Donald Rubin on Philanthropy | Big Think

Donald Rubin on Philanthropy

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Donald Rubin elucidates his gift-giving activities.

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Donald Rubin:

Donald Rubin is Co-Founder of the Rubin Museum of Art and Co-Chair of the Board of Trustees. He also serves as the museum’s CEO. Shelley and Donald Rubin started collecting Himalayan art in the early 1970s and amassed a large and significant collection, a major portion of which was given to the museum to seed its nascent collection. He was the founder of MultiPlan, Inc., a major general service PPO health provider. He serves on the board of The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation and is a member of the Global Philanthropists Circle.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What guides your philanthropy?

Rubin: We try to… for the big projects initiate most of them ourselves, but we do give a lot of what we did before the crash, I don’t know what’s going to happen after the market went down, and I’m sure you have looked at our website, the foundation website to see what we’re doing. One of them another website we did years ago and funded it and spun it off to the group that was working on it is laborarts.org. My father was a very important labor leader in New York, Jay Rubin, and he founded the Hotel Workers Union. And one of the things we do with the hotel union for many years is every year we have a writing contest for the children of the hotel workers, and the union does a thee-page, full page write-up with pictures of the award ceremony where on there with all these kids almost all from Asia or Russia, but not too many Russians, but few years ago there were a lot of Russian kids. And all of these kids are immigrants to America and were all going to Bronx Science and studies in the best schools in the city. And the union then does this newspaper, you know, and it’s very exciting to do that. We do writing contest for the American Civil Liberties Union with the New York Chapter. I think there are four or five chapters. And it started out on looking at First Amendment Rights and they’ve done a contest on the Rockefeller Drug Laws and it’s to get these youngsters involved in thinking about it and writing about these very big issues. My wife is on the board of Human Rights Watch. I don’t know if you saw that on the web. She’s on the board of Human Rights Watch and Channel 13. So, we our interest range in a lot of human rights, a lot of issues on poverty and education. It’s not a big foundation. It’s not a humongous foundation, but you can give modest grants and do great things with them.

Question: What does Obama’s presidency mean for philanthropy?

Rubin: We are very optimistic, but I think it’s going to take a long time. I mean, the economy and the public services is close to being in a cesspool and it’s going to be very hard to clean that cesspool out and we all have to take a metaphoric shower and scrub ourselves and just move on and build a good healthcare and education system and a great economic system. And I think it’s going to take somewhere between 5 and 12 years to right all the destruction that we’ve had.

Question: How will the recession affect philanthropy moving forward?

Rubin: It’s going to be a very difficult thing. First of all, Shelley and I are at the age that the first priority is us surviving, because without us surviving there will be no foundation. And so, that’s a very important thing. It’s very, very hard with all the endowments for non-profits that have been basically partially destroyed by the economy and the corruption in the financial system to get on the feet again. And it’s like to us it’s going to be like starting over again where we were 5 or 10 years ago, you know, to get the money back to be able to donate it, to say yes rather than no and I’m a kind of person who likes to say yes to anything I believe in and it’s very hard for me to say no. I don’t… one of the ways that the museum survived and went is my whole philosophy is getting around the word no. I never take no for an answer. And when we bought the building over 10 years ago, the [Bonny Barney’s] Store, and I was driving down from my office, which we could see from, our old office which we could see from your window across 17th Street, there was a big sign saying “bankruptcy auction” and we were looking for space for the collection and thinking little more modest terms and it took me two weeks. It was the [Bonny Barney’s] Store was closed.

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