Travis Brown, Rachel Keller Brown, Rex Sinquefield and Jeanne Sinquefield

In its fourth year, the annual Christmas benefit for St. Vincent Home for Children continues to build momentum. This year’s benefit brought in $75,000 through sponsorships from community leaders and businesses, and a live auction. St. Vincent’s creates a safe place for some of St. Louis’ most vulnerable children to live and learn.

One of the reasons that ideas like St. Vincent’s have been so successful is our country’s rich legacy of philanthropy. It is not casual. It’s not an afterthought. With centuries of growth and innovation, philanthropy has truly become a national treasure – and a nimble vehicle for change.

Early philanthropists like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller used their wealth to create public assets – hospitals, schools, libraries, research – that are still used today. They popularized the idea that one could donate wealth while they were still alive, and that it could be a dynamic part of life, instead of a perfunctory part of a will.

In the early 20th century, fundraising grew to include more group giving, foundations that report on social conditions, and corporate giving. Recently, venture philanthropy and online fundraising have again revamped the idea of giving.

Applying the idea of venture capital to philanthropy has changed the donor-foundation relationship from one of transaction to one of ongoing support. Beyond financial support, a company assists with management and structural support, helps measure and improve outcomes, and typically invests over a period of years. Riffing on that model, organizations like Venture Philanthropy Partners pair D.C.-area donors who want to see great, positive change in their community with a portfolio of projects that combat a litany of issues facing children in D.C. Of charities and not-for-profits, VPP Co-Founder and Chairman Mario Morina says, “We ask them to do the remarkable, but we don’t give them the support to even do the negligible.” Venture philanthropy models hope to help donors give more strategically, and provide more comprehensive, long-term support for organizations.

Online giving has been especially powerful in giving donors of any size access and information to donate at any time. It’s a way for people to seek out causes they care about, and helps charitable organizations educate the public about their cause. E-philanthropy has also tapped small donors who may not be the target of mail campaigns, but could spare “as little as a cup of coffee”, and helped engage large efforts to respond quickly to disasters like Hurricane Katrina or this year’s devastating earthquake in Haiti. More than $30 million of donations to Haiti came in the form of text message. The Future of Philanthropy estimates that 25% of personal giving will be done online this year. But that still leaves 75% of personal giving that happens through personal appeals or fundraisers, and remains the core of fundraising.

Think about this for a minute: of the $303.8 billion charitable dollars given in the US in 2009, individual donors gave 75% of those dollars. The majority of US giving came not from corporations or foundations, but from individuals. In 2004, donations to tsunami victims reached $2 billion – three times what the US Government spent on disaster relief. Donations after Hurricane Katrina were nearly $6.5 billion, and donations to Haiti reached a similar level – in the first three weeks.

That’s an incredible force of people who weren’t coerced to give anything, but who chose to take action and donate to advance the causes they felt strongly about.

Missouri’s charitable giving is also quite strong: Missouri Foundations provide the state with $675 million in giving, and Missouri individuals gave $2.8 billion in 2008 (that’s an average of $3290 in contributions from each person who filed itemized charitable deductions). While individual donations may go to causes around the world, Missouri Foundation giving is a good measure of how Missourians support in-state needs.

We’re fortunate to work with the Sinquefield Charitable Foundation, which gives to such diverse causes as the Boy Scouts of America, music composition, education and chess – their giving directly impacts children in the area, our friends and neighbors, and it makes Missouri a magnet for organizations, talent and leaders who also want to see these causes thrive.

Philanthropy is more than a way to make us feel good. It might have that effect, but something more significant is driving this incredible scope of action. There’s a spark when we realize something is wrong – and that we have the tools or resources to do something about it. It’s a legacy our country has spontaneously nurtured, that we carry forward and improve upon, and it strengthens us as much as it strengthens the people we give to.

Today, the Let Voters Decide committee submitted more than 209,000 signatures to the Secretary of State to place the measure on the November 2010 ballot. More than double the required number of Missourians signed the petition to place this question on the ballot.

The committee collected signatures in seven congressional districts, rather than just the required six. More than 210,000 signatures filling 104 boxes and 20,646 petitions sends a clear message that voters from all across Missouri want the opportunity to vote on this issue.

When this measure goes before voters in November, a YES vote would give voters in Kansas City and St. Louis the opportunity to decide every five years whether they want to continue collecting the earnings tax. A vote to repeal would phase the tax out gradually, over 10 years.

For Missourians not in Kansas City and St. Louis, a YES vote in November would prohibit local politicians from imposing an earnings tax anywhere in the state.

Based on the large number of signatures gathered, it is clear that Missourians want a say on local earnings taxes, and they will have their voices heard again on November 2.

For more information on the initiative, go to www.LetVotersDecide.com.

Follow Let Voters Decide on Facebook and Twitter.

This weekend, Twitter co-founder and St. Louis, MO native Jack Dorsey, (known to most as @Jack) returned home to visit the Central West End neighborhood. By any accounts, his company’s exponential growth as a micro-blogging communications platform has been astounding in the last two years. For a better summary of Jack Dorsey’s personal views about Twitter, IWantMedia.com has a great 2008 article that breaks it down nicely.

For a CEO whose hand is on the pulse of an important grassroots communication tool (check out U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill’s updates at: @clairecmc for recent news), new ideas for revolutionizing our local lives must occur on a daily basis. That’s what got several of us thinking: what if the City of St. Louis, MO moved at the speed of twitter?

So, here’s a few predictions under a St. Louis-style “fantasy twitterverse:”

First, when you land at Lambert St. Louis International Airport, your mobile device would recognize your location, and offer up the top five transportation options available to you. By the time you leave baggage claim, you will have made your selection based on a competitive bid tweeted back to you.

Then, suppose you’re in a hurry to Grandma’s house, but you want to swing by Ted Drewe’s for their famous concretes in the dog day heat. Your mobile device might ping, poke, or otherwise authorize release of your moving proximity to the Frozen Custard location servers operating nearest to you. Then, you direct message customer service, and after the order is made, the Custard shop responds to a tweet order when you are three minutes or less away (not before – or it will swelter). The transaction might debit from your PayPal account, operate off of your Bluetooth feature once arrived, or simply paid in cash without delay.

So your plans fall through, and you’re considering going to the St. Louis Cardinals game. No sweat. Simply search the game day single game ticket office, and they would present live tweetfeeds of those with available tickets and their prices. Tweetpic views from each section would also be viewed, as well as options to find everyone else who might be in the Stadium right now.

The next day, as you’re packing to leave, you receive a tweet from your Southwest flight crew – looks like your return flight to KSFO might be delayed 45 minutes. Not only does their text message keep you posted as you clear security, but it also offers you a few small deals, like a free Starbucks Coffee or Cardinals t-shirt to smooth over your inconvenience.

Granted – a little beyond today’s world. However, if we were to lead with integrating these technologies, wouldn’t we help upgrade our “Gateway to the West” designation?

By AL Lawrence

Rex Sinquefield

Most of the fun has gone out of reading about the super-rich. “Wall Street versus Main Street” is a constant media mantra. We’re shown fund managers and investment bankers perp-walking or being grilled by a congressional subcommittee, shaming the greedy traders who brought all of us down with their short-term get-rich schemes.

There are understandable reasons for this billionaire-bashing. But Rex Sinquefield is a different kind of “Wall Street” success. And neither short-term nor greed are words that apply. He made his millions by founding a Santa Monica firm that structured solid, long-term investments in real companies. Now in retirement, he’s giving back big-time to his native Saint Louis—and is sponsoring his lifelong passion, chess.

A life right out of Dickens
Even the fortunate flush now roll only half as high as they did in mid-2007. Many American companies, facing the cycle of downturns and layoffs and further downturns, are shrinking from charitable contributions. In this context, chess benefactor Rex Sinquefield is remarkable. Truth is, Rex would be pretty remarkable in any context. In fact, Charles Dickens would have loved to write Sinquefield’s life story, which features the kind of tear-jerking life-challenges the novelist loved—a cleft palate, life in an orphanage, a difficult personal choice between the Church and business, and a broken back—just to list a few. Not to mention the rags-to-riches resolution.

Following his father’s death, little Rex moved from his protective home and family, a seven-year-old’s whole world, to a crowded, nun-strict orphanage in the northwest St. Louis suburb of Normandy. Some rise to meet adversity. Young Rex flourished, especially in competitive contexts, covering any personal pain with wisecracks and grins, not tears. Deciding early to become a priest but always interested in the stock market, he entered the seminary owning $200 of stock in Great Northern Paper. Three years later, he changed course, majoring in philosophy and business at St. Louis University.

After a hitch in the Vietnam-era army, he enrolled in the University of Chicago’s MBA program, where he studied under, among others, future Nobel Laureate Merton Miller. Rex went on in 1973 to pioneer the first passively managed indexing S&P 500 fund. An “index” fund is set up to reflect, not to try to out-perform, the market in general. It’s “passive” because an investor lets his savings ride—resisting the urge to constantly churn and change his picks. Thus he avoids the risks of guessing at the future fluctuations of individual corporations. The idea is, in a way, the opposite of the overly sophisticated and risky investment approaches often blamed for our current financial problems. Indexing funds became a staple for the growing sector of middleclass investors who had their own, non-financial jobs to worry about and wanted their savings to grow long-term—at the same time, the billions in funds provided a dependable source of working capital to American companies.

In 1981, Rex co-founded and, with his wife Jeanne, a Ph.D. in economics, ran his own company, Dimensional Fund Advisors. When he retired in 2005, he had helped many others to make money—and had made a lot himself. Now he is an important and eclectic benefactor—of the St. Louis Opera Theatre, its art museum, symphony, botanical gardens, and numerous other charitable causes. But his passion is chess. And that passion brought Wall Street to Main Street in St. Louis.

Sinquefield is a real chess enthusiast. He told me that once, years ago, he was on a trans-Pacific flight that happened to also be carrying Bobby Fischer and then-FIDE-president Florencio Campomanes. Rex instantly recognized Fischer, but Campo warned Sinquefield that Bobby was in a foul mood, not even talking to his traveling partner. “But you can try,” Campo said. Even when faced with the force that cracked the biggest egos, Sinquefield couldn’t pass up an opportunity to meet the greatest ever, and he knew his audience. He stopped by Fischer’s seat. “I hope you beat those commies,” he told Fischer. The champ came out of his pout. “I will,” Bobby said.

Rex Sinquefield, playing the Sicilian in a simul game against Jennifer Shahade. World Youth representative Margaret Hua looks on.

[to see a recent game, go here]

The Chess Club and Scholastic Center of St. Louis

During a break from the recent Mid America Open, I went, with my longtime buddy, Nebraska chess-expert Gary Colvin, to visit the new club that Rex Sinquefield sponsors. I admit it was a bittersweet and sentimental journey. After catching chess fever while a sophomore at the University of Missouri, I joined the old Capablanca Chess Club, in the St. Louis suburbs. A key-club (adult members could enter the club any time of the day or night—a sensible arrangement in the three-shift industrial city that St. Louis was in the 1970s), the “Capa” Club served as an incubator of Midwest chess, nurturing a number of then-rare Missouri experts and masters. But when the Fischer bubble burst, the Capa club, like other chess clubs across America—after expanding into bigger and fancier quarters when Fischer beat Spassky—had to shutter its doors when Bobby refused to play again.

Not your grandfather’s chess club

The new club was organized in 2007 as a nonprofit organization, dedicated to introducing thousands of St. Louis children and adults to the benefits of chess, and to supporting existing school chess programs while encouraging new programs within the regular school curricula. Already the club has attracted more than 500 members and has been written about in both chess and non-chess media.

Since my familiarity with the St. Louis’ roadways peaked 35 years ago, I had to use my Verizon’s phone navigator to find the club’s address: 4657 Maryland Avenue, just east of the intersection of Euclid and Maryland. My first shock came on hearing the fembot-voice tell us “Your destination is ahead on the left.” The old Capa Club occupied the second story of a car dealership on a main but definitely unromantic intersection, across Big Bend Avenue from a White Castle and across Manchester from a Jack in the Box. (Did the side effects of those wee-hour junk-food forays keep me and my old gang from making norms?)

Outside the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Saint Louis

But now Gary and I found ourselves in a trendy dining section of St. Louis. In the unseasonably warm weather, couples were drinking lattes and families were snacking under umbrellas along the fashionable street. We could have been in Pasadena along the row of clubs on Colorado Boulevard, at the outdoor restaurants across from Lincoln Center on New York City’s Broadway, or walking along the bilingual bistros on the sidewalks along Sunset Drive in South Miami. No car dealership, no Jack in the Box. Could there really be a chess club here?

Out of the car and strolling down the café-lined avenue, seeing the restaurant tables change to stone chess benches with green-and-beige board tops, we knew we had arrived. But we had trouble accepting that a chess club—in a well appointed, two-story building of its own—was in the middle of this block of obviously prime real estate.

Once inside, we saw that chessboard had met boardroom. The worn chairs and cigar-stained tables of the old Capa Club were nowhere to be seen. If James Bond and Donald Trump were going to play some serious chess, this would be the place. The pictures tell the story.

Club executive director Tony Rich, who looks as if he runs a fitness center, not a chess club, heads a truly professional staff. We were given a friendly greeting at the reception desk (really, a reception desk!), and a tour of the three-level facility—the two above-ground floors and a lower level that features a small kitchen, lounge area, and a classroom for teaching chess. There are flat-screen monitors throughout the facility and even monitors available to show the outside passers-by the tournament action happening inside.

And there will be lots to show them this year. In May the site will host the U.S. Championship , and in October, the U.S. Women’s Championship. Meanwhile, there’s a full calendar of regional events as well, for both beginners and experienced tournament players.

I’m already making plans to be at the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Saint Louis in May. Check out the schedule of events here. I know a lot of us will be visiting this new and unique chess destination in upcoming years to see some of the most important chess events in North America.