When Barbra Streisand isn’t on a movie set, in a recording studio, or out on tour, she and Margery Tabankin talk almost every day. For the past 25 years, Ms. Tabankin has advised Ms. Streisand on her philanthropy, resulting in a total of $25-million that the entertainer has given to charitable causes.
Women’s health has been a major focus for their efforts during the past five years.
The two became outraged in 2007 when they started researching women’s health issues and discovered that more women die of heart disease than all cancers combined and that heart ailments are frequently misdiagnosed in women.
“It made Barbra nuts when she realized that 50 years of the medical research used for treating women was actually done on male patients,” Ms. Tabankin says.
As a result of their conversations and working with hospital officials over the years, Ms. Streisand this spring will announce that she has committed to raise $15-million for the women’s heart center at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center’s Heart Institute in Los Angeles—including a donation she will make from her own fortune. The entertainer previously made a $5-million gift in 2008, and now hospital officials plan to name the center after her.
‘Rewarding and Fun’
The women’s business relationship has turned into a friendship over the years, in part because they share the same values, says Ms. Tabankin, 64, who has been executive director of The Streisand Foundation since 1987.
Ms. Streisand also describes their relationship that way, saying, “Our many years of working together have been meaningful, rewarding, and fun.”
Ms. Tabankin is smart, strategic, and deeply compassionate, Ms. Streisand wrote in an e-mail.
“She has helped to connect me with organizations that work effectively in the areas that I care about,” Ms. Streisand wrote. “She leverages my interests while respecting my privacy.”
Philanthropic Activist
Ms. Tabankin, a student activist in the late 1960s at the University of Wisconsin, now considers herself a philanthropic activist. Ms. Streisand’s civic interests are also her own: AIDS, children, civil rights, the environment, and women.
Most of the daily calls from Ms. Streisand regard the business of philanthropy, but some are invitations to dinner so they can brainstorm and visit.
“Barbra is very present in whatever is in front of her,” Ms. Tabankin says. “She makes every decision, whether it’s for $50 or $5-million.”
Ms. Tabankin started working with Ms. Streisand first as a consultant, after two decades of involvement in activism and philanthropy. She trained as a community organizer at Saul Alinsky’s famed Industrial Areas Foundation in Chicago, then moved to Washington, where she became an advocate for lowering the voting age, then 21, to 18. In 1972, she headed the Youth Project, which raised money from large foundations for local youth organizations around the county. When Ms. Tabankin was 29, President Jimmy Carter named her director of Volunteers in Service to America, or VISTA.
In the years since, she has included political fundraising among her duties, generating millions of dollars for progressive political candidates.
In 2004, the director Steven Spielberg asked her to work for his Righteous Persons Foundation. She says she didn’t want to leave the work she had started with Ms. Streisand, so her compromise was to start a consulting firm, Tabankin and Associates, a Santa Monica company that manages the philanthropic and political giving of Ms. Streisand, Mr. Spielberg, and four other progressive-minded individuals and families in southern California. Her clients give out of their own checkbooks as well as through their private foundations—awarding $140-million in the past seven years.
The consulting company employs seven staff members who are experts in causes that Ms. Tabankin’s clients are interested in, including climate change, poverty, civil rights, civil liberties, health, and Jewish issues.
Margery Tabankin
Current philanthropy role: Founded a Santa Monica, Calif., firm to advise Steven Spielberg, Barbra Streisand, and other wealthy donors on their giving
Early jobs: Trained as a community organizer, she headed the Youth Project, which raised money for charities serving young people
Other experience: Led Volunteers in Service to America, or VISTA, during the Carter administration
Vetting the Options
Ms. Tabankin says her job is to make sure Ms. Streisand and her other clients know all about the opportunities they might want to finance. Vetting the ideas is crucial, too, especially for a very high-profile client. If a gift goes badly, the story “could end up on ’60 Minutes’ or on the front page of The New York Times,” Ms. Tabankin says. “If your name is Barbra Streisand, people are going to take an interest.”
Whenever Ms. Streisand is asked for support, even if it is for a germ of a good idea in a grant proposal, note, or call, Ms. Tabankin researches it. In a memo, she will outline the strengths and weaknesses of the idea and the people behind it. Program leadership is critically important in the analysis: Star quality doesn’t hurt.
In 2007, when the two women were considering women’s heart disease as a potential cause, a friend of Ms. Streisand’s told her about “a fabulous cardiologist at Cedars.” Ms. Tabankin vetted the doctor, C. Noel Bairey Merz, and her work, meeting with her twice and interviewing some of her patients. Only after a good report did Ms. Streisand meet the doctor face-to-face.
Ms. Tabankin’s research showed that Dr. Bairey Merz and Cedars-Sinai had the whole package Ms. Streisand sought. She is considered to be a brilliant doctor and research clinician and a strong public speaker, educator, and writer who shares her findings in a way that makes people pay attention.
“For us, there was no question we could grow a women’s institute around her,” says Ms. Tabankin, who negotiated the terms of the donation of the $5-million gift with the medical center’s heart institute. “It happened to be the same interest as Cedars has.”
Location also played a role in the decision to support Dr. Bairey Merz’s work.
“Somebody may have a great local program in Minneapolis, but we probably aren’t going to fund it because we don’t live in Minneapolis and it isn’t national,” Ms. Tabankin says. “But if it’s in Southern California or nationally based, we’ll put it on a higher priority level.”
Intellectual Challenge
Much of Ms. Tabankin’s work is more routine than that involved in shepherding the Cedars-Sinai gift, such as when TEDWomen, an offshoot of the popular TED lecture series featuring innovators from technology and other fields, called last year and asked if Ms. Streisand would introduce Dr. Bairey Merz at the prestigious lecture group’s December event in Los Angeles. Ms. Streisand knew enough about the doctor and her work to write her own introduction, with editing suggestions from Ms. Tabankin.
In years when the entertainer has higher visibility, the requests for gifts increase. Ms. Streisand is adamant that every request must be answered, Ms. Tabankin says.
In 2010, when the performer appeared in the movie Little Fockers and released a recording, the Streisand Foundation received more than 2,000 grant requests and made a total of 95 grants.
That contrasts with quieter years, when the entertainer gets about 450 to 500 requests and her foundation makes 70 to 85 awards.
Some requests come because many fans “simply believe she is a part of their lives,” says Ms. Tabankin. They may want Ms. Streisand to pay for their mother’s nursing home or a grandson’s bar mitzvah, the adviser says.
In such cases, “all you would need is a very skillful assistant, if the job were simply telling people yes or no,” Ms. Tabankin says.
The fun and challenge, she says, is being involved in the intellectual work of helping figure out what to spend money on and to educate the philanthropist on her options.
