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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Philanthropic Activities are Personal for Valley’s Wealthy

ValleyCrest Co.’s CEO Burton Sperber and his wife Charlene throw a lot of their support behind WeSpark, a Sherman Oaks-based group that provides services for cancer patients and their families founded by their daughter, Wendie Jo Sperber, who passed away last year after a long battle with cancer. Javier Uribe, the founder of 1 Day Paint & Body, has set up a scholarship fund for students at Laredo High School in his hometown in Texas, along with the Valley schools the Calabasas resident’s own children have attended. For many of the Valley’s most prominent citizens, philanthropy is personal, and it’s no accident. Unlike those with inherited wealth, self-made multi-millionaires, who comprise the bulk of the Valley’s most affluent, often seek to give back to those that helped them on the way up, and they favor organizations that have some personal meaning in their own lives. “The wealth tends to be thankful for the opportunities,” said Michael J. Crum, founder and president of Financial Planning for Generations, an estate planning and wealth management firm in Thousand Oaks, who is also a director of the Billy Blanks Foundation board. “It tends to make philanthropy more direct. They want it to make a personal difference for the recipients as opposed to naming a tower.” The Billy Blanks Foundation, started by the creator of Tae-Bo and his wife Gayle, has given several millions in charity since it was founded in 1999. Although Blanks and his wife, Gayle, now live in Hidden Hills, Billy Blanks grew up one of 15 children in a poor neighborhood in Erie, Penn. Dyslexia, undiagnosed until Blanks grew to adulthood, often hindered him in school. Not surprisingly, there are a number of charities in Erie on the Blanks Foundations’ donation list, along with organizations in the Valley and the greater L.A. area, typically offering social and educational services to children. The desire to offer help to those organizations that hold some personal significance to these donors presents a number of challenges to Valley-based charities, say those who are involved in fundraising. Even if they do their work in the same community where these donors reside, they may not wind up front and center on these philanthropists’ gift lists. ‘Strange’ environment Added to that, many donors seek to place their contributions in places that may offer the greatest visibility for their businesses, and often, those are not Valley-based charities either. “It’s a very strange fundraising environment,” said Rickey Gelb, general partner at real estate firm Gelb Enterprises in Encino. “I’m the vice president of the Los Angeles Police Reserve Foundation, and when we have events there, we never make less than $150,000 or $200,000 and most people donate $5,000 or $10,000 at a crack. I’m on similar boards in the Valley and the same organizations never donate more than $500. In the Valley, it’s very hard to raise a lot of money at one special event.” Gelb, who has lived in the San Fernando Valley since he was a child and derived his wealth from investments in the community, devotes most of his philanthropic efforts to the local community, donating as well as serving on boards for groups that range from medical foundations to chambers of commerce. But many other philanthropists are not nearly as connected to the Valley as they are to specific causes wherever their location. “Somehow it’s not as cohesive an area,” said Earl Greinetz, immediate past chair of the Jewish Home for the Aging who currently heads up the group’s fundraising efforts and was formerly involved with fundraising for the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles. “Let’s take the Jewish Federation. They have a very strong Valley presence called the Valley Alliance of the Jewish Federation, however there are many Valley people who choose to be active in the Federation in the city. Sometimes people feel like it’s more glamorous.” The Jewish Home, although it is located in Reseda, provides services to people from all over Los Angeles, and perhaps as a result, the group has been extremely successful in its fundraising efforts, raising $10.5 million per year to fund its operations and, recently, $72 million for a capital campaign. The same might be said for the Circle of Care, a newly-formed foundation that services the Grossman Burn Center in Sherman Oaks as well as a local chapter of Leeza’s Place, a support service for caretakers of people with memory disorders founded by on-air personality Leeza Gibbons. Grossman Burn Center, through its work, has become internationally known, and as a result has many supporters in addition to Valley-community philanthropists. Still, Elizabeth Grossman, who now chairs the Circle of Care, notes that corporate contributions have been less forthcoming. “Most of our donations are (in increments) more than $1,000 from individuals,” said Grossman. Same donors Most charitable organizations will tell you that they rely on the same donors year after year. That, in part, is true for all charities no matter their location, which, as any good marketer knows, typically get 80 percent of their funding from 20 percent of the population. And if you were to make a list of the Valley’s largest benefactors, you are likely to see those same names on many different boards. The Valley’s affluent citizens may devote a large portion of their largesse to groups outside the immediate area where they live, but even if they could be persuaded to up the ante in their own communities, fundraisers say, it is especially difficult to identify them. Unlike many of the communities on the other side of the hill, the Valley does not have elegant country clubs and social events thrown by the ultra wealthy creating an identifiable community of affluent philanthropists. “The geography here is very difficult,” said Michael Altman, a partner with Simon, Altman & Kabaker Inc. Financial and Insurance Services in Encino who has served on a number of boards of charitable organizations. “We are nothing but a bunch of loosely linked suburbs. It’s not the fact that people are not willing to ask, it’s that they have no idea who to ask.”

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