Personal Ties Guide L.A. Couple’s $190 Million in Giving to Schools and Hospitals

Photo by Glenn Marzano

Southern California philanthropists and real-estate investors Richard and Melanie Lundquist like to give big to causes and nonprofits that need them the most. They have given away about $190 million so far, primarily to education and health care in the Los Angeles area, where they spend most of their time and devote much of their giving.

And they have more big giving plans to come.

The Lundquists met in the 1980s as neighbors in an apartment complex in Redondo Beach, a coastal city in Los Angeles County. He was busy building a real-estate business, and she was a speech pathologist working with special-education children. The two slowly became friends and over time they started dating.

The couple will celebrate their 30th anniversary next year, and friends keep asking how they plan to mark the occasion.

“No big parties, just more big philanthropy,” says Melanie Lundquist.

“Maybe we’ll get together with the kids or something,” adds her husband.

The Lundquists don’t have children. Their “kids” are the dozens they’ve gotten to know of the 14,500 children and teens the couple have sought to help since 2007, the year they gave $50 million to launch the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, a nonprofit aimed at improving student success in 18 of the highest-need public schools in Los Angeles.

Both products of the Los Angeles public-school system, they co-founded the organization with Anthony Villaraigosa, mayor of Los Angeles from 2005 to 2013. The nonprofit grew out of Melanie Lundquist’s search to find an organization or a program that would work steadily over time to repair and transform what she views as the nation’s broken school systems.

Meeting the Mayor

Rather than following the path of so many wealthy donors who back charter-school efforts, the Lundquists wanted to devote their money and attention to where the majority of today’s youths receive their education — public schools.

They weren’t necessarily focused on fixing the school system in their own backyard, but when they hosted a political fundraiser in 2004 that Villaraigosa attended, Melanie Lundquist asked him what his top priorities would be if he won the mayoral race. His answer? Improve Los Angeles’s most underserved public schools.

At that, the Lundquists shifted into high gear, helping raise money for his campaign. He won, and with input from others, the Partnership eventually grew from a rough idea to a full-fledged nonprofit in two years.

It was an ambitious concept for nonprofit involvement in a public-school system. There were infrastructure upgrades for some of the most neglected facilities, but there were also elements that reached deeply into the operations of the schools, including teacher-support programs, academic and other coaching for students, and advice and engagement efforts for parents.

Many teachers and school administrators working in some of the toughest tumbledown schools were skeptical.

Villaraigosa had to do some “arm twisting,” as Melanie Lundquist puts it, to get the Los Angeles Unified School District’s board to agree to let the Partnership into the schools.

“We had to overcome decades of unfulfilled promises that were made to our teachers who were promised solutions, and few if any ever worked,” she says. “They had very good reasons not to believe in us.”

Bringing In Other Donors

In addition to their own $50 million donation, doled out over 10 years, the Lundquists have tapped their many business connections to help raise money from a number of corporations and foundations. They helped bring in gifts from Wells Fargo and DirecTV, as well as a number of large foundations.

Photo by Glenn Marzano

They’ve also gotten to know the beneficiaries.

“Richard and I spend time at the schools and with the kids, and I sometimes meet with the principals and parents and teachers,” she says. “It’s been the best journey of our lives, really.”

In January, the Partnership released a public report (paid for by the Carnegie Corporation) analyzing what the organization has accomplished over the past decade. Among the successes: Graduation rates and student performance in math and other subjects at most of the participating schools have improved.

But the report makes clear that more needs to be done, and to that end the Lundquists donated an additional $35 million last year. They are also continuing to take an active role in helping the nonprofit raise money from others.

Longstanding Relationship

The Lundquists’ other philanthropic passion, health care, has been demonstrated mainly through a series of gifts totaling nearly $100 million to the Torrance Memorial Medical Center, just south of Los Angeles.

The contributions are the result of a longstanding relationship the couple has had with the hospital, one that is rooted in an effort Melanie Lundquist made more than a decade ago when she was trying to help the hospital’s chief fundraiser land a large gift from another donor.

Lundquist got to know the day-to-day workings of the local hospital as a volunteer the 1980s and ’90s. “I was one of those ‘blue-haired little old ladies’ working the desk on Thursday nights,” she says. “I guess I was observing more than I thought and saw this was just a really wonderful, caring place.”

In the early 2000s the Lundquists became better acquainted with the medical center’s leaders through their real-estate dealings, and by 2005 they heard the hospital was looking for a donor to support a new cardiovascular institute. The couple thought a friend who had just sold his business would be a good fit and connected hospital leaders with the man.

Wanting to put their friend at ease around fundraisers, the Lundquists joined him for a tour of the hospital. Excited about helping connect the hospital to a potential big donor, Melanie Lundquist later asked the head of development about the friend.

“She said, ‘Melanie, I know it when I see it, and he’s not our donor.’ I was really disappointed,” says Lundquist. “Richard and I talked about it. I have a real thing about women’s heart health, so I said to Richard, ‘What if we do this?’ "

They ended up giving $10 million to the cardiovascular institute — the largest donation to the hospital at that point — and $3 million to expand emergency-room care.

Those first gifts happened, says Richard Lundquist, because in the years leading up to them, the couple saw continuity and consistency in the ways the hospital’s leaders operated, and in its decades-long financial health.

Since then, the Lundquists have given more money, including $50 million in 2013 for a new patient building, and $32.5 million last year for neurological, orthopedic, and spinal care.

Limited Naming Rights

The couple also helps the medical center attract additional dollars by speaking to groups of potential donors and working with hospital leaders to cultivate relationships with wealthy philanthropists.

And they’ve taken a very unusual approach to naming rights — one that sacrifices their own vanity for the sake of the institution.

The Lundquists say they don’t believe their name should be on a building forever. So their gift agreements with the medical center, which has named a building and the cardiovascular center for them, include a provision aimed at spurring donor bidding wars.

“I’ve always thought naming rights should be more like what’s become customary for sports stadiums; you pay a certain amount a year, and if you don’t continue to pay, your name comes down,” says Richard Lundquist. “We want our name to be temporary, so if somebody comes along and donates as much as we’ve put in plus $1, they can take our name down.”

Public School as Alma Mater

Their contributions to the medical center and the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools reveal an overriding aspect that surrounds most of the Lundquists’ giving: They prefer to devote their biggest donations to groups they seek out and get to know over time, and they want those donations to have a big impact on the organizations and people they are trying to help. They also would rather support nonprofits that need them rather than those that most wealthy people usually back.

They both attended the University of Southern California, for example, but say they have no intention of leaving the university any money because they don’t think USC needs it. Besides, says Richard Lundquist, universities with large endowments should put some of that money back into the local K-12 public schools so students are better prepared for college. Melanie Lundquist goes a step further.

“It’s kind of a goal of mine to get people to understand that where you went to public school, your K-12, that is an alma mater as well, and that is way more in need than anything else,” she says.

“It’s a real climb uphill; the boulders are sitting there ready to tumble down on me, but that’s OK. We like a challenge.”

The couple, who just signed the Giving Pledge last month, say their future philanthropic plans include giving much of their wealth away during their lifetimes (they declined to reveal their net worth), and they plan to continue to give big to the two causes they care about most.

“We want to make transformative contributions and create systematic change, and we want to be about the big picture,” says Melanie Lundquist. “The underlying foundation of the big picture for everything is education and health care; they’re basic human rights to us.”