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The Noble and the Needy
Matthew Schuerman
09/01/2004
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In a meeting after her husband’s death, her lawyer asked, “If you
wanted to start a foundation, what is the most important thing you could do?”
The lawyer, Richard Thies, a partner at Wildman Harrold, was not just trying to
reduce her tax load. He believes that when a client faces a personal loss and a
huge windfall simultaneously, it can be therapeutic to spend time in
philanthropic pursuits.
“Without missing a beat,” McLachlan recalls, “I said
I would love to help women, at least one woman, say to herself or her partner or
her boss, ‘This is how I feel,’ and to act or conduct herself the way she wanted
to conduct herself. I would give it all away for that.”
McLachlan says a
series of unexpected twists taught her a great deal about herself and what she
wanted to do with her life and in her philanthropy. In the 1970s she had
started, more or less as a hobby, a jewelry store that turned out to be quite
successful, only to leave it a few years later after differences with her
business partner. In 1986, her oldest son, Jason, was kidnapped while visiting
Colombia and held for 10 months. Determined to take control of her life, she
returned to college, only to receive the news soon after that her husband had an
incurable illness. She began studying pastoral ministry and became a lay
chaplain at a hospital.
“For 20 years, I didn’t have a voice and don’t know
how conscious I was that I didn’t have a voice,” she says. “I felt I had been
released into a new orbit, and didn’t know quite what to do, but thought it
would be wonderful if other people could start a little earlier.” In 1994, she
established the Girl’s Best Friend Foundation, which last year gave out $700,000
to initiatives benefiting girls.
Though McLachlan now lives on an island near
Seattle, she has decided to restrict her foundation grants to charities in
Chicago because that is where she spent most of her adult life. Some of the
community organizations her foundation sponsors encourage young women to express
themselves. Redmoon Theater teaches middle school girls to develop and perform
their own plays. Girl Talk presents weekly workshops on health, self-esteem and
career options to teenage girls in juvenile detention.
Her grant recipients
are mostly organizations without long track records. “A small organization could
go under tomorrow,” she acknowledges. She believes other philanthropists would
be supportive of grassroots groups if only they knew about them. “There are 40
or 50 programs in Chicago that are doing wonderful things with kids,” she says.
“Maybe people could try giving to just one or two to see if it fits.”
“There are a lot of charities out there to which people give
money, and they are not always assured that that money is
well-handled and well-spent.”
– Roy Bostock |
Roy Bostock
Giving Back
Former Duke linebacker Roy Bostock jokes that he started giving to his
university five minutes after he graduated in 1962. The school gave him a full
football scholarship for four years, and when he graduated, he promised himself
he would repay it. Bostock figured he owed $10,000.
He has far surpassed that
goal: The university has announced that gifts from Bostock and his wife,
Merilee, also a graduate of Duke, now total $8 million. “Obviously, over time
the decimal point moved to the right,” Bostock says.
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