Business-School CEO Switches Gears to Head Her Family’s Foundation

Robin Bruce was dreaming of starting a business when her father, home-building giant and philanthropist David Weekley, made the overture. “I had a list of 25 ideas,” she remembers, including the ahead-of-its time notion that furniture could be sold directly from the manufacturer to consumers.

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This was 2015, and Bruce was CEO of the maverick Acton School of Business in Austin, Tex., where she had earned her MBA in a yearlong, experiential entrepreneurship program. Weekley asked Bruce, the middle of his three children, for help with the family foundation, whose anti-poverty focus flows from Christian stewardship principles.

“Absolutely,” she responded. “Copy me on emails. I’m busy but happy to take calls.”

Weekley, however, had something else in mind. He had begun the foundation in 1990, and with his wealth growing, he wanted his daughter to come on full time to help accelerate its giving and deepen its impact. Bruce deflected her father’s recruitment for more than a year, worried that such a move would derail her business dreams for many years. But as the two talked, she saw this role as a chance to make the most impact with her life.

“The opportunity is so big, and our time is so short,” Bruce says. “There’s urgency to this.”

Bruce, 39, joined the foundation as president in 2017. Weekley, who with his wife, Bonnie, signed the Giving Pledge in 2020, remains chairman and makes final decisions. But Bruce, whose interest in nonprofit work dates to her mission work in Mexico as a high schooler, is leading the grant making in new directions.

This year, 80 percent of the foundation’s $35 million in grants will go to anti-poverty groups working abroad, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia. It’s the third straight year that international grants have topped domestic giving, a shift Weekley began years ago to wring the most impact from his giving.

Bruce has managed the expansion, including hiring four full-time staff members who are based abroad. Next she will lead a restructuring of domestic grants.

And she persauded Weekley to replace the grant maker’s eponymous name. “I thought it was a little rude,” Weekley jokes, but he agreed, in part to ensure that no family members would feel obligated to join.

Curious About Solutions

Exploring how best to help people in need has been a through line in Bruce’s life and career. Arriving in a rural Mexican village at 16 to build latrines and stoves, she brimmed with a confidence and idealism that she quickly realized was naive. “It was like, ‘Here I come with all the solutions to all of your problems,’” she remembers. Bruce left awakened to the macroeconomic forces underlying poverty and curious about solutions. “I often tell people it was the biggest education I’ve ever gotten in the shortest period of time,” she says.

Jobs with social entrepreneurs and nonprofits followed graduation from Vanderbilt, where she was an English and film major. These included stints with a community-development group in Nicaragua; Geneva Global, a philanthropy consultancy; and the Razoo crowdfunding platform (now Mightycause) in its infancy. Later, she joined Carol Cone, a pioneer in cause marketing, when Cone was leading corporate social responsibility at the PR giant Edelman.

During that time, Bruce and Weekley talked frequently about philanthropy’s opportunities and challenges. Weekley’s foundation, which at first focused chiefly on Houston, was expanding its reach outside the United States. International development was Bruce’s passion.

“He and I have always had a special relationship because of this work,” she says. “We were drawn to it for similar reasons.”

Interrogating Impact

Since she has worked alongside her father, Bruce has doubled down on efforts to evaluate the impact of the foundation’s grant making, which is focused almost exclusively on antipoverty efforts. Weekley is renowned as a venture philanthropist who taps his business acumen to help groups expand proven solutions. He had helped build scores of financially healthy and efficient organizations, but he hadn’t always focused on results.

“It’s not that he wasn’t reading the impact measures as reported by the nonprofits,” Bruce says. “He was not interrogating the impact in the same way he was interrogating the financials.”

The foundation’s grant making internationally also has shifted to local groups. Half of the grant partners are organizations with leaders from the Global South. Similarly, half of the full-time staff are based internationally — an investment that’s possible because Bruce has earned Weekley’s trust to hire and manage those people, says Josh Kwan, Weekley’s first adviser on international grant making.

“Robin could very well lead a Fortune 500 company,” says Kwan, who’s now president of the Gathering, a group of Christian philanthropists.

Weekley’s venture-philanthropy principles remain core to the foundation, as evidenced by its long relationship with the One Acre Fund, a social enterprise begun in 2006 to support farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. One of the group’s early backers, Weekley urged the leaders of what was then a start-up to identify and chase a “big, hairy, audacious goal,” a common business term at the time.

“He really has challenged us at every step of the way to think bigger and hairier and more audaciously,” says Andrew Youn, a co-founder of the group. “It was a constant guiding force until it became more muscle memory.”

Matthew Busch, For the Chronicle

One Acre is now a mature organization working in nine countries with annual revenue of nearly $200 million — a sum that would dissuade most venture philanthropists from investing. But Youn says Bruce is constantly looking for “surge” opportunities where additional funding can help the group realize big, complicated ideas.

“Robin keeps that venture philanthropy spirit relevant and catalytic even as we get bigger,” Youn says.

This year, the foundation unveiled its new name: Dovetail Impact. In the Christian faith, the dove symbolizes the Holy Spirit. In construction, a dovetail joint makes two separate pieces into a whole. The joint, the foundation wrote, “is both functionally strong and aesthetically beautiful, illustrative of what takes place when we partner with nonprofit organizations to create meaningful impact on behalf of a greater purpose.”

The name change also signaled the intention that the foundation would outlast its founder. “It was definitely a move to indicate to ourselves and to others that this is a foundation that has its own lifeblood,” Bruce says.