't sell it, he has to create a task force that can.
So here's my advice to the mayor: Keep at it! Become a more visible and vocal champion. Inspire others to get involved.
Bottom line: The city's future depends on how we handle this crisis.
Ten years after being diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and one year after surviving a bout with cancer, how is your health? How have these challenges changed your perspective?
I have learned to be in the moment. I have learned to cherish every day and find fulfillment through volunteering at organizations such as OMSI, SMART (Start Making a Reader Today) and Parkinson's Resources of Oregon.
