I work alot in the special needs community and every now and then we will be blessed by some rich person going above and beyond.
For example, once this man and his wife sponsored about 200 or so families who have special needs children at our church to come to a Royals baseball game. We got: 1. tickets 2. parking passes 3. a great lunch ahead of the game (not just hotdogs and cokes but gourmet food) plus him and his wife helped serve food and assisted families. I think just the fact him and his wife actually got their hands dirty walking around serving and helping out really showed character.
This was an example of a one time thing you see on occasion. Other times someone bought say 300 ice cream bars in or say lunch for 100 or a contractor who will come in and build some cabins at a special needs camp.
Another example is an annual event:
Challenge Air. This is an event where pilots give rides to special needs children where the kid actually gets to fly plus family members. Normally its just ordinary pilots with small planes who fly maybe 3 people at a time for maybe a 20 minute ride which alone is awesome but occasionally its been wealthier people with corporate jets who can take 3-4 or more groups at a time.
Bill and Melinda Gates, who donated $36 billion to their foundation for world-wide spending on healthcare, education and to further social reforms are the best example I know.
Personally I’ve had rich people voluntarily pay unrealistically high amounts for services. I’ve also had rich people take me in, and others as well for the night when doing long distance hiking, however I’ve had many people make such a offer, the difference is when a rich person takes you in for the night it’s staying at a beautiful mansion, not a regular home or apartment ad typically driven around in late model luxury or sports cars instead of the usual rides, but the intention of kindness equates across all levels.
A friend and fellow board member of a non-profit I work with was the board’s largest donor. But, she was also the organization’s largest anonymous donor, which I know only because I was their treasurer. She also anonymously funded the organization’s matching contribution campaign in the winter, so she was affirmatively agreeing to be more generous than essentially every other donor. And she anonymously funded a special program to make the organization’s services available to very low-income seniors to make sure everyone could get help. She was cantankerous, curmudgeonly, and gruff. She was invariably one of the smartest people in whatever room she was in. She didn’t suffer fools. Those who knew her wouldn’t necessarily describe her as a saint but she was and she died just a few days ago.
Rich being a relative term, when a family friend died, he specified that a portion of his estate would be used to pay off the mortgage of a struggling hospital employee. Our friend’s wife and only child had died less than a year before he did, and he rewrote his will to the benefit of his friend. I thought that was incredibly generous. Several other traditional charities also were remembered generously in his will.
Andrew Carnegie helped build 2,509 libraries between 1883 and 1929, including many for black people in places (like the city I’m sitting in, sad to say) where the noble alternative of integrated libraries wouldn’t have been tolerated at the time and where the default would have been nothing.
Lebron James. He gives to a ton of charities, but also has his own Lebron James Family Foundation to which he donates, and gets donations from other rich folks and other means. Instead of just doing one-off fun stuff like free basketball tickets, he gives kids opportunities to have a better life through education and fitness, and focuses on his hometown of Akron. He recently promised free tuition to two local colleges (Kent and Akron) for students of the iPromise school.
Like Bill & Melinda Gates, he’s doing things to make lifelong positive changes for large populations (the Gates populations are of course larger) and I think that’s very admirable of him!
I am so sorry for your loss. are you going to “accidentally” let her generosity be known through the community, or are you going to respect her wish for anonymity?
Tough call, isn’t it? Our rescue lost one of our largest donors through death a while back. While she or he left us a large bequest, we have never known who this person was. Some of us really, REALLY are upset that we don’t know now because it doesn’t matter anymore. Others feel that our benefactor wanted to be anonymous for reasons of their own and we need to respect them and not go around playing fucking Nancy Drew with obits.
My story is the billionaire who helped out my husband when he started his business. He (my husband) was making a (very small) living as a bagpiper and couldn’t get anyone to lend him the money to expand his business into a school and a marching band. It did sound crazy - a guy born with spina bifida wanted to start a marching band? Absolutely no one would lend him money, no matter how many business plans he drew up, no matter how much research into demand for musical services, etc. He bumped into this guy at a piping seminar, and they hit it off. The guy didn’t lend him money, he made it a grant to get my husband started - which lead to a school of piping, and a band, then the MIDI electronic bagpipes… It wasn’t a huge grant, but it was enough to get the ball rolling and my husband got to live out his dream.
Turns out this guy did a LOT of that - bankrolled small, inventive, off-beat folks. Did it always work out? No, of course not. But he gave a lot of folks the opportunity to try out their ideas or talents, opportunities they they wouldn’t otherwise had, with no strings attached. And you’ve probably never heard of the guy, because he wasn’t doing it for fame or monetary profit. He seemed to like helping other people (he did a lot of other, generous stuff, too).
Both my husband and his benefactor are gone now - I do miss them both.
If we’re listing celebrities, I’ve become very fond of Jose Andres’s efforts on behalf of World Central Kitchen. He’s provided over a million meals to victims of natural disasters but that’s not all. He provides culinary training for disadvantaged people in the U.S… And kitchen hygiene training for school chefs in developing countries. And free meals for people who were laid off in the government shutdown. And he broke his lease at the Trump Hotel for…obvious reasons.
Thank you. It’s not my story to tell, so I won’t be sharing it outside of my post.
When John Oliver did a show on debt collectors, how they work and how debt is bought and sold. As an example of how easy it is, he (or the show/network whatever) bought almost $15,000,000 worth of medical debt for $60,000.
Then they forgave it. Any outstanding debt that was picked up as part of that $15m is no longer owed.
It was handled through a charity (that specializes in this) because the people would otherwise have to pay income tax and it, but regardless of how you look at it, even if it was just for the clicks, they paid $60,000 and helped out a lot of struggling people.
