C h a z a q
It means "Strength"

Mrs. Kerry
2004-04-16 | 4:16 p.m.

I would vote for her:

Teresa Heinz Kerry,

The Philanthropist,

Tries Tough Love

Ketchup Family Endowments

Are Tighter With a Buck;

Shaping Up a Symphony

By SHAILAGH MURRAY

Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

April 16, 2004; Page A1

PITTSBURGH -- A month after Teresa Heinz Kerry's first husband, John Heinz, the ketchup heir and U.S. senator, died in a plane crash in 1991, she took his place as head of the family philanthropies.

The first significant request she fielded was from the Pittsburgh Symphony, which had depended on the family's largesse ever since her husband's great-grandfather provided early funding for the orchestra a century earlier. The symphony was beset with financial and labor problems, and it was burning through cash. The board wanted a $30 million grant to launch its new capital drive.

"Over my dead body," she says she responded. Heinz funding would come only with reforms in the symphony's organization, she said. It was a wake-up call across Pittsburgh that a new era of philanthropy was under way. Relying on rich people to dash off checks is "not sustainable," she explains today. "You have to install good business principles, period."

That brash, unconventional style makes Teresa Heinz Kerry, 65 years old, a wild card as the spouse of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. The same traits that mark her hard-nosed philanthropy make campaign aides sweat when she approaches a podium: She is intense, curious, exacting and blunt.

Mrs. Heinz Kerry, one of a breed of philanthropists who aren't content to just write checks and hope for the best, plans to continue overseeing the $1.3 billion Heinz Endowments, as well as her own fund, if she becomes first lady. She would continue to choose among supplicants for the $60 million to $70 million the charities dole out each year to environmental, cultural and educational causes.

Mrs. Heinz Kerry, whose English is accented by the Portuguese she spoke as a child in Mozambique, is regarded as St. Teresa in Pittsburgh. There, Heinz money girds everything from neighborhood after-school programs to grand civic projects such as the new convention center. One of her dates with Sen. Kerry, whom she married in 1995, was at an after-school arts program, where the senator was dazzled by a state-of-the-art recording studio and photography lab.

� For more about Teresa Heinz- Kerry's life, see www.johnkerry.com

� For more on her charities, see www.heinz.org

� See a chart of the biggest grants by Heinz charities in 2002

Her tough-love approach forced the Pittsburgh Symphony to cut costs, undertake an aggressive subscription drive, improve community relations and begin to address its labor problems. After a year of grueling negotiations with endowment officials -- and with plenty of strings attached -- the orchestra got $20 million of the $30 million it requested.

Richard Simmons, chairman of the symphony board, says that while the symphony is still struggling, its future is no longer in doubt, in large part because the Heinz Endowments cracked the whip.

The symphony experience established a pattern: Every early-childhood program, public-television show and training initiative that has sought Heinz funding must show it is prepared to spend the money wisely. In 2002, the endowments, along with two other local groups, yanked $3 million in literacy funds from the Pittsburgh public school system, compelling Mayor Tom Murphy to create a commission to examine the district's problems and recommend solutions.

As Mrs. Heinz Kerry sees it, grant making should be held to the same standards as venture capital investments. "You're going to win some, and you're going to lose some," she says, "so you better have the best mechanisms in place to be accountable."

There are flops. Margaret Petruska, the foundation's longtime director of children, youth and family programs, persuaded Mrs. Heinz Kerry to fund high-quality early-childhood care on a grand scale. The $60 million, five-year Early Childhood Initiative was launched in 1996 to establish 80 early-childhood education centers in Allegheny County's poorest neighborhoods, serving about 7,600 preschoolers.

There were no comparable models to follow, and success depended on state money coming through. It didn't. Welfare reform had started in the meantime, sending mothers of the targeted kids into the work force. They needed full-time child care, not a half-day program with difficult logistics. At the program's peak, in May 2000, $34 million had been spent, including more than $10 million in Heinz money, and the centers were serving just 680 kids. So the Heinz Endowments pulled the plug and commissioned $1.8 million in two follow-up studies to examine what went wrong.

When Sen. Heinz was killed in the 1991 crash, Heinz giving was in its fourth generation. The two endowments, named for Howard Heinz, a son of company founder H.J. Heinz, and for Howard's sister-in-law Vira I. Heinz, had a clear mission: to improve the quality of life and community in their hometown of Pittsburgh. But the two funds' grant-making had grown too routine and predictable, endowment veterans say.

After his father died in 1987, Sen. Heinz began an overhaul. His vision, spelled out in his last chairman's statement, was for western Pennsylvania to become a laboratory for cultural, social, educational and economic development initiatives that addressed national problems. He instructed program officers to outline what needed to change -- a process that was under way when he died.

In her 25 years of marriage to the moderate Republican, Mrs. Heinz Kerry had attended just two meetings at the endowments' downtown office: one to report on a trip to Eastern Europe, the other to discuss early childhood development. She had helped found a day-care center while she was raising her three sons.

Mrs. Heinz Kerry knew Pittsburgh only as a wealthy senator's wife, and she had a lot to learn. During her first year at the foundation, she toured abandoned steel mills and visited struggling surrounding towns such as Braddock. Andrew Carnegie had built his first steel mill there, and the first Carnegie library in the U.S. Driving by the grand, turreted building, Mrs. Heinz Kerry was struck by the thought that it could be the focal point for Braddock's revitalization. She went inside to have a look. The walls were covered with chipping paint. When she returned to Pittsburgh, she announced, "We're going to have a grant to repaint those walls."

She expanded the endowments' boards to bring in fresh blood. She instituted a version of the weekly legislative meetings her late husband's Senate office had held, with mandatory attendance for all. She popped into staff offices to ask, "What are your dreams?" Most people looked stunned, she says.

One of Mrs. Heinz Kerry's basic principles is that charity doesn't have to mean cheap. At the Manchester Craftsmen's Guild, an after-school arts center on Pittsburgh's North Side, Heinz money helped to build a recording studio where two Grammy-winning jazz albums have been produced, a gourmet teaching kitchen big enough for a hotel, and a hothouse for growing orchids.

Last year, she threw out plans she deemed too pedestrian for an expansion of the Sarah Heinz House, a former settlement house for immigrants built in 1913 on the Heinz factory grounds. It is used today as an after-school center for troubled youth. Instead, she hired William McDonough, a "green" architect from the University of Virginia, to design a campus where kids can grow vegetables and learn how rainwater is reclaimed. The refinements added $1 million to the overall $7 million cost.

The Heinz grants reveal something of Mrs. Heinz Kerry's political philosophy. Her two great passions are the environment and early-childhood education. She doesn't think government has all the answers. She thinks of herself as practical. When her smaller family fund, based in Washington, was helping Massachusetts create a prescription-drug benefit for older people, she insisted the program be designed for what the state could afford, not for precisely what seniors wanted.

Now that Mrs. Heinz Kerry is in the political spotlight, the endowments are getting scrutiny: Conservative groups have tried to link Heinz money with left-wing causes. The endowments issued a lengthy rebuttal.

Mrs. Heinz Kerry plays down her influence on Sen. Kerry, stressing that what she does "is not partisan work. Everyone has good ideas, and you just bring them all to the table." Unfortunately, she says, governments don't tend to work that way today. To the extent that she can show a contrast, she says, "I think my experience is very valuable to him."

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