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| Best Practices: Philanthropy |
Fade to Black?
Randy B. Hecht
11/01/2007
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Another recipient of Reeve Foundation funding is Martin Schwab,
a Swiss scientist who is trying to discover why the spinal cord does not
regenerate as other parts of the nervous system do. He refused to believe that
the human body has a design flaw, and so he explored the hypothesis that
something—he calls that nebulous something the "no-go antibody"—tells the spinal
cord not to regenerate. He severed rats’ spinal cords, found that the rats could
walk again after weeks of treatment with his no-go antibody inhibitor, and is
now conducting clinical trials on humans.
"There are a lot of organizations where the celebrity passes, and two years later the thing is out of business." |
Growing Gilda’s Club
Gilda Radner, the Saturday Night Live star who died of
ovarian cancer in 1989, once said having cancer was like "membership in an elite
club I’d rather not belong to." She did, however, find solace at a club of
sorts, a support center called the Wellness Community in Santa Monica, Calif.
She talked about helping fund similar havens elsewhere, and before she died she
asked her husband, Gene Wilder, and her cancer psychotherapist, Joanna Bull, to
create something like it on the East Coast. In 1995, Bull and Wilder opened the
nonprofit Gilda’s Club, for people with cancer only, in a downtown Manhattan brownstone.
High-profile friends who helped start the club included the
late film critic Joel Siegel and actor Mandy Patinkin. Bull says they all knew
that celebrity associations would help give the nonprofit a strong kick start,
but from there the club would have to deliver on its promises of support and
community-building for cancer patients and their family members, with all
services provided free. "We decided not to capitalize entirely on Gilda’s
personality," Bull says, "but to use whatever capital we had in her celebrity to
make sure that, in the future, our brand, our logo and our mission would survive
without relying in any way on whatever it was that Gilda and the celebrities
that we had at the time were giving us."
Perhaps the best proof of success is that what started as one
clubhouse has mushroomed into more than 20 across North America, with new houses
scheduled to open soon in Cleveland, Houston, San Francisco and Los Angeles. The
founders were thinking only of running a house in New York, but then they began
hearing from people in other cities who wanted to start something like it with
their own funding sources.
Gilda Radner, who died of ovarian cancer in 1989, once said having cancer was like "membership in an elite club I’d rather not belong to." |
Michael Radner, Gilda’s brother and now one of the charity’s
most active fundraisers, was an early donor who became more involved with the
organization with the founding of the Detroit Gilda’s Club. An investor with
varied business interests who lives in the Detroit suburb of Southfield, he was
one of the first people to join the worldwide board, on which he has served for
nine years. He loves the idea that his sister is still remembered so fondly by
so many fans. But what means the most to him is that thousands of people, even
those who never saw her work, are having their lives made better as they live
with cancer. "I think that’s why we can go on, because we’re fulfilling a great
need."
If board members are happy to see Radner’s memory living on in
a nonprofit organization that is much bigger than anyone anticipated, they also
have had to create some practices no one ever expected, such as a system of
licensing new clubs. The board now serves an organization known as Gilda’s Club
Worldwide, which has a staff of 18 people in the New York headquarters. The
organization evaluates prospective clubs to determine their likelihood of
success before it issues a provisional license, the first step toward opening a
clubhouse.
"They are their own separate 501(c)(3)s, they do all their own
fundraising," says Laura Wheat, president of the board of directors of Gilda’s
Club Worldwide. "It’s an expensive proposition, because what we like to see in
order to open the doors of a Gilda’s Club is that you have a stand-alone
facility—because it’s important not to be in a hospital setting. And ideally you
own it, ideally you have six months’ to a year’s worth of operating funds in the
bank, and you have your entire staff hired." The different architectural spaces
vary, but each clubhouse must adhere to an established program. And children too
young to remember Radner firsthand can learn some stock phrases from her comic
characters in a playroom called "Noogieland" or a meditation area called the
"It’s Always Something Room."
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