Foster Friess darted in and out of stocks so frequently while running his Brandywine Fund that a financial journalist once dubbed the mutual-fund manager an investing “Lothario.” Since selling most of his investment business in 2001, Mr. Friess has pursued philanthropy with the same opportunistic flair, especially when it dovetails with his twin passions for Christianity and free markets.
Following high-profile natural catastrophes, Mr. Friess and his wife, Lynn, are often among the first philanthropists to respond. They contributed a combined total of more than $5-million to relief efforts immediately after the Asian tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and, most recently, the Haiti earthquake.
Mr. Friess is motivated by a quote from the New Testament book of Galatians: “Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.”
Mr. Friess became a born-again Christian in 1978, after realizing that even with wealth, entrepreneurial success, and a loving family, his life felt empty. The experience so changed him that he now calls God the “chairman of the board of my life.”
“I believe that we are merely stewards, not owners, of what God has given to us,” Mr. Friess says. “I tell friends who accuse me of being generous that it’s the Lord’s money, and if it were mine, they wouldn’t be getting a dead red cent.” (Mr. Friess declined to be interviewed by phone or in person, but he did respond to questions from The Chronicle via e-mail.)
Small-Town Boy to Billionaire
Mr. Friess grew up in a small town in Wisconsin, excelled at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and founded Friess Associates at age 34.
His rapid-fire approach to investing led to strong returns for the company’s funds during the bull market of the 1980s and 1990s, and the fees generated by the business turned Mr. Friess into a billionaire.
Today, Mr. Friess leads the sort of life that one might expect of a billionaire. He has a private jet, homes in Jackson Hole, Wyo., and Scottsdale, Ariz., and a sprawling ranch in Cody, Wyo. He enjoys exotic hunting trips in places like Alaska and Tanzania, and in July he threw a four-day, all-expenses-paid bash in Jackson Hole for 200 friends to celebrate his and Lynn’s 70th birthdays. The weekend culminated with a dinner at which the Friesses donated a total of nearly $8-million to organizations chosen by their guests.
Yet friends say Mr. Friess also has a quieter calling to help those in need. Last winter, he walked into the Good Samaritan Mission, a shelter in the town of Jackson, and met a resident who was working in the kitchen, and took the man to lunch at a country club, to stores at the base of Jackson Hole’s ski resort to buy warm clothes, and to the National Museum of Wildlife Art to see paintings and sculpture. On the way back to the shelter, they drove past Mr. Friess’s church, the Presbyterian Church of Jackson Hole.
“There are a lot of good people here,” the billionaire told the homeless man. “You might want to see if this is a place you’d like to be.”
Since then, the man has been coming regularly to services at the church, says Nancy Schneider, a friend and neighbor of the Friesses.
Just after the Haiti earthquake, Mr. Friess established the Haiti Renewal Fund, a $2-million matching fund, and he traveled to the country in the weeks following the tragedy to report to other donors about how their money was being used.
The fund has supported Water Missions International, which prepares water-purification systems that have provided clean water to 200,000 people; Chances for Children, which supports two orphanages in Haiti and helps families adopt Haitian children; and Cure International, which provides orthopedic care for children, including surgeries to fix club foot.
Republican Values
The louder side of Foster Friess can be found on his blog, (http://fosterfriess.wordpress.com), where he has criticized the federal health-care overhaul, blasted what he calls the liberal bias of the media, and questioned the science behind global warming.
Mr. Friess is a generous supporter of Republican political candidates, and much of his grant making is motivated by Republican values like small government, free markets, and individual responsibility.
He gives to conservative think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and to education groups that advocate for school-voucher programs, including the Alliance for School Choice. In the near future, he expects to make grants to advocate for the FairTax—which would replace the current federal system of taxation with a tax on retail sales.
A year ago, Mr. Friess made a $3-million for-profit investment in the Daily Caller to help get that news site, led by the political pundit Tucker Carlson, off the ground.
Another area of focus is supporting Muslim organizations that champion a pluralistic, violence-free version of Islam. Foster and Lynn Friess made a significant grant in 2007 to the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, which works to combat radical Islam and advocates for a greater separation of mosque and state. The Phoenix charity, which had been getting by on a budget of just $15,000 per year before the Friesses’ gift, now has a staff of four, according to its president, M. Zuhdi Jasser.
The LibForAll Foundation, cofounded by a former president of Indonesia and C. Holland Taylor, an American entrepreneur, has received $375,000 from the Friesses since 2008. The group uses a variety of strategies to combat religious extremism in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
“Foster is always trying to evaluate what he should do and how he should act in order to share God’s love with humanity,” says Mr. Taylor, who has twice gone pheasant hunting with Mr. Friess in South Dakota. “He’s able to love people who think like him and those who don’t.”
A Break for Parents
Mr. Friess relies on a slew of foundations and people to help him with his grant making, and at least one foundation watchdog group says the confusing structure could theoretically be a way around minimum-distribution rules, or a bid to conceal transparency, at the Friess Foundation.
But supporters says Mr. Friess simply likes having multiple outlets for his giving, and involving others in the process, much as he did in the summer birthday party by allowing guests to designate gifts.
Even his closest philanthropic adviser, Matthew Taylor, says he does not know about all of his boss’s giving.
For example, Mr. Friess put Ms. Schneider, his friend and neighbor, in charge of a program that provides a four- or five-day all-expenses-paid vacation, usually to a West Coast city, to any married residents of Jackson with disabled children. The idea is that parents of disabled children need an occasional break just to focus on their own relationship. Mr. Friess’s son, Michael, is deaf.
“Foster knows their stress,” Ms. Schneider says. “He wants to give them a chance to stay out late, sleep in, and remember why they got married.”
Ed Bartolini, a consultant to the Friess Foundation who has known Mr. Friess for more than 40 years, says Mr. Friess is also considering a grant to help construct permanent housing for a community of 400 deaf people in Haiti who are currently in temporary housing.
Lynn Friess is a champion of the National Museum of Wildlife Art, in Jackson. Ms. Friess, who ended a term on the board in September, helped start a $4.5-million drive in 2004 to eliminate the museum’s debt.
“I called Lynn the ‘energy chairman’ when she was the chair of the board,” says Jim McNutt, the museum’s president. “She really puts herself into projects.”
As for Mr. Friess, friends say he has strong and controversial views but not a rigid mind. At large dinner parties, he becomes aggravated by one-on-one chatter and prefers a single conversation in which everyone gets a chance to share with the entire group.
“Foster was the pre-eminent growth-stock investor in America,” Mr. Bartolini says. “That’s all about getting information and having an open ear.”
After meeting and being impressed by James Nyondo, a young man who ran unsuccessfully for president of Malawi last year, Mr. Friess began to take an interest in the African country.
He has supported projects to bring fresh water to several communities in Malawi and also backs entrepreneurial programs focused on raising chickens and sewing.
One of Mr. Friess’s pet causes in the United States is helping to spread the model of Good Samaritan Health Services, which operates a mobile medical van in Tulsa. The van provides health services and “transformational ministry” in several low-income neighborhoods, says John Crouch, its founder.
The Friesses bought the charity its first mobile medical unit in 1999. But when Mr. Crouch met with Mr. Friess in Jackson in 2007 to seek funds for a replacement vehicle, Mr. Friess was surprised to find Mr. Crouch on his schedule and said he could spare only 30 minutes.
But by the end of the meeting, Mr. Friess was so impressed with the charity that he dictated orders for a $125,000 grant while Mr. Crouch sat in his office. Then he told an assistant to put together a luncheon at Teton Pines country club with “all the muckety-mucks we know” to try to raise even more money for the charity, Mr. Crouch recalls.
Today, the Friesses offer a $100,000 matching grant to any American community that wants to mimic the Good Samaritan approach.
As they drove out to the luncheon on that day in 2007, Mr. Crouch marveled at Mr. Friess’s spontaneity. “John,” Mr. Friess responded, “the biggest enemy of success is planning.”