In the Dominican Republic, one young man took the money and ran to the other end of the island. The villagers ran after him and made him come back. Otherwise, our recipients are just so happy to be given the opportunity to move themselves out of poverty. Nobody wants to be poor.

Of course, we face certain governments that do not encourage this kind of activity, but we work through individuals and organizations, not with governments. We did, though, start working in India as a result of meeting Indira Gandhi. She was visiting the United States, and I was invited to a small reception for her. I told her about Trickle Up; she got very excited and called her secretary over, and that is how we got started in India.

A Woman’s Place
I first learned about philanthropy from my grandmother. She was a tiny little woman, no more than 4 feet, 8 inches, and she became involved in raising money to expand a hospital in Brooklyn, the Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center, which is a huge hospital now. She rang doorbells to collect money. At 16, I started doing that with her.

I got into nonprofit work as a career, though, because it was something I could do as a married woman with children. When I graduated from NYU, I was thinking about going into advertising. I was 19. But I also got married. A wife’s place was in the home, and my in-laws did not take kindly to the idea of my working, although my first husband, Lou Robbins, a lawyer, was a sweetheart of a guy, and he knew I was not the kind of woman who was going to sit home and knit or cook. He died unfortunately, very young, when we were in Egypt.

I think I learned what it takes to be a leader when I became board chairman of the Audrey Cohen College for Human Services in New York. At a board meeting in the late ’60s, when the student revolts were occurring all over, I was sitting at a table when all of a sudden, a student raised his hand and said, “You’re not going to run this organization. I am.”

He started ranting and raving. I was trying to show that I could keep calm. I started to drink from a glass of water, but I had to put it down because my hand was shaking so much. Ultimately I stayed in control and the staff and the students in the room stopped listening to him because he wasn’t making any sense. For me, it was a great learning experience. I find every time I encounter a crisis and have to keep things under control, I have to realize that even if my heart is pounding and my hands are shaking, my mind can keep going. It’s exercising discipline, and it ain’t easy. But you have to do it, because if you are going to be a leader, you will have to confront issues.

Our projects at Trickle Up do not often encounter griping or rebellions, but at times we have to calm people down. Once in India I was dealing with a women’s organization in which the old leader and the new leader were arguing. The important thing for me to do was to listen to both of them and mediate. You have to learn to listen to other people, no matter how bright you think you are and how much experience you’ve had. There is always something else you learn that you never knew before. I’m 82, and I’ve found that it doesn’t stop.