Albina du Boisrouvray has been a journalist, a film producer, and a war-zone aid worker. She’s also an heiress who has given at least $100-million to charity, although she says the word “philanthropist” doesn’t belong on her résumé.
“I’m a social worker who happens to have been lucky enough to have a lot of money, which I had the duty to share with people and use to make a difference,” she says.
Whatever you choose to call her, the wealthy donor has been working largely under the radar for over 25 years to help some of the most impoverished people in the world.
Through her nonprofit, FXB International, Ms. du Boisrouvray helped develop a program that boasts a track record of lifting more than 80,000 people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America out of extreme poverty and putting them on course toward self-sufficiency.
How she got there involves an adventurous trek through European high society, “Age of Aquarius” leftist political activism, and work in war-torn nations.
It also involves another title for which she doesn’t have much use: countess.
Ms. du Boisrouvray was born in Paris in the early 1940s to Count Guy du Boisrouvray, a French aristocrat whose fortune she would inherit four decades later. Her mother, Luz Mila Patino Rodriguez, was Bolivian, and her maternal grandfather, Simón Iturri Patiño, grew up poor but became a wealthy industrialist.
She spent her childhood in New York and her teen years living in Europe and on other continents. She returned to Paris to study psychology and philosophy at Sorbonne University and became a journalist. In 1969 she started a film-production company that she led for 18 years.
Along the way she had a son, Francois-Xavier Bagnoud, and while her activism took a back seat to motherhood and running her business, she never entirely left it behind.
“From very early on, I wanted to make a change for something better on this planet,” she says.
A friendship with Bernard Kouchner, a founder of Doctors Without Borders, rekindled her altruistic side. The famous physician also persuaded her that leftist politics were “interfering” and not helping those in need. It was the start of a long-term collaboration and friendship that would help carry her through the darkest period of her life.
Stunning Loss
In 1986, her son, by then a 24-year-old search-and-rescue pilot, was killed in a helicopter crash.
Devastated, she disappeared into a fog of mourning. When the clouds started to lift, she decided it was time for a change. She sold her film company and went to work for Dr. Kouchner’s new organization, Doctors of the World, spending two years distributing medicine and food in Lebanon during the country’s civil war.
“I learned the ropes of how you deliver aid, how you deal with the authorities, how to negotiate, how you get the population to want your help and how you, hand-in-hand, help them,” she says.
That work coincided with the early days of the global AIDS crisis and Ms. du Boisrouvray’s dawning awareness of the escalating number of women and children being driven into dire poverty because of the pandemic. It was time, she decided, to start her own nonprofit.
In 1989 she sold much of the art, jewels, and real estate she had inherited and used $100-million to start Association Francois-Xavier Bagnoud, which later became FXB International and the FXB Foundation. Her earliest grants included more than $2 million to establish a pediatric AIDS training program at Rutgers University in 1990 for doctors, nurses, and social workers, and she gave money to start FXB House, a Washington, D.C., home for children affected by HIV/AIDS and other illnesses.
She also supported the Global Aids Policy Coalition at Harvard’s school of public health, where she met experts who helped her develop her FXBVillage program, which helps some of the world’s poorest people start small businesses and become self-sufficient.
Broad Approach
Her earlier experiences in Lebanon, the FXB House in Washington, and guidance from Harvard experts helped Ms. du Boisrouvray fine-tune her approach of working with families on multiple fronts, such as providing assistance with nutrition, basic medical care, education, and hygiene — all factors that help families climb out of poverty for good.
Since then, almost all of Ms. du Boisrouvray’s time has been spent visiting the FXBVillage sites. The level of sickness and poverty she sees is sometimes overwhelming, she says, but seeing progress gives her the energy to forge ahead.
“When you go to a village and see a family that has huge smiles on their faces, and they embrace you and share the results of their success, it’s their work and their courage and our help that got them to this point,” she says. “That’s extremely encouraging and can keep me going for the next year.”
With most of her inheritance now channeled into philanthropy, Ms. du Boisrouvray has added fundraising to her résumé. She talked USAID into taking over the support of 20 FXBVillages in Africa, and she has raised support from French and Swiss corporations and philanthropists.
She is working on support from American companies and getting the word out about her FXBVillage program to affluent donors through groups like the Global Philanthropists Circle, a network of the world’s top philanthropic families focused on poverty and social injustice.
Ms. Du Boisrouvray says she has no qualms about asking others to support the villages and credits her willingness to raise money to her complex ancestry. While her mother’s father became wealthy, he didn’t start that way. His mother was from an Andes tribe call the Quechua and was very poor.
“I had one foot in the silk and one foot in the mud, and that’s helped me go far,” says Ms. Du Boisrouvray. “It’s helped me understand my participants. ... I have the ability to go to heads of governments, to go to the head of the U.N. and say, ‘Hey, listen, there’s a problem here and you’ve got to do something about it.’”
