Bridging the GAP: philanthropy helps capitalists connect with those less fortunate.

You see them all the time. Public service announcements pulling at the heart strings and quite likely the pocketbooks of Canadians. The causes are as diverse as they are deserving. Most recently, it was Breast Cancer Awareness Month, but soon it will be the Salvation Army and the Kinsmen Telemiracle thereafter. That is, unless a natural disaster shakes us to the core, then it will be the Red Cross that will be the cause of the day.

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Though it has long predated world leaders, billionaires and celebrities like Bill Clinton, Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey respectively, it is perhaps because of the efforts of notables such as these that philanthropy has seemingly taken centre stage of late.

Locally, we had the opportunity and blessing to see philanthropy at its very best, when Les and Irene Dube donated $6.5 million to the Children's Hospital Foundation of Saskatchewan on October 6. This amount is believed to be the largest single donation made in Saskatchewan's history, and the largest gift to a pediatric hospital in Western Canada.

"Health care has been, I wouldn't say an exclusive focus, but rather their primary focus of philanthropy," says David Dube, son of Les and Irene, and current CEO of Concorde Group, the company founded by his parents, which obviously served them well over the years. "They are big donors of all of Saskatoon's hospitals, including the Neurology Centre at St. Paul's, the Mental Health Centre at Royal University Hospital and the Breast Centre at RUH. They want to foster an environment where people contribute to the community in ways other than what was standard operating practice."

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"For me growing up, charity began at home, and it still does," he furthers. "My parents really tried to instill some great lessons and values in me. And that is: when you have some prosperity, you need to decide how you want to live your life. Both my wife Heather and I really adopted a philosophy that says for life to have any real meaning, it has to be about something greater than your own self-interest. It doesn't mean you shouldn't have self-interest, but there's got to be something bigger than that."

"We have the ability to say we don't need all of this for our lifestyle. We want to do some fun stuff. Fun stuff can be a vacation, fun stuff can be a lot of things, and fun stuff can be investing in the community, or whatever cause gives you passion. And that is something that we get a lot of joy from, as well as it being very, very fulfilling."

Among the many causes he supports, Dube and his wife Heather are major supporters of the Nature Conservancy of Canada, Saskatchewan branch. Their mandate is to protect and preserve selected natural land around the province from future development. The irony of the situation is not lost upon Dube, whose holdings are significantly weighted towards property development.

"My wife actually made the comment to me one day, 'You are a real estate developer. You'd pave the world if you had a chance.' And that hurt my feelings. But the only things that hurt are the things that are true. So I realized that I had to reevaluate things."

"When my great-grandparents moved to this province, they saw things fundamentally different than we see things today. We have to preserve what's left of that, some of it, for future generations to be able to see just how beautiful the prairies actually are."

Dube also has Huskie Athletics on his long list of philanthropic causes. As a former Huskie football player himself, he knows well the sacrifices student athletes make, and he felt compelled to return a little of his good fortune to his alma mater.

"I'm a big supporter of the university," he says, with his reference clearly going beyond his monetary contributions. "It's great for the community, it's great for student athletes. I think there's huge dividends for the city from that."

Another organization that has had a large impact on Saskatoon's philanthropic scene is the Saskatoon Community Foundation. Started in 1970 by a group of seven community leaders from Saskatoon, which included Senator Sid Buckwold, former mayor of Saskatoon, as well as Fred MacDermid, a prominent Saskatoon lawyer, the Saskatoon Community Foundation is nearing its 40th anniversary.

Set up as an endowment fund, meaning the money is there in perpetuity and the investment income is what is doled out, community foundations are universally benevolent; meaning they do not limit their granting to one or even a few charities. Rather, Trevor Forrest, executive director of The Saskatoon Community Foundation, says that their directive for support is universal.

"We are cause-neutral," says Forrest. "We're trying to address the most pressing issues in the community, while at the same time, trying to accommodate the donor's wishes. We can help to bridge the gap between what the donor sees and what they want to see. And, we appeal to all donors; from the $10 donation to the $1 million-plus gifts."

"A question we're often asked is, 'What is the difference between ourselves and the United Way,' because we're both perceived as being about community," Forrest adds. "The significant differences are: the United Way is a member agency. So they will have 30 to 35 members, where we would support any of the 700 charities in Saskatoon. Their primary focus is on social services, ours is the whole range from arts and culture, to environment to health. Their focus is immediate, where ours is a legacy. An analogy that is often used is that the United Way is the chequing account, we're the savings account."

"Not one is right and not one is wrong," he emphatically adds. "We're not about splitting the pie, we're about growing the pie. We just want to say to donors, 'Are you aware there is another way of supporting your charity or your community?' We will outlive any bricks and mortar or any equipment. We don't have a life span. We're a legacy that lasts forever."

But an act of good will doesn't have to take on a monetary value, stresses Sanj Singh, director of the Wilson Centre for Entrepreneurial Excellence. He'd know, as he's been the impetus behind a movement of good will that is overtaking the globe. In February of this year the Wilson Centre introduced a new website dedicated to tracking instances of good will. The concept is known as Made it Happen.

"The concept here was to expand the notion of value from purely outside of economics," says Singh, "in areas like social, environmental, political, family, spiritual. The term 'values,' in one sense, is really like beauty in that it's in the eye of the beholder. More importantly, what we wanted to show was the connection, the integration of all of those values."

The Made it Happen program began with a series of wristbands that were numbered for the purpose of tracking on the website. Once a wristband-wearing person has done a good deed, they pass along the wristband, log onto the website and register the deed. The ripple effect could go on in perpetuity, with each subsequent recipient logging the next good deed onto the same wristband's number. Already, the effect has been enormous, Singh relates.

"We've had entries on there from Qatar, Philippines, Croatia--I have no idea how they got there--and the thing is, we didn't want to promote it. We wanted the message to carry itself and resonate with people and grow organically. After four or five months, a representative from IBM called out of the blue and said, 'This Made it Happen thing is really interesting. We were at our social networking meeting in Orlando Florida, we have 20,000 members in our social networking, media network. And the message was, do something that resonated and we just thought that your initiative fit in with ours.'"

This was followed up in July with a call from the Canadian Youth Business Foundation out of Toronto. To encourage entrepreneurship around the world, the CYBF was taking part in a global initiative with 101 countries participating. The initiative, initially spearheaded by Richard Branson and Gordon Browning of the U.K., intends on setting a world record for mentorship in one day. With Guinness on board, the group will be using the Made it Happen website for tracking this feat. The deeds fall within the Made it Happen mandate, and with new networking and relationship-building opportunities coming to the fore, the Wilson Centre is exposed to a win/win scenario.

"It started off as an initiative which was really about adding value. I didn't want to force it, that wasn't our objective. We just wanted the power of it to shape it itself. And it did. If the message is powerful enough, it will find a home. If it's compelling enough, it will have its own wheels. But it's actually having faith in humanity, in the human spirit, that there is a lot of positive energy out there. It just needs a vehicle."