Crash Course in Racial Justice Redirects Couple’s Giving

Mark Katzman/Washington University

When a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., killed Michael Brown, a black teenager, hundreds of residents of the St. Louis suburb and beyond took to the streets to protest.

Maxine Clark, founder of the Build-a-Bear Workshop, which has made $5 billion in sales since 1997, and Bob Fox, owner of home-organizing company NewSpace, took a quieter action: They devoured books.

“She was reading books and would give them to me, I was reading books and would give them to her,” Mr. Fox says. He found some books, like The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, so compelling that he bought two dozen copies to give away so others would read them too.

Their self-assigned syllabus opened the couple’s eyes to problems they never knew existed in the city they have called home for decades.

“We were not ashamed to say we didn’t know,” Ms. Clark says. “Not all crimes are created equal, and yet when you’re a person of color in St. Louis, Mo., you can have a much more severe penalty than a person who is white.”

‘I Got Mad’

Now the philanthropic couple is working to help bring racial equity to St. Louis. Through all their reading, “I became fairly well-educated about the criminal-injustice system, and I got mad,” Mr. Fox says. “Surprisingly, within a year we are major players in this issue in our region. How did that happen? It happens because we care enough to read the books, meet the people, take meetings.”

They’re applying their money to the work as well as their time. After examining what’s already being done to address criminal-justice problems in the area, they donated $7.5 million to the policy institute at the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis. They’ve also supported the school’s work to help people leaving prison succeed, and they developed a mobile application to connect children from low-income families with summer opportunities.

That enterprising spirit has long marked the couple’s charitable work. Through the Clark-Fox Family Foundation, a charitable trust, they have supported education and projects to promote economic development, social justice, and overall well-being in St. Louis.

Their ultimate goal, Mr. Fox says, is “making this the best possible place it can be. We feel like if we can get a lot done here, it’s a big enough task for us.”

Giving From the Start

Ms. Clark and Mr. Fox met at the May Department Stores Company, a corporation they both considered very charitable because it awarded grants that matched its employees’ charitable donations.

When they wed in 1984, “Maxine was seriously interested in giving back to the community even though at that time in our careers, we didn’t have a lot to give,” Mr. Fox says. “Eventually it sparked my interest.”

St. Louis Mosaic Project

While Ms. Clark served on many boards, like Washington University’s, Mr. Fox says he worked behind the scenes, taking care of details and meeting with people his wife worked with on charitable projects. When he joined a board of his own, about 10 years ago, “I was bored to death,” he says.

Aid for Immigrants

But Mr. Fox jumped at the chance to get more actively involved when a friend asked for help supporting a new nonprofit health clinic for Hispanic immigrants. In 2009, Mr. Fox helped found Casa de Salud, which has about 12,000 patient visits a year.

Since then, he’s devoted a significant portion of his volunteer time to working on immigration issues.

While his own family history contributes to this interest — his grandparents fled to America from Poland, where they were persecuted for their Jewish heritage — so, too, do his desires to help stimulate the St. Louis economy and to “counter negative voices of hate with voices of reason, supported by economic studies.”

After joining the Chicago Council on Global Affairs’ task force on immigration for the Midwest, Mr. Fox helped establish the St. Louis Regional Task Force on Immigration and Innovation.

“We stuck ‘innovation’ on the end because we were afraid no one would pay attention,” he says.

The task force started the St. Louis Mosaic Project, a campaign that aims to make St. Louis the U.S. metropolis with the fastest-growing immigrant population by 2020. As of 2014, the city ranked 10th.

“We are firm believers that we need a more diverse society,” Mr. Fox says. “We need to continue to attract and retain foreign people if we’re going to have a growing, dynamic, diverse economy.”

Access to Education

The couple’s philanthropy also focuses heavily on broadening access to high-quality education, a cause to which they say they’ve given more than $10 million in the last seven years. “When you turn over the rock of public education, there are a million spiders under there,” Ms. Clark says. “We don’t think everybody is necessarily made to go to college, but the underlying principle is that every child should be able to find true potential.”

She serves on the board of several education nonprofits, including Teach for America and Parents As Teachers. Her husband is the founding board chair of InspireSTL, a charity that prepares middle school students for high school and college. They are founding donors to a local charter school.

The couple’s concern about providing opportunities for all children gave them a keen interest in the fallout from the shooting of Michael Brown in 2014.

Rather than immediately establish a new organization, Ms. Clark and Mr. Fox commissioned a law student to create a map of local nonprofits and government agencies working on a range of criminal-justice issues. They found several organizations already working on the problem and now are figuring out “how our work is going to fit into the big solution of mass incarceration,” Mr. Fox says.

In addition to the gift to Washington University, the couple has led several efforts intended to fix what’s broken in St. Louis. To make sure disadvantaged kids have the same access to summer programs as their wealthier peers, they founded and raised money to support Blueprint4Summer, a mobile application designed to share summer camp and scholarship information.

While their millions of dollars in gifts matter, Mr. Fox says it’s also vital to get personally involved in efforts to help St. Louis.

“We need to know the people we serve on a meaningful, personal level,” he says. “You’d be surprised how much joy there is in being part of their lives and letting them be a part of your life.”

Note: A previous version of this article said the Build-a-Bear Workshop was a $5 billion company rather than saying it has done $5 billion in sales since 1997.