Stanford Business

NOVEMBER 2006


Charitable Giving Sustains GSB Ties

Each summer the more than 100 executives from around the globe who take part in the Stanford Executive Program (SEP) become friends during their time on campus.

For the past three years, the process of staying connected has benefited the class members but also outsiders. The SEP classes of ’04, ’05, and ’06 have each created class gifts to benefit an outside agency—and in the process help class members stay together as the groups administer their gifts.

The most recent effort was a charity auction and dinner last August to build an orphanage for children of AIDS victims in Kericho, Kenya. Foster homes are the goal for orphans in this tea-growing region, but about 14 percent of young adults have AIDS, and so alternative living arrangements also will be needed.

For the auction, class members donated stays in their homes or vacation condos, guide services around the French Alps and Scotland, tickets to a Viennese ball, and dinner for nine featuring authentic Spanish recipes followed by champagne and a poetry reading at the home of Robert Burgelman, faculty director of the Stanford Executive Education Program. One classmate let his friends bid for the right to shave his head.

The Class of 2006 raised $200,000, which is more than the $175,000 estimated cost of constructing the orphanage, initially planned for 20. To be built on land donated by the Finlays tea and flower plantation, an employer of 18,000, the company also committed to covering operating costs and management.

“We wanted a volunteer component with some ownership after we left SEP,” says Kim Wright-Violich, SEP ’06. “Finlays has a cottage on the plantation where the SEP graduates can stay while they do whatever is needed—tutor, paint, or whatever.”  As president of the Schwab Fund for Charitable Giving, she arranged for that organization to serve as recipient of the funds until the orphanage could obtain U.S. legal status as a nonprofit. While she is an old hand at charity auctions, Violich said, many in the class were greenhorns.

“The idea of giving back, of fundraising through this mechanism, is going back with people in our class to 40-some-odd countries. That is another reason this whole experience was so moving.”