Transcript

Jerry Hirsch: I want to thank you for allowing me to speak to you for a few moments about what I consider of value. I spoke to this group maybe a year or two ago, and I talked about my road to philanthropy. To summarize that very quickly, I subscribed both to the philosophy of our fellow GPC member, Bobby Sager, who’s here, and more academically to Martin Seligman, who was the founder of the concept of positive psychology, and my goal is to simply have a meaningful life. And the way to have a meaningful life is to do whatever you can to help others. And, as Bobby suggests when he talks, it’s really a very selfish thing.

I just want to be successful. I want to be known to be successful in my mind. Nobody else has to know it. The key, which Stanley Bergman said, is to know inside that you’ve made at least some difference in society, no matter how small it’s been. So, that’s what I have tried to do. We set up the Lodestar Foundation 20 years ago. The mission is simple: use leverage to maximize the resources of philanthropy, the funds, the time, and the energy to do the most good with whatever limited resources you have. And we have two strategies, one is to encourage others to be more philanthropic, and the other is to encourage non-profits of any kind to work together.

And in that second area—I’ll try to be very brief because I want to talk about a specific thing—over the years we’ve facilitated the collaborations of hundreds of non-profits representing thousands of individual non-profits. In addition to that, we’ve created a database of about 1,000 successful non-profits, in partnership with the foundation centers where non-profits can search to find out what obstacles they may have and may want to facilitate a collaboration. More recently, we have assisted in developing funder collaboratives, first in New York City, which has been in existence for five years. I think our fund here is responsible for many of the collaborations here in New York City.

Two years ago, we facilitated a collaboration that began in Philadelphia, and now has spread to some other cities. And I mention this for two reasons, first, if any of you would like some support in developing a funder collaborative to support non-profits in your community, non-profit mergers or collaborations in your community, we’d be happy to assist you anywhere in the world. And second, over the last 20 years, we’ve developed some knowledge about what it takes to support a non-profit collaboration and we’ve developed this tool.

About three months ago, my life changed a little bit with the new administration in Washington, and I recognized that the new administration caused some great deal of concerns about certain areas of the social sector. So, we decided, “How could we use our expertise in facilitating collaboration to apply to some of those concerns?”

We’ve leveraged our expertise in certain areas, and the one I’ll mention today is the area of the free press. As I’m sure most of you know, the President has suggested that free press is the enemy. And so, we took a very quick dive into what the free press is all about and we developed a superficial knowledge. It’s only been a couple of months, but the most profound thing we learned was that not only are the press and the media one of the pillars of democracy, but also more significantly, they sort of represent the First Amendment and the social infrastructure of our society.

If you think about it, it virtually doesn’t matter what area of philanthropy your focus is – whether it’s on climate change, on curing a disease, or education – without the free flow of ideas, without the ability to disperse publicly facts and ideas related to the work you’re doing, all philanthropic endeavors would be thwarted and would be much more difficult to occur. As a result, no matter what area you’re working in, you might also consider supporting the area of the free press in addition to what you’re doing because it’s really, really fundamental to those areas.

We then looked a little further and we found that there are different areas within the media that you can focus on as a funder. One is to support the non-profit media that has emerged over the last few years, which is absolutely critical. As most of you know, the traditional model of business media has really taken a hit because their main source of revenue, advertising, now face tremendous competition amongst social media and other platforms. And second, the government has suggested that the budget for non-profit media may be dramatically curtailed. Non-profits such as NPR, ProPublica, The Center For Investigative Reporting, and many others are really essential to continue to do the news.

I’m pleased to say that two other members of our group, Molly Bingham and Claire Hoffman, have already set up some seminars in partnership with Synergos to encourage you to help those organizations. But that’s not the area that we decided to work in, even though it’s a very valuable one. We decided to use our collaborative efforts to support the area of legal support that is necessary to protect and support the media. After speaking to quite a few members, lawyers, and donors, and people, journalists and all, we know that this is a great concern. It’s a crisis right now in what’s going on.

First, there’s the issue of libel lawsuits that are increasing. Within that area, there’s something I learned about only a few weeks ago called slap lawsuits. If anybody doesn’t know what a slap lawsuit is, it’s a terminology that’s very common in the press, and it means strategic lawsuits against public participation. Basically, these are frivolous lawsuits that are filed against journalists and others to reduce their willingness to publish what they believe. And there’s a movement in states to pass laws, what they call anti-slap laws, which has been delayed quite a bit. As a result of libel lawsuits, the basic concept that non-profit media works on, and even profit media, in the way of having libel insurance is starting to become extremely more expensive.

There’s increasing government harassment; taking searches at borders, adding reporters to no-fly lists, confiscating cell phones. There is also limited access to the White House, as you know, and opportunities to try to get sealed documents. For example, it was just disclosed that the administration has secretly waved ethics opinions against certain administrative officials they want to appoint, which might otherwise have violated ethics laws. There are also subpoenas against reporters to divulge their sources, and a lowering of the public support for the media as a result of the administration’s comments about how detrimental the mainstream media is.

In Turkey and in Egypt they have passed laws against what they call fake news, which is a big threat. The President has labeled CNN, the New York Times and other newspapers, as being fake news. And there’s a more fundamental issue of the concept, the distinction between digital and traditional news media. The courts have built up a set of laws protecting the media but those laws do not relate to digital media. As the courts have become more conservative, the concept of digital media and how it affects the First Amendment is of great concern to reporters.

For example, it’s probably against the First Amendment for a printing press to be confiscated. But what about a cell phone? Today’s cell phone operates just like a printing press. And then of course there are the rights of whistleblowers. If you’ve noticed some of the congressional hearings, some of the people are more concerned about finding out who the whistleblowers are, or who the leakers are, than they are about the substance.

All these areas are of great concern. So, the good news is that there has been some significant reaction. One major initiative that launched a few months ago is a partnership between the Knight Foundation and Columbia University to set up a First Amendment defense fund that will approach close to $60,000,000. They hired the number two guy at the ACLU to run it and it’s on operation right now. It’s a separate 501(3)(c).

Moreover, the Democracy Fund, which is one of the funds set up by Pierre Omidyar of eBay, has pledged over $100,000,000 to support the media. But ironically, at the same time, the Attorney General has said they’re considering new laws allowing more libel suits against newspapers. I don’t know if you’ve read about directives against certain administrative agencies that broadcast TVs, to change their TV channels from CNN to Fox TV. And if you’ve noticed that facts about climate change are quickly disappearing from government news from the EPA and other government agencies.

So, what we identified are three different areas that we could support with our collaborative efforts. The one we’ve been most successful with is a collaboration among law schools. There are about 15 law schools around the country that have law clinics to defend the First Amendment, and we have been working to develop a network where all these organizations can work together. I’m pleased to say that two weeks from today in Chicago, we will gather 18 of these law schools together, Harvard, Yale, and University of California at Berkeley, University of Chicago, and quite a few others are going to participate, for the purposes of developing a strong network, so that when there is an issue that comes up they can all work together.

It’s created so much enthusiasm that other schools – such as Arizona State University, where I’m from, and Cornell University – which don’t have these type of law clinics, decided they’re going to start one and become part of the network.

The second area of collaboration would be the half a dozen or so pro bono lawyer groups that support and defend journalists. And by the way, when I mentioned all the issues, I forgot about those who have been arrested over the last few months. During the inauguration, seven different reporters were arrested. And even today, if you read the newspaper this morning, there was a newspaper reporter in West Virginia that was arrested when he asked the Human Services Director some questions during an event. This has been happening throughout the country a little bit.

So, our goal is to help facilitate a collaboration amongst these lawyer groups that protect or defend these guys, and many of the journalists that come from small organizations that don’t have the funds to defend themselves. And they decided that they’re going to participate in the same collaboration, the same network as the law students, because they need to supervise the law students anyway. So, we’re facilitating that. And we made a deal with the Democracy Fund that if we can accomplish this network, they would support the operation of it from then on.

Lastly, the third area that we have sought to develop a collaboration for is a funder collaboration, a huge one amongst major foundations and others. In fact, one of the reasons that I agreed to talk here this afternoon is because I thought this would’ve been formed by now. But we encountered the issue of large foundations with bureaucracies that have a lot of difficulty, so we haven’t been successful at that yet. But for those who are interested, we did get a generous offer from the MacArthur Foundation. By the way, the three or four major foundations that work in this area are MacArthur, Ford, Knight, and now the Democracy Fund of Pierre Omidyar. So, the MacArthur Foundation has offered to come and speak to individual funders who would like to participate to form partnerships with them, and we think that they could be followed by some of the others. This is sort of a work in progress.

If any of you think this would be of interest to you, I think we could gather them up and have them talk to you about all of the needs and how this could come about. In addition to that, on June 14th, the Kaiser Foundation is assembling a whole bunch of media funders together in Washington and you all could be invited. They would focus on defense efforts and make a special program on the day before that, June 13th, if any of you are interested.

I’m saying all this, and we’ve done all this, simply because going back to values, I view this crisis—and it really is a crisis—as an opportunity for us to do what we can to make a little difference here.

So, that’s really all I have to say. If any of you have an interest in this, please let me know and we’re happy to pursue it. Thank you so much.