The Sager Family Traveling Foundation and Roadshow, as its name implies, employs an unusual approach to identify projects to fund.
“My family and I have made a commitment to travel the world, and to live eyeball-to-eyeball with the people who we are trying to help. It takes critical listening and a willingness to engage to accurately understand the problem from their perspective and to address it accordingly,” said Bobby Sager. “That is why we travel to the places where we have initiatives, meet the people, eat their food, and even sleep on the ground in tents if necessary. Then we partner with an organization on the ground to not just implement the project but to develop it and eventually create it into a self-sustaining entity; it’s the business of making a difference.”
In Rwanda, for example, the foundation created a microfinance institution in 2005 to help impoverished women start small businesses such as raising livestock or selling handicrafts. The Sagers could have invested in an existing micro-enterprise bank, but they wanted to do more. Their unique idea was to take “concrete baby steps” to help heal a country torn apart by government-backed genocide.
The Sager Foundation (www.teamsager.org) brought together widows of genocide victims and the wives of men imprisoned for committing murder to go into business together and take out small loans. “We didn’t want to just help people start businesses…that wasn’t enough,” said Sager. “We were looking for a huge return on investment and we got that by doing reconciliation.”
When Sager talks about return on investment, he doesn’t mean the monetary kind. His foundation evaluates return based on the long-term impact an investment is making. “We want to make the biggest possible sustained impact on the most number of people. One of the reasons we go to the most desperate places in the world is that’s where the biggest opportunity is,” Sager explained.
“My family and I are the currency. The return on currency is the impact we make on other people and ourselves,” he added.
The Sagers focus their efforts on leaders, but not the leaders you might expect. They don’t have to run an organization or hold a position of power. Rather, they are individuals who are in a position to help a lot of other people, thus multiplying ROI.
Among them are Tibetan monks who have experienced what Sager called a “massive blast of modernity” through interaction with Western scientists. Spurred by the interest of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan Library introduced science education to the monastic curriculum in 1999. Beginning in 2001, the Sager Foundation began funding a program in which – for the first time in the 1,500-year history of Tibetan Buddhism – American scientists teach physics, quantum mechanics, cosmology and other disciplines at Buddhist monastic centers of higher education.
Last year, the foundation helped launch the Science, Monks and Technology program at MIT. “Now (monks) are learning practical technology such as solar power and producing clean water. They’re taking that expertise to their refugee communities, especially in India, to make lives better,” Sager said.
Like the project to teach science to Tibetan monks, many of the Sager Foundation’s programs have been operating for a decade or more. “Unless a program is sustainable it’s not worth starting. It needs to be something to motivate people to continue the process over a long period of time. That’s how you get results,” Sager said.
A virtuous cycle
The Sagers – Bobby, his wife Elaine, and their children, Tess and Shane – travel as a family several times a year to do the “eyeball-to-eyeball” philanthropy they believe is critical to success. “It’s so different when you look into people’s eyes,” Sager said.
Their approach contrasts with one he calls “philanthropic colonialism,” in which “well-meaning people come and say, ‘this is what we’ve done in other places, we could do the same for you,’ whether or not people think they need it.”
In 2000, when Tess was nine and Shane was six, the family spent more than a year living in Third World countries.
“My kids could see what these kids don’t have.…We take so much for granted. You can’t be really happy in life unless you appreciate what you have, and you need some kind of context to appreciate it.” Sager says his family is getting “context on steroids” by going outside their bubble. “You end up as a more thankful person when you live outside your bubble. There’s a richness to it, a virtuous cycle.”
On one early trip, the family visited a child soldiers’ camp in Rwanda. They were charmed by seven-year-old Moses, small for his age, who had been forced to commit murder. Sager took photos of Moses, and of his football (a soccer ball in the United States). Put together with trash, plastic bags and string, Moses’ was the best of the handmade balls in the camp.
“It was heartbreaking; it was his only possession,” Sager said. “It was a bunch of rubbish and he was so proud of it.” Sager used a photo of Moses, and one of the ball, in a stunning book of children’s faces from conflict areas around the globe. Millions of people saw those images projected behind the band during a reunion tour of The Police, as rock legend Sting sang “The Invisible Sun;” Sager’s book is named The Power of the Invisible Sun.
In a high-powered example of networking and serendipity, a friend of Sting’s had been working on creating an indestructible soccer ball. Sager’s interest spurred him on, and the Hope is a Game-Changer initiative (www.poweroftheinvisiblesun.com) was launched.
Four years later, Sager was visiting another child soldiers’ camp in Rwanda to distribute footballs to the graduating class of the program the foundation created to teach soccer and life skills. There was Moses, holding his new ball. “(Because) my family and I connected with him, it will end up affecting kids all around the world,” Sager said.
Team Sager (as they like to be known), never gives handouts to people, preferring that they “have skin in the game,” Sager said. “Pure charity cripples people; it doesn’t make them feel good about themselves, it’s not sustainable, and it’s not leveraged.”
Instead, the Sagers give people a “hand up.” Expanding on a well-known axiom, Sager likes to say that a “hand up” goes one step beyond teaching a man to fish. “Unless you teach him how to sell fish, all he’s going to do is eat fish.”
Based on that precept, one of the foundation’s dozens of current initiatives is called Hands Up Not Handouts, in which Rwandan and Palestinian women make jewelry using their traditional skills: basket weaving and embroidery, respectively. By creating and effectively marketing products that appeal to fashion-setters in the West, the women pull themselves and their families out of poverty.
Tess Sager operates the initiative in Palestine. “She has hundreds of Palestinian women working with her,” said her proud father. “We’re Jewish. When would we have the opportunity to sit in a living room in a Palestinian woman’s house and share with them who we are? We are giving Palestinian women a different way to think about Jews.”
Bobby Sager also has given the world a different way to think about wealthy businesspeople. A major supporter of the Young Presidents Organization (YPO – www.ypo.org), Sager exhorts them to use their skills to improve the lives of others. Sager was the first recipient of YPO’s Global Humanitarian Award and recently won the organization’s prestigious Hickok Award for distinguished service.
There are 20,000 members of YPO throughout the world, effectively all millionaires, said Sager. He speaks a dozen times a year to members of the organization. “Ultimately, business leaders have the unique ability to make a powerful difference in the world by making themselves the currency.”
Sager tells them that he applies the same skill set that he uses to make money to help people. “You have to know how to formulate a plan, hire, fire people, hold them accountable; you have to know how to get stuff done.
Sager urges them, and everyone, to “Be selfish, go help someone.”
He said that he and his family get to learn so much and “feel our experiences so much. That’s what being selfish is. The more selfish we are, the more we want to do it, and the more people who get help.”
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