It would have been so easy for him just to write a check.
Checks are simple.
But John Kennedy Jr. never took a simple path to public service. Not at 15, when he and his cousin Timothy Shriver trekked to Guatemala to help earthquake survivors rebuild. Not in his 20s, when he helped devise a program to improve treatment for the disabled that started in gritty New York City neighborhoods and is now being copied overseas. And not when a charity he worked with wanted to know how kids in a drug-prevention program were faring, and Kennedy went to talk with some himself. In many ways he embodied a new, entrepreneurial kind of Kennedy philanthropy.