Gary, 53, whose paternal grandfather invented the dial telephone and whose mother is a member of the Pillsbury family, was philanthropically inclined at a young age. She started one of the early women’s funds in San Francisco in the 1970s.

Hunt, 55, a daughter of Texas oil tycoon H.L. Hunt, is a marriage therapist and author. Her most recent book is Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself Be Loved, which she coauthored with her husband, Harville Hendrix. She began running a foundation with her sister, Swanee Hunt, a number of years ago when she read the annual report of Gary’s foundation. “Tears streamed down my cheeks, because the annual report was so different from the 30 I had just read,” Hunt recalls.

In turn, “I was on my little planet worrying about philanthropy when I read about what Helen was doing,” says Disney, 45. Her father is Walt Disney’s nephew, Roy Disney, who resigned from the Disney board after his failed attempt to oust Michael Eisner.

All three have aligned their foundations with the Women’s Funding Network (WFN), a coalition of about 100 private and community foundations across the world, that, since its founding in 1985, has awarded more than $200 million in grants aimed at the symptoms and causes of poverty among women. “These are powerful women with incredible expertise that could be utilized by this country and by a global network of lawmakers to actually shift and change the world,” WFN executive director Christine Grumm says. The money distributed is a relatively small amount in the philanthropic world, however. Grumm notes that only about 6 percent of all foundation grants directly support programs for women and girls, although the figure has risen from 2 percent when the network launched 20 years ago.

In a conversation with Grumm and Worth features editor Jan Alexander, the three philanthropists, Disney, Gary and Hunt, discussed growing up with highly visible wealth and how they have used their money.

Abigail Disney: My mother used to say to me, “Be proud that you have a name to live up to, and not a name to live down.” I’ve always been very aware that I have a name that resonates in a positive way for people, and I feel incredibly blessed by that. I didn’t really understand, though, the way it can be the elephant in the room for people until I got to college.

It’s hard to tease out what in my heritage is about the name and what is about money, so I lump it all together. But it is a bit like being born really, really beautiful; it makes people gravitate to you for all the wrong reasons. Some people take you too seriously; some people don’t take you seriously enough. Somewhere around my 20s, I started figuring out that the name of the game was going to be finding people well-adjusted enough that they would have a neutral reaction to me.

Helen LaKelly Hunt: I lived in a big house, and so was aware that my father was a wildcat oilman and had struck oil. My father’s politics were very visible. He believed in the free enterprise system. His sense of stewardship was that he was providing jobs. At the same time, I found a very positive influence in my faith tradition, much of which came from my mother, Ruth Ray Hunt. We were taught to be good stewards.

Tracy Gary: I grew up with five houses, a helicopter, a yellow Rolls Royce and a plane, and the idea of hiding who we were was never a choice for me, because my parents were very comfortable with their wealth and they enjoyed it. But they also gave me great tutelage as a kid. What they said, very emphatically, was, “Look, we may have had tens of millions of dollars, but you are not going to. We want you to learn how to use the money and put it back in the community.” They expected both my brother and me, from the age of 14, to volunteer at least twice the national average, which was about five hours a week, and to work in paying jobs when we were 16. I was a happy teenager, because I saw so many opportunities to be generous. I taught swimming, I baby-sat, I taught reading in the library to low-income and Native American kids. My family started a lot of nonprofits on this little island where we went in the summer. They set up a giving account for me, and my mom would match the gifts I made.

Worth: And then you gave away your inheritance, right?

Gary: Yes. I inherited about $1.3 million when I was 21, and I gave away $1 million by the time I was 35. Since then I’ve given away another $1 million that I’ve earned, so you could say I’ve given away $2 million of the $1.3 million I inherited. I run a philanthropic and legacy advisory business, as well as some real estate businesses and a firm that invests in small businesses. My partner and I give away about 50 percent of what we earn. I have nieces and nephews and godchildren who rely on me as a philanthropic mentor; whenever anyone in the family turns 14, it seems to be me they turn to.

Hunt: I believe it. Tracy, I can just see you in your kindergarten organizing everyone to contribute their milk money.

Gary: Well, I was always interested in money. My mom had been a stockbroker during World War II when all of the women were going into the Red Cross, and the men were going to war. She thought, “Oh, my god! Wall Street’s going to collapse,” and went off to do something about it. She was a great role model. Not to belittle this in any way, but in my high school yearbook the graduating class predictions said I would be the first to make a million dollars.

Even so, I think one of the things that really stimulated me was when I started asking the managers of the family trusts questions when I was in my early 20s. They basically patted me on the head and said, “You know, you’re not going to have to worry about this. Your brother will take care of it, and then your husband will take care of it.” They were speaking to the wrong person.

Disney: When I had Tracy’s experience with money advisors—which I had, even though I am a little younger, and I think young women are still having the same experience—I was very intimidated. My fear was that if I touch the money, I won’t be smart enough to manage it and I will cause it to disappear.

I got a sense of power, I think, in some of the first meetings I had with people like Tracy and Helen. I remember, Tracy, the first meeting I ever had with you when you told everybody to write their net worth down on a piece of paper. Then you added it up, and we all realized there was a TV network for sale at the time for about the same figure. I realized that if I made myself a part of a larger whole, there was enormous power to be had.

That was when I stepped up and really took control of my assets. That inevitably requires involving yourself in the family business. I made a decision to go out there and make some money, because I want to be able to give it away, and I want my children to be able to give it away, and I want that for the generations going forward. Now I’m engaged in some of the day-to-day decision making both in the Disney company, as well as Shamrock, our equity investing company.

There was a time when I was writing a lot of checks to causes. I was crazy full of good intentions. It felt good momentarily, but it didn’t feel strategic or effective in any way. When I got involved with the New York Women’s Foundation [a WFN-affiliated public foundation of which Disney is a former president] I got engaged in the entire ethic of it. I found myself shoulder-to-shoulder with people I would never have been shoulder-to-shoulder with other than on a city bus. And that was absolutely life changing for me. There were also women who were working in communities who had never encountered a woman like me, and probably never would have, who also felt completely changed.

Hunt: Part of the ethic of a women’s fund that drew me to it was the board compilation, the commitment to cross-race, cross-class, cross-socioeconomic women sitting shoulder-to-shoulder. The boards are
a compilation of the population served, which keeps it from being that top/down model. The second ethic that attracted me was that we had made a commitment to fund where there is the least access to resources, which makes sense. Maybe we could go where no one else was going, helping that Albanian woman or that Afghani woman. The third was the idea that the victim is the expert. When we heard that some women had a problem, instead of sending PhDs from MIT to come in and say, “Well, let’s analyze this, and let’s talk about the solution,” we would listen to the woman with the problem.

Disney: The New York Times ran a piece recently about domestic
violence. The police department had done a study about domestic violence in New York City, and what they found was, first of all, that immigrant women are especially vulnerable, and second, programs that work with immigrant women in a culturally appropriate way tend to work better. Well, hello! We have been funding such programs for 10 years. We could have told the police department much more than they learned in their independent study. It is time for us to really step up and start to tell our story, because we have learned about domestic violence, immigration, job training, welfare reform, housing, safety, the environment and sex trafficking. They are totally, totally connected; you can’t simply address one aspect of the system of obstacles that poor women confront.

Worth: It sounds as if you would like to do more work that actually affects policy.

Disney: We are working on it. We have not worked the smoke-filled rooms yet, but I think we are in a position to do so.

Christine Grumm: The Atlanta Women’s Foundation actually did help work with local churches and community groups so that pimping underage women would be made a felony rather than just a misdemeanor. Before they made an issue of it, no one was touching it, but Atlanta had become a major place for sex traffic in women coming from Southeast Asia.

Hunt: Another example: I worked closely with a group of women working with an organization called Women for Afghani Women. These women in Afghanistan had two national conferences, and then met with the [members of] congress as they created their constitution. They were able to put in some women’s perspectives and needs and requests as the constitution was being written.

Worth: The Bush administration is always eager to have the private sector take on responsibility for social spending. But how much can philanthropy accomplish alone?

Disney: Philanthropy will never, ever, ever replace government
money. It is just a drop in the bucket as compared with what the government can accomplish. What we should be doing is looking for
cost-effective and strategic, alternative, new ways of looking at social programs, and modeling them, and rolling them out for the government to follow.

Gary: We want to see more money in the hands of women, because of the values and the way they see the world, or because we are trying to counterbalance something that’s going on. If there has been any change in the 30 years that I’ve been involved, it is that we now have a passionate belief that we actually have a great deal at stake, that there’s a great deal that has to be changed. It has to happen in a partnership between men and women, but we want women’s voices leading in a way that they haven’t heretofore done.

Worth: Helen’s sister Swanee Hunt once told a Toronto Star reporter that sometimes wealthy women are intimidated by the women who are the recipients of their philanthropic money, rather than vice versa. A number of issues of inequality and boundaries must come up when you get this closely involved with recipients. Have you had experiences in which recipients ask for more money, time or friendship than you feel you can realistically give them?

Disney: Yes, we are building diverse, functioning systems inside a culture that is seldom diverse, so inevitably there will be problems with boundaries, because, let’s face it, we are making this up as we go along. What I’ve learned is that the bottom line for functioning well in that kind of environment is manners. People who are willing to communicate, listen and just basically observe basic good manners can get through the difficult situations.

Hunt: Sometimes the word is “intimidated,” sometimes it’s “inspired.” Some of these grantees are a force, and not a force that women we know in our socioeconomic circles have. I look at them and think I would love for one of my daughters, or my sons, to be just like this grant recipient. I put my children and grant recipients together often.

Gary: You also have women of wealth who have grown up in families where there has been domination or violence, where there has been a lot of damage. So you definitely have very different personalities involved. The beauty is that all personalities are welcome, and we seem to have a way to work through all these differences for the greater good.

Worth: Do you have a way of measuring the effectiveness of the programs you fund?

Grumm: We have a new tool we call Making the Case, with which we measure social change. We look at what changes have to take place within a community to move the wheel, to make the difference. We have an online tool that we created that allows women’s funds to sign on with the grantee partner to look at the work they’re doing. We have some measurement tools they can use as a comparison now. One of these is the issue of domestic violence, which we managed to shift, through funding and activism, from a private to a public issue, so that people started paying attention and police departments learned to take it seriously when women were victimized by violence in the home. We’re testing Making the Case in South Africa, Nicaragua and Nepal first, then we will take it all over the U.S. You cannot ask for big investment if you’re not going to show effectiveness.

Disney: We can see from what we’re doing that we are building citizens. Girls’ programs used to be about keeping girls from becoming pregnant. So a girl was a terrible event to be stopped; she wasn’t really seen as a resource for her community. These are not pregnancies that didn’t happen—non-event successes, which would be impossible to measure. These are people who will grow up, vote, pay taxes and teach their children well.

Worth: Bit by bit you are effecting changes.

Gary: Now we are poised to turn around the world in which there is a lot of pain and isolation. We would like to do something about this stressed life people lead of being constantly on cell phones. I’ve worked in 50 states and 20 countries doing this and all people ask is, “How do I sign up?”