Worcester Business Journal

10 Worcester Business Journal | Janurary 10, 2022 | wbjournal.com How the United Way doubled – and spent – its annual budget, thanks to a mysterious billionaire A vague email, a dummy bank account & a $5M surprise I t was the first Monday of No- vember 2020. Halloweens across Massachusetts had just been canceled or modified due to the coronavirus pandemic, and national political tensions were at an all-time high as Americans braced for a forthcoming virus surge that would leave countless people alone for the holidays, unable to see friends and family. e next day, aer one of the most fraught years in many people's memo- ries and an election cycle that felt like a lifetime, voters would turn out to elect Joe Biden as U.S. president. Amid all of that, Tim Garvin, presi- dent and CEO of United Way of Central Massachusetts received an email. e short note was from a woman named Hillary. "It said, 'Hi, Tim, I work for a philan- thropist who is interested in making a donation, can we set up a time to talk?" Garvin recalls. e first thing he did was look up the name of the sender, trying all the usual BY MONICA BENEVIDES WBJ Senior Staff Writer sources – LinkedIn, Facebook, Google – to no avail. e name was too common. Metaphorically, Garvin shrugged. e person who wrote didn't seem to be ask- ing for anything. He took the meeting. "I thought, 'Okay, nothing ventured, nothing gained,'" Garvin said. e next day at noon, the two con- nected. e person on the other line asked if he had ever heard of philanthro- pist and author MacKenzie Scott. Garvin remembers Googling – and misspelling – her name while on the call. But then, the dots started to con- nect. Of all the philanthropists in all the world, Scott was the billionaire author and former wife to Jeff Bezos, found- er and then-CEO of Amazon – and someone who had publicly pledged to give away vast swaths of her wealth to charitable causes. e person on the other end of the line – Hillary – explained to Garvin that Scott was in the process of donating a chunk of money, and she'd like to allocate some to the Central Massachusetts Unit- ed Way. e gi, of a then-unspecified amount, Hillary said, would be unre- stricted, a dream scenario for nonprofits. e only stipulations, she explained, would be Garvin not tell anybody until Scott announced the donation herself, and he needed to let Hillary know how United Way wanted to receive the money. Garvin opted for receiving it all at once, through a bank transfer. is meant he needed to tell at least one other person: Jim Hayes, the United Way's vice president of finance and operations. Still, Hayes and Garvin didn't have a way to verify that this impending financial gi was legitimate. So, out of an abundance of caution, Garvin and Hayes set up a new Bank of America account and placed $100 in it. If this all were a ruse, Garvin reasoned, that's the most they'd lose. en, the pair waited. Garvin didn't so much as tell his wife or United Way's board about the phone call, or the bank account. Life, for a while, went on. Two or three weeks later, Hayes pulled Garvin aside and told him the unthinkable: e new account they'd set up had $5 million in it. In one fell swoop, with the help of Scott's charity, they'd nearly doubled United Way's annual $5.5 million budget. Sharing the news Scott announced the gi to United Way, along with gis made to 383 other organizations, in a Medium post on Dec. 15, 2020. In it, she described how she and her team poured through 6,490 po- tential recipient organizations, narrow- ing them down to the nearly 400 who, like Garvin, would receive an unexpect- ed boost from Scott's fortunes. A pre-scheduled United Way board meeting was set to take place the fol- lowing day. Garvin called AiVi Nguyen, then-chair of the nonprofit board and partner at Worcester law firm Bowditch & Dewey, that night to tell her what had happened, and announced the news to the larger board the following morning. Immediately, the team got to work both sharing what had happened with the public and putting the money to work across their service region, looking for ways to spend nearly double the amount the United Way spends annually. e first motion the board supported returned $500,000 to the United Way endowment fund, replenishing the same amount of money set aside in June 2020 to help cover, with the help of the Worcester Together Fund, a projected $1-million deficit across the city's sum- mer youth programs. at pool of money, the largest the nonprofit had ever taken out of its en- dowment, supported grants given to the Summer Literacy Initiative, Recreation Worcester, and Youth Connect, which runs at local youth service agencies including the Boys & Girls Club of Worcester, Friendly House, You, Inc., Girls Inc. of Worcester, YWCA Central Massachusetts, and the YMCA of Cen- tral Massachusetts. Another $500,000 was set aside to ret- Tim Garvin and Naomi Sleeper from United Way (center) stand with members of the community organizations who benefited from MacKenzie Scott's $5-million donation. PHOTO/MATT WRIGHT

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