thank you so much for taking the time out of your well probably will be a busy day for many of us to come out here for this wonderful michigan west coast chamber of commerce early bird breakfast so for those who don't know me i am on my west michigan and i enter the noon show and report throughout the evening so i always do a pitch before we get started that if you do have a wonderful story idea let me know get ahold of me either e mail me facebook me i've done quite a bit of  of coverage this week so you know if there's anything else besides too little time that that i don't love to have but if you have anything else please get ahold of me we love covering everything that happens out here in holland and we can't cover it until we know what's going on so to kick things off this morning how about a warm welcome to jane clarke president of the west coast chamber morning everyone so happy to have you with us and welcome to two of time a couple of really neat things going on first of all i want to invite every single one of you to our new building open house you know over the last year we worked so hard to renovate our holland building and it is absolutely fabulous now and we're so proud of it we want to show it off to you so on wednesday may twenty fourth from four to six p m as our member open house click on our website to sign up we'd love to have you there we promise you can be very proud of this member facility second thing our new contre is coming up a month from today plus one day so the day after early bird next month on june fourteenth we're taking a bus load of people to new york com so if you've never been to  if you'd like to visit our office furniture manufacturers at their in your showcase it's a great trip you have a lot of fun on the bus we do a group luncheon we arrange for tours for you and we do it all in one day so we'd love to see you there and now switching gears  today before our official program starts we're going to celebrate some of our members we are so proud of all of our members and we've got three specifically that were honored last week amid some special awards in lansing and we wanted the chance to share that celebration with you today so i'd like to ask keith brophy to the stage keith is from the michigan small business development center he'll be presenting his our awards and also i'd like to ask up our state representative daniela garcia who's going to join us for a special tribute as well so welcome keith and daniela last thursday evening five members of the west coast chamber received awards the michigan celebrated small business event the michigan fifty companies to watch award is a celebration of second stage companies contributions is economic powerhouses job creators supporters of communities and groundbreaking innovators in their industries awardees as i announce your names please join us on stage to receive your award receiving this honor our daniel morrison collective idea congratulations and now i would like to present the two thousand and seventeen michigan small business of the year award to john landy and eric burns from n n time incorporated john eric were able to join us today after a quick trip last week to the white house with the other state winners please join me again and credit congratulated john and eric is well as the other  and now a state representative daniela garcia has an additional award to present to john and eric so you can come back up should have told me to just stay up here well good morning as you can see we have a lot to be proud of here in west michigan and just as i am proud to represent this area because we have so many great people but today is my privilege to present a small token of recognition for john and eric for in on time for being named small business person of the year for the state of michigan and by the u s business small business association john has been recognized a few different times for his strong financial performance innovative miss response to diversity community contributions and advocacy for the advancement of small business and those of us who serve in the legislature from ottawa county and know that we represent an area of michigan that has strong business leaders like john and erick who make this area a great place to live work and play so on behalf of myself said majority leader arlen week off lieutenant governor brian calley and governor rick snyder congratulations i have to gravity's i'm too short ok all right well up next let's do some door prizes you once again win something today let's see what we've got ok so we are doing things a little differently usually you get your little ticket but what we're going to do is there is something on your table and once i can find the script i will tell you what you need to do so door prize today is provided by our friends at can't insurance agency the amount is fifty three sixty five in west coast cash we'll have to ask them why it's that amount and as you know we have to look time happening here in holland and in order to win this year's this month's door prize look at the bottom of the in down minutes get it endowments provided by today's early word sponsor the community foundation of holland's elan area now if you see a tool of time sticker today you are the lucky winner so come up and claim your we are of course very grateful for sponsors of today's event and we thank you for you know providing the sponsorship of the free coffee time and also thank you to our early bird sponsor the community foundation of the hollins elan area and now we'd like to invite my house president the community foundation of the hollands elan area to come to the podium and say a few words thank you it's great to be here it's to have time it's a busy week for everyone but we are very very honored to part of the chamber and we do that a lot of different ways but to sponsor today's breakfast just to give you a quick quick nugget on the foundation but i really want to get to karl our speaker today because i want to once you hear him you're going to want to keep hearing him so we'll give as much time as we can if you're not familiar with the comm foundation we do two things in the community one we build and manage our local endowment we call it our communities in down and that's why you have been down mints in front of you today so you can remember that the committee foundation is an endowment organization that endowment has about twenty million in assets that we manage on behalf of the local community distributing grants to respond to needs and opportunities as they arise it's an endowment so it's really focused not only on today but also long into the future so one part of our work is managing our communities local endowment and the second part of our work is providing services to help donors whether they be companies or individuals or families achieve their philanthropic goals those services come in a wide variety of areas but the goal for us is if we can help make philanthropy happen easier quicker more effective in our community we think that more philanthropies will happen and more philanthropy as you hear from karl is a good thing at least we certainly think so so the  foundation does those two things build our local communities and dominant and provide services to donors to help them achieve their charitable goals if you want to learn more about the commute foundation we actually have our annual luncheon next thursday may eighteenth will actually be in this room and there's still room to sign up so you can go to our website or google us and call us and we'd love to have you sign up and then you can get the whole version of the commune foundation instead of the two minute version but love to have you there last thing i want to mention is you have some resources on your table of course the endowments but also some publications if you want to learn more about us please take those and then finally i want to introduce you many are familiar with the commute foundation we actually have three new faces well two new faces in on face it's been around but now is formally on staff so the foundation has three new staff members they just want to ask to stand so you can see them and you'll start to see them much more around town in our office and so the new face who's not so new is an query who's our new director development really really pleased to have her join the  and barb weidner are also new to our team and they're over here if they could stand a second so you can see them new to the foundation  so you'll see those folks around get to know ok so now for the real show so caro zinsmeister is our speaker today and you have to understand in our world the philanthropy world this is this is rock star status in terms of speaker today you know the phrase that when you tell someone you know they wrote the book on hospitals or chambers whatever he literally literally wrote the book on philanthropy i mean the book he wrote is called the almanac of american philanthropy so  was just a title he actually did significant amounts of research and we're going to hear some stories today that not not many people have access to in terms of how our country developed our ethos of giving of private resources for the public good so he has he has written it all he's been at all  and so for our industry karl is the top of the top and we are so pleased to have him here in this community there is a much more formal bio that can be written there but i'll just call it a couple things so he's been in public government both as a senate aide but also in the west wing as the president's chief domestic policy adviser so he's seen the inside of public government at some really high levels he was also editor in chief of the american enterprise magazine so from a writing and kind of a cultural perspective really saw a wide variety of stories happening on a national level and that's just to be the tip of the iceberg in terms of what karl bring so i'm excited for you to hear him talk about a topic that this community already cares about but i think you'll learn a little bit more about why giving is so important to our fabric and hopeful feel inspired to keep doing it more and more so can we give a good holiday welcome to karlsson's meisner thank you for that nice introduction that my family's says the short version is that is that i can't hold a job and i'm standing here with all these musical instruments and not feeling very talented actually all kinds of things i don't i don't even know the names of them but i'm very happy to be here in holl for that but i find that even people i think we're getting feedback from this if i can figure out a way to turn that off there we go i find that even people who are active in charitable work very active in charitable work today often badly  underestimate the kind of importance in the power of private giving and what it can actually accomplish and i think there's a kind of a conventional view that philanthropy is you know no one is against it obviously maybe it's a think of it as a kind of a nice coat of paint on the american mansion i think that's the traditional view and i'm here to tell you that's actually not right that it's much much more than that that it is actually a deep part of the foundation structure of our entire society and that we would be a different country in a much lesser country without it so we try to show you some evidence for that and if you realize that eleven percent of all the american workers today are working in the nonprofit sector you might know that we give away three hundred and seventy three billion dollars a year in this country and by the way that's just cash then there's the value of our economists say that you should roughly the amount of money if you count the value of our labor as well so it's a huge part of our economy and it's an even bigger part of our culture and yet i think you'll agree with me almost never hear these kinds of in the media or in journalism or in or in academia or in public discussions in the first i was going to depressed about that and then we decided well let's do something about that so as mentioned we had the plan to be roundtable decided we would produce this book and it's kind of the bible of philanthropy we've put gilt edges around it to kind of give people hint hint this is the this is the philanthropic bible i want you to know i did not put my own words in red letters a day that would have that would have been too far but  e the book is really built around the three greats it's about the great donors through american history it's about the great accomplishments in all kinds of sectors and it's about the great ideas that power philanthropy and by the way there's a lot of michigan in this book i just looked at the index this morning and there's thirty seven separate entries on michigan here and you know obviously this book has a certain encyclopedic aspect to the kind of what we wanted we wanted to be the authoritative resource but i promise you folks it's he was born and raised in the louisiana bayou you of i'm sure you look at the cost of when you're saying that does not look like a louisiana boy to me but he was one of these guys who had kind of a forrest gump life and he had these just so unbelievable series of adventures one thing after another he had interesting capacities all over the map and at this point he was actually an explorer in alaska there's some amazing things up there with among other things saved about one hundred sailors who had become frozen into the ice and were going to starve to death that winter except the fact that he was a very good shot so he fed them sea birds all winter after he got back from this event he he wrote a book on alligators which is still read as kind of a classic book he became an expert on chameleons and gardenias don't ask me why but he was one of the world experts on those two plants  paying for life insurance and paying the mortgage and doing all those responsible things that men do when they take off their furs and they put on their bow ties so you you have to do it but it's still kind of said but it had a day job and his day job was  producing and selling the hot pepper condiment that his family invented so this is the family business and if you don't think that there is good money in burning people's tongues you better think again he did very well and he used his profits for an amazing array of good works for one thing he got very attached to a fellow need of the louisiana by use this is the snowy grit i tell you i was chasing sandhill cranes and trumpeter swans all weekend so you know i'm a little biased here but that's a magnificent beas in my opinion stands about this high but when was a boy there was a fashion craze for women's hats with feathers on them you know what i know about fashion would fit in a very tiny slipper so i had to go looking this again i found pictures like this and i thought i might shoot a bird for that that's pretty good looking actually but then i kept looking and then i found things like this and then you don't want to go there but obviously a very silly fashion but it had a really silly effect which was it was making these birds almost extinct and meckling figured this out and so he swung into action and he went to his family owned an island in southern louisiana they still own on the same island actually and brought him home and he raised them up and paid for them to be taken care of in a protected area and by nine eleven he built up a private flock and his refuge there were about one hundred thousand eat grits and the same time use doing that kind of on the micro level he was also working on the macro level he was good friends with big philanthropist like john rockefeller and libya and he convinced them to buy up what was considered a wasteland of swampy land along the louisiana coast which was actually very important breeding habitat for these birds and think in that kind of double barrel way you know at home in his own with home energy in his own money in a personal way but also acting on a larger scale combined he managed to save these really beautiful animals from disappearing from earth now i told y he had interests and appetites and capacities all over the map and i want to give you a little taste of the kind of things he got into and i love the fact that this is also about extinction but it's not about an extinct animal to animal going extinct it's about cultural extinction so i mentioned he was a southern boy and he grew up with negro spirituals it is yours just loved the music really really love those songs and used to sing them all the time and get this family to sing with them and sometimes as far as i can tell aroun tradition they had never been written down and all it takes is one break in the generational change don't teach them to your kids and they're gone all right so many realize if you get swung into action the same exact way as before in a very double barreled way kind of at home and on a larger scale so the first thing he did he had to find somebody who knew a lot of these songs so he was rummaged around and asked people and he found these two very elderly ladies who live right now as a neighborhood quite nearby and invited him over to his home and he hired a musicologist and the two men sat down and they just as these ladies to sing their hearts out and is as fast as they could write they wrote down the lyrics and the melodies and the harmonies of these beautiful old songs and you know preserving them exactly as the been handed down through generations of slaves and then free african americans and he then published these as a book kind of a crummy photo but this is a very rare book at this point and there are one hundred twenty five spirituals in this book ok and i went to some trouble to try to figure out how many of those were written down some other place probably would have survived on their own and as best i can tell it's only five or six and the rest of those were saved because this gentleman took the time to kind of preserve a little piece of americana and by the way the among the songs that you saved was the i think you could say you know remain lastingly free was this guy this is for lewis and i but some of you in this room know somebody like this he's one of these guys just from the time he was you know knee high to a grasshopper he would experimented in blue things up and made stuff and very scientific kind of temperament and approach to life but when he was in college is dad died and you realize he might have to support the family so he went to law school and ended up hating that desperate to get back to science wanted to get back to what he really loved but didn't know how to make it work as a way of making a living so he said his brother in law said how about if we go to wall street and just make as much money as fast as we can so that i can do what i really love sounds easy obviously we all know it's not easy but these two men set up put up their shingle on wall street and to make a long story short that i tell in the book they ended up financing about forty percent of the rural electrification of america which of course was the internet boom of its day you know bringing those wires in for the first time to those counties big deal and they were they were at the bottoms for this made a lot of money and then brilliantly anticipated the stock market meltdown in the summer of one nine hundred twenty nine he went one hundred percent cash and of course the collapse came in the fall and up up up but by the early one nine hundred he was one of the richest men in america and at that point he did exactly what he said he was going to retire from finance never touched it again and went into science full time he would get th he lived in the new york city suburbs and he bought an abandoned her not a band but an empty mansion near his house and kind of westchester county area got it and put in one of the world's great science labs in this mansion you can measure how much the neighbors love that this must be presuming days or something but he put in just really one of the best science labs in the world at that point all kinds of equipment and then he started inviting americans in foreign scientists to come work with them and louis was an amateur obviously but he was not a dabbler he was a very serious scientist ended up with a bunch of patents and wrote a whole bunch of papers and was an expert for instance in the precise measurement of time that was one of his specialties wave theory knew a lot about wave theory he was one of the first people that th two things really first thing that surprised him was how popular hitler was and the second thing that amazed him was how good the german scientists were so he came home pretty alarmed and convinced that war was brewing and that science was going to be a lot to do had you know people high places and he rang the alarm bell he said i want to tell you what bad things are about to happen and we have to be first at things like atomic weapons we have to get there before the germans do or the japanese do and he was amazed by the answer he got the people in the government defense research lab said yeah yeah yeah we know about that stuff but you know that's for tomorrow's war we'll worry about that down the road and he said no it's not he said those things are moving fast and if the japanese or the germans get the first it's a disaster for all of our civilization and he really didn't get anywhere with this so he decided well i'm going to just act on my own so he thought hard for a period of time as to where he might be able to make a substantial contribution to the war effort through his scientific expertise and he very quickly settled on the idea of using radio waves to try to detect moving objects right which is what we call radar but did not exist at that point and in the very short period  time for them is not only became the america's expert on the theory of radar but he actually started making working practical radar sets that they put into bombers and into ships into shore installations and it by the thousands and folks i don't know if you realize this turned the tide of world war two these radar sites were hugely important in changing the course of the war in fact it was it was f d r f d r said that no civilian had more to do with winning world war two other than winston churchill nobody other than churchill had more to do with winning the war than alfred lewis and i have to admit i did not know the man's name before i started researching this book and i don't think probably most of you know his name this is the kind of huge swath of philanthropic history that just isn't told in this country people don't realize that even in the area i mean this you've got to admit this is the last area you would expect philanthropy contribute right national defense holy smokes that's the government's responsibility but i found this again and again and again national defense endangered species high level science things that you really wouldn't think are very appropriate places for philanthropy to make a contribution to make huge contributions and this was very sobering for me and it kind changed my whole view i really got away from the notion that you know if i had to be this kind of sweet little hobby that helps people who are poor and that's it made me realize how broad the horizons of flanges have been in can be and continue to be so that was  i think an important lesson for me oh by the way so this is the cherry on top so lewis is method by the way continues to live this i don't have time to get into it he created this crash science method that by the way was basically what powered the manhattan he had a lot to do with that too but that continues to be the way we kind of pursue high level defense science in this country so he has a legacy in that sense but he also has a physical legacy i realize he left behind a flesh and blood example this is his great grandson of anybody recognize that face but that is reed hastings who is the founder of netflix which by my count is completely up ended three separate businesses you know they destroyed blockbuster in the video rental thing and then they invented streaming and now they're becoming in a movie studio so  brilliant businessman who also by the way is a wonderful philanthropist he is one of the leading creators of charter schools in the country this is great grandson another really entrepreneur philanthropist who put huge marks on america is this guy this is george eastman and he of course was the basically the guy who popularized photography and he was the founder of kodak and you got to remember when in surly days photography was just this big black box nobody had a clue how it worked they just kind of fumble their way through it and when kodak was a start up there all these phenomenal stories for this is what say about this one period there was a period of about two or three weeks where all of the photographs being sent into kodak were coming back imagine how popular that was with people you send in your daughter's wedding photos and they're gone so this would this would have killed the country the company and very very short order so co directed would all start up guys did a little strong a hammock in the corner of the warehouse where the kodak company was then operating and just didn't go to bed until they figured this out it took him several days but he finally figured out just through trial and error that what had happened so you may know the old fashioned film process involved gelatin that were gelatin that you are used to make the films and jones are made by boiling down how carcasses of you realize that there might be some country people in this room who know that but otherwise that might be a secret but anyway how hard is it produce these villains and it turns out the cars had been moved to new pastures where they were eating different grass and that grass apparently had a little bit less elemental sulfur in it and that tiny change in the chemistry was enough to completely screw up the photographic process so when he said figure this out just trial and error he said never again you know i'm not going to be a prisoner of that kind of guesswork i need to know the basic chemistry of photography so i can control this so what did you do it and i started hiring chemists so he hired a bunch of wary well trained minds from an obscure little commuter school in boston called boston tech and he had very good luck with these folks it really became important employees of his company and in gratitude eastman one day just literally waltzed into the office of this little college and said i'm adopting you here's a here's a twenty million dollar check and basically we walked into the climactic moment and turn boston tech into today's mit this is their main library and their main care was even built their whole campus basically gave them the equivalent of about a half a billion dollar gift today recent been doing more research on this topic is amazing actually mit within it wasn't yet mit but what became mit was in desperate shape they were in terrible condition and run out of money decided to shut themselves down they actually had signed an agreement both mit and harvard had signed an agreement that mit was going to shut down and become the engineering department of harvard all agreed and then a massachusetts judge came along and said nope can't do that that violates your state charter so they were desperate the president resigned and they were basically going to go out of business and then eastman walked in the door and he did not get asked by the way he just waltzed in the door and did this on his own eastman never had staff he did all of his giving by checkbook journalism is one of the biggest givers of his era he was rockefeller carnegie level you don't know that because he did it all anonymously he gave all this money anonymously people thought it was mr smith who built them id for about twenty years and finally came out  but that's that's the kind of guy he was now easy to understand he's been a lot of other philanthropist you have to understand importance of passion and sometimes when you talk about philanthropist passion it's easy to make fun of it or to caricature it you know some people who seem to go so overboard he spends a perfect example so one of his passions was music absolutely crazy about music i was just in his house a couple months ago up in rochester he had who full size pipe organs installed in his home and he actually hired a guy to come over every morning and play to cut isn't if you as his alarm clock that's literally how he woke up and he is in his journals there's all these incredible stories about he would take these jags these musical jags he'd go to new york city for like three days and he'd taken six operas no kidding and he loved this but the people who we went with him sometimes didn't love it one of the women who went with him on one of these trips it's not in the her journal she said george is absolutely alcoholic about music but there was a perfect description but it was definitely extreme passion and he went crazy but it led to beautiful things passions often do and in this case it led him to create this institution this is the eastman school of music at the university of rochester which is a hugely important cultural institution in our country this is basically where classical music was americanised and popularized up until that time if you want to be a conductor or you want to be a concert master you had to go to europe and that changed when east and built this tremendous institution which remains one of our our great cultural organizations now i want to even go a little tighter on this idea of passion and personal involvement you've heard about it with you heard about it with eastman this is an even more extreme case this is a guy named michael brown he was a broadway lyricist ok now try to imagine that business that's so your ultimate boom and bust business you can go five or six years without a paycheck in that business and then also you get lucky and you get a gosh meanwhile your wife is giving you the wicked side i am sure that i was a freelance writer for a few years so i kind of know how that can go but he got lucky in one hundred he had a hit musical and he felt blessed and so he and his wife and their two boys decided they were going to share some of their good fortune so they invited said you have one year off from your job to write whatever you please merry christmas and the writer's name was harper lee and you might remember harper lee was from alabama and when she does decided she want to be a novelist what do all novelists do they move to new york city right what happens when they get to new york city they're so darn busy trying to pay their rent that they have no energy left over to pursue their art which is exactly what happened her she was working in an airline office in a bookstore and just had no energy left over at the end of the day making no progress on her writing and the browns noticed this all right they were good friends and they noticed this and they acted on it now really was really agonized over whether she should accept this and this is a big it's a big gift from a friend you can imagine but she decided in the end she would she do or very best to kind of honor that gift and it was during that gift year she quit the airline job in the bookstore job was during that gift year that she wrote to get a mockingbird course that won the pulitzer prize in one hundred sixty one and really changed the course of american literature now i'm sure some of you are saying you know is that really philanthropy well my my definition of flattery would be something like this you look around you and use see someone who is not meeting their god given potential for whatever reason and you realize that with a little boost well extra help from somebody maybe for me they could get closer they could maybe  given potential now this is a very extreme lee personal case and not certainly the mainstream of flattery but to me it meets the definition and it gives you kind of a sense of the range of this activity a more conventional view of philanthropy is this you know the gates foundation of the ford foundation that's what most people think of because that's what most of the reporting is all about and this in fact is a great quote and i think i have it here i have this this is a great quote about the ford foundation being described as quote a large body of money completely surrounded by people who want some and you know it's it's easy to look at that phenomenon i think all that's left to be right actually that's not that's a piece of american flattery but that is not the mainstream of american plan to me that's the little tip of the iceberg that you see and it gets way more reporting than it deserves but underneath that tip there is a huge iceberg under the surface that is the mainstream and that is basically philanthropy by every people because i want to show you they have the evidence here this is this the this is the latest data from the latest year i don't you realize only fifteen percent of the money that's good given away in this country every year comes from foundations and only another five percent comes from corporations so where does the rest come from individuals and most of that by the way most of that eighty percent comes from very ordinary average american households who give away about twenty six hundred to three thousand dollars a year you say want and somewhat too much well multiply three thousand by a hundred something million households see what number you lot about some amazing things done by little little givers if you will and there's just some beautiful i love that whole set of stories so i talk a lot about i don't have time to get into that now but i'm here to tell you that i mean the response i get sometimes when i tell those stories about little givers is they say well those are beautiful history of really important things getting done by little givers banding together to give a quick example that i was reading a book and it said in the book that in the year eighteen the state of ohio h three million residence not a lot and had thirty seven colleges i don't know what that meant but it sound like a lot to me so i don't know that i'm a compare that to some would be interesting to know so i looked up in the year eight hundred eighty the entire country of england which is much bigger twenty three million people how many colleges these boys they had at that point grand total for so i thought wow that's interesting that's very interesting what is going on there and to make a long story short basically what is going on there is educational philanthropies sacrificial educational philanthropy let me show you the map of colleges in eight hundred twenty six and i picked that year because that was the year that case western reserve was now called case western reserve university was founded so you might know case western i don't know something like sixty nobel prize winners of come out of there and a whole bunch of companies that you would know were founded by case western grads very good and generic and in business and technical school but in eight hundred twenty six that was not cleveland where case western that was a mosquito bite on the back side of america all right that was the bill and nowhere that was the frontier this was the west in one thousand nine hundred six and who is founding a university there it's a bunch of backwoods low income farmers who were doing this and this was happening all across the american frontier this is happening in kentucky and tennessee in all kinds of places really remarkable when you think about it that people who were just barely scraping out a living were thinking about the next generation and thinking i want my kids to have something more and i want to live in a country where people are not ignorant where where people who are broadly well educated so they're making huge sacrifices to do this and there's some beautiful stories i mean case western for instance that i found some stories about france is there was a farmer who had a bunch of teams of horses that he didn't need in the winter so his contribution to case western was he just used those teams to haul stone back and forth between the local quarry and the campus that's what he could do and in about the eight hundred forty s as best i can tell this is kind of the way american flint works there was phase two phase two and eight hundred forty s was some churches in the east got wind of this and they heard what some very low income fellow citizens were doing out west to try to make their part of the country better inter try to make the next generation better and they were very moved by this i think very inspired and touched and they decided we want to help with that so these churches banded together and they started koch pooling their contributions and sending the west to support these kinds of colleges and folks you can be darn sure it was nickels and dimes in the collection plate and you say what can you do with nickels and well you do it for years and years and you show some patience can you do it with a bunch of other people and things that up and let me show you what happened when that campaign we had been going for about thirty years this is the map of ohio about thirty years into the campaign you can see this is bloom of colleges all across the state and this again same thing i only did ohio because i had the data for you can do the same kind of map for a lot of other states probably probably including michigan this beautiful stories of hillsdale college friends i know it was i think the founders hillsdale road something like four thousand miles collecting tiny little contributions to be to build that campus so this is a this is a big story played out all across the country and i don't have to tell you it changed our universe our whole world i mean this is the reason we are the best educated country in the and in the world and it started again with educational sacrifice and there's lots of other sectors that illustrate this let me give you another example i don't know if you realize that the amount of money that we send overseas to super poor  people in developing countries as individuals far exceeds what we send as a government these are the latest numbers that just came out in march you can see our government gives away thirty three billion dollars of overseas aid but we as individuals give away forty four billion dollars now that comes in the forms of you know fifty dollars checks to save the children or you know fifty bucks for mercy ships or doctors without borders or world vision and you think is my fifty dollars going to make a difference well yeah everybody else is doing it too and it adds up it really adds up so this is the power of what would you call it kind of this is grassroots action this is sort of you know small scale giving and you know it takes a certain amount of faith to understand that power i think there is  some people just kind of have this instinct that you know you have a big problem you've got a big hammer you've got a big solution and you've got everyone marching in the same direction you know this is this looks powerful and fermentable and effective but folks this is not a good way to solve human problems there are relatively few problems that are so solved well in this kind of large centralized standardized big power method you know just start with education those of you who have kids know that sometimes the school that would be perfect for one child would be absolutely awful for the other child you don't really want consistency in schooling you want to match the individual you need to have a variety of options and choices so that you can match the individual person's needs and problems and talents i felt that all the time when i was in the white house i assure  we were as careful as we could be we worked really hard to try to come up with good solutions but i was as i've been plagued with this feeling that no matter how careful we are we're going to discombobulate millions of people that's just the way it is that's that's the way it works at the federal level you can't like i used to crave the best like turn on the faucet a little bit just see what happens or maybe try something one thing in west michigan to try to totally different thing in newark and see if how that works out or maybe phase things in over time can't do that in the federal government it's on or off you got to rule change or a new lot of the same way to everybody and there's things you have to do that way and there's things that works ok for but it's not really a good way to deal with individual human beings competing policies and small pewters this is what a computer meant huge big box where all the wires lead to one central processor and we recently thought well that's a powerful machine and actually we figured out that's not a very a powerful way of solving a lot of problems you really want to solve a complicated problem this is what you want looks like a mess my mom looks at this is chaos this is a hackathon and i don't have to tell you we learned the hard way that one person with a laptop can do amazing things this is much more powerful than it looks with the doritos and the diet coke and this is how the internet was built you know it wasn't a big agency folks it wasn't a big corporation it wasn't a big anything they built the internet it's a mosaic it's a mosaic of lots of little pieces put together by people's effort in different different times in different ways which is exactly how philanthropy works you know lots of small actors working without central control and this is a thing you see over and over in american history you see it in biology see i business give an example in business anybody recognize the common thread in all this words are all marriott's this is the way mary how does hotels know used to still want to stay in america you can stay in america but if you want to have a extended stay you're to end up in a residence inn or a fairfield suites if you want to go for a luxury experience are going to go to st regis or the ritz carlton if you want to go to a boutique hotel or going to the a loft and these are just fake badges that mariette puts on the same product every one of these separate little entities now has its own budget as its own staff has its own rules has its own ways of operating this is what smart companies that figured out is that you can't do one size fits all for everybody anymore you have to specialize and find people where they  are meet their needs and their interests and their capacities where they are that's how you can be effective and folks this is what philanthropy has done for three hundred years this kind of localized decentralized small scale response and give you a couple of quick examples  i hope some of you are admired as of goodwill goodwill is a five and a half billion dollar year entity so huge of force and really effective at getting people into jobs and into the workforce who would otherwise have no chance to talk to people like you know people with disabilities people with addictions people coming out of prison people who just wouldn't even have a shot anymore or getting really great help through goodwill but you know what goodwill is not one thing goodwill has one hundred sixty three regional affiliates each of whom is entirely independent they have their own board they have their own budget they are own ways of operating and they talk amongst each other but nobody has any authority or control over them it is just a network and even more extreme example that would be habitat for humanity which is got fourteen hundred separate chapters again each one of them independent so this is the way philanthropy has worked for a long time let me close now just so you don't think i'm a complete pollyanna not to acknowledge that  is not perfect and in fact that philanthropists especially aren't all saints some of them do their good works for not such good reasons this is a perfect example this is j paul getty who at the time he was literally the richest man in the world put a pay phone into his  state to make his guests pay for all of their their phone calls so you might remember i remember this vividly his is one point his grandson was kidnapped for ransom and they asked for seventeen million dollars ransom to let the poor kid go gran'pa got involved and said that sounds a little high to me maybe we could get that down so to negotiate to the point where the kidnappers cut off the boy's ear and mailed it to grampa and that kind of got his attention but even then he wouldn't pay the ransom in full he paid two point two million dollars which was the amount that was tax deductible don't ask me why apparently that was directed at him and the rest he gave as a loan to the boy's father his son at four percent interest so not exactly a warm and fuzzy person but here's the bu folks i was out last month in l a and i visited the getting museum that he left the world with a multi billion dollar and folks when you are dust in the ground and completely forgotten there are going to be people going to that museum to get their spirits lifted and getting inspired to try to become a better human being just for a beautiful fantastic greek and roman art and other things and that's the beauty of land to be you don't have to be an angel you don't have to be a saint you can even be a pretty crummy per person and the mechanism is capable of dealing with you because listen there's a little j paul getty in every one of us we have this mix of good impulses and kindness intellectualism and little selfishness and meanness and cruelty and it's in all of us and the thing about philanthropy is it can deal with it it can take that and encourage you and help you and and and  hold your hand and once in a while kick you in the backside to make you a better person and to take get you to take an interest in your fellow human being so with that i will quit and say that i i really just want to encourage you to get away from this idea that again it's kind of a sweet hobby or it's kind of a nice little sideline is really really much more than that in this country it's a huge part of our our national success so thank you for having me you go and we would like to give you this as a gift to remember your time here in west michigan thank you again so if you were interested in picking up a copy of carl's well what comes next or the almanac the community foundation of holland zealand will be selling these right out the front door on your way out this morning so again thank you so much for spending time with us this morning and please come back next month june thirteenth to hear from our local superintendents as they highlight the collective work that they are doing in our educational community have a great morning everyone