Sustainability and Hope

Stewart and Lynda Resnick are the wealthiest farmers in America. Their skillful marketing of Wonderful pistachios, Halos mandarin oranges, and Pom Wonderful pomegranate juice — along with Fiji Water and Teleflora flowers — has produced a fortune that Forbes estimates at $9 billion.

But as the money poured in, the Resnicks began to notice that their land and the people working it weren’t always doing so well — and to their credit, they didn’t turn away. In the past decade, the couple has been among the biggest supporters of climate-change research, and they have spent more than $100 million on health and education to improve the lives of the 4,000 workers and their families in depressed rural towns in the Central Valley of California.

The couple, owners of the Wonderful Company, based in Los Angeles, are best known in philanthropic circles for their $750 million gift last September to the California Institute of Technology for research on environmental sustainability. That gift, along with several smaller ones, put them at No. 6 on the Chronicle’s Philanthropy 50 ranking released last month.

Stewart Resnick, who has been on Caltech’s board for more than a decade, calls the university “the most impressive institution I’ve ever been involved with” and one with the staying power to address the multigenerational challenge of climate change.

“If you can’t solve the sustainability problem, nothing will make any difference in the end,” he says. “It’s the most important thing to work on.”

But Lynda Resnick hints at a good-natured philanthropic rivalry with her spouse during a separate hourlong conversation, in which she focuses on her efforts to improve the lives of the mostly Hispanic workers and their families in the Central Valley. Those efforts, underway since 2010, include new charter schools, scholarships, free health clinics, healthy food, and a team of about 120 employees dedicated just to those good works.

When Stewart gave $750 million to Caltech, the national media was “all over it,” Lynda says with a laugh. “I kill myself for 10 years and nobody hears about it.”

‘An Enormous Amount of Pressure’

The Resnicks met in 1970, in Los Angeles, when Stewart approached Lynda’s advertising business seeking marketing help for a men’s clothing company that he’d invested in. Lynda didn’t win the account, but the meeting sparked a romance. In the decades since, the couple has collected additional businesses — Teleflora, Fiji Water, 281 square miles of farmland — and produced a steady stream of profits, thanks in large part to Stewart’s financial acumen and Lynda’s marketing skills.

The Wonderful Company

The Resnicks are longtime patrons of the arts, but over the past decade, they have also thrown their support behind other philanthropic causes, which are likely to define their legacy.

Their first major gift to Caltech came in 2009, when the Resnicks pledged $21 million to establish the Resnick Sustainability Institute. In 2014 they gave the university $15 million more. Their $750 million gift last fall is the second-largest ever to an American institution of higher education, trailing only Michael Bloomberg’s $1.8 billion gift to the Johns Hopkins University in 2018.

Stewart says he has witnessed the effects of climate change at the company farms — including pistachio-crop declines following unusual weather years and significant growth in the cost of water. Irrigation water has spiked from $50 per acre-foot when he bought his first farm, 50 years ago, to $1,600 per acre-foot today.

Some environmental advocates see the Caltech gift as an attempt to deflect long-term criticisms of the Wonderful businesses, including how the company’s ownership of a key underground reservoir known as the Kern Water Bank affects other users and the inherently unsustainable practice of bottling water in plastic containers and transporting it more than 5,000 miles from Fiji to the United States.

“It would be naïve to assume that altruism is the whole story,” says a Los Angeles Times column about the recent Caltech gift.

Stewart rejects the notion that his giving is designed to bolster the company’s image. It is taking real steps, he says, to reduce its footprint. With a water bill of more than $200 million, “we’re trying to reduce usage as much as we can.” The Fiji Water business has vowed to move to 100 percent recycled plastics by 2025.

Thomas Rosenbaum, Caltech’s president, says the Resnicks’ gift has no restrictions that limit the scope of the university’s research.

The gift will allow Caltech to revamp its undergraduate labs to include a sustainability component, he says, and will enable the institute’s Jet Propulsion Lab to analyze data from space to better track drought conditions worldwide. Caltech will also expand its study of research-engineering microbes to better withstand arid soil — something of interest to farmers like the Resnicks as climate change progresses.

About $250 million will go to immediate research, $100 million for a new building to house the sustainability institute, and $400 million to an endowment that is expected to produce about $20 million per year for the university to spend.

“This is a problem that will confront our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren,” Rosenbaum says. “We need to organize research and technology in a way that will continue to address these problems.”

Even so, the urgency of climate change is so serious that Caltech is aiming to produce results during the Resnicks’ lifetimes, the president says. “We feel an enormous amount of pressure to deliver.”

Starting in Lost Hills

Shortly after the Resnicks’ first gift to Caltech in 2009, Lynda became concerned about another long-term problem — how to inspire hope and break the cycle of dysfunction in the Central Valley communities where many families have at least one parent employed by Wonderful.

She had grown frustrated with just “writing checks,” she says, and wanted to use her business instincts and marketing savvy to help improve the lives of the company’s workers.

She started in Lost Hills, a town of about 2,400 that didn’t have sidewalks or streetlights, and where less than 5 percent of the residents had four-year college degrees. The town is near Wonderful’s pistachio and citrus plants; about half the families in the town have someone who works for Wonderful.

“This is a rural American town that had been forgotten,” Lynda says. “I felt that if I started, I would be led to where the need was.”

The company built sidewalks, a community park, and two community centers, and it collaborated with local and federal partners to create a new neighborhood with affordable housing. As Lynda spent time in Lost Hills and learned about the low math and reading scores in local schools, she says, “I realized we had to get involved in education.”

She recruited Noemi Donoso, who had been a top education official in both Denver and Chicago public schools, to lead an effort in the Central Valley that helps students and involves parents all the way from preschool through college. Donoso started with a staff of two and now oversees 70 people, not counting the 250 who work at the charter schools the company started in Delano and Lost Hills.

The company has created three private preschools. It also has more than 40 specialists — some work with middle-school and high-school students to make sure they’re on a college track, and others support students in college to help them earn a degree and make the transition to the workplace.

Wonderful has developed an alternative track — known as the Ag Prep Pathway — that allows students to earn an associate degree while still in high school and gain the technological skills required by modern agriculture. Three other pathways are in the works, focused on teaching, logistics, and health careers.

Wonderful also offers scholarships of $4,000 to $6,000 per year to children of employees, graduates of its charter schools, and students who complete its pathways programs. The engagement from preschool through career is meant to ensure that students get help when they need it. “You can’t demand results if you don’t do it that way,” Lynda says.

Early results are encouraging. Of the students who graduated from high school in 2013, 70 percent had earned a bachelor’s degree within six years, far higher than the national average for first-generation college students (about 9 percent). By 2025, the company is aiming to see 90 percent of the students it helps go on to four-year colleges.

The focus is on turning around communities, not simply helping employees, Donoso says. Employees’ children account for only about 20 percent of the 1,800 students at the largest charter school, in Delano — which the Resnicks built — and less than a third of the 640 college students currently receiving scholarships.

Manny Alfaro’s story illustrates the impact the company’s programs can have. He got involved in gangs as a youth, following in the footsteps of three older brothers, who had been incarcerated. After a friend was killed in a gang-related fight, he decided as a junior at Avenal High School that education could give him a second chance.

Alfaro’s parents, who work at the pistachio-and-almond plant, pointed him to the company’s programs. The company sent him on a college visit, and an adviser helped him gain admission to California State University at Fresno through a special program despite his low grade-point average.

During college, Wonderful employed him as a tutor and camp counselor at his old high school. Upon graduating last spring, he got a position teaching eighth-grade language arts at Wonderful’s charter school in Delano. He hopes to become a principal or superintendent back at Avenal High.

“Luckily for me, I had the Resnicks that provided all of this,” Alfaro says. “If it wasn’t for them, I don’t know what would have happened to my life.”

Throwing Broccoli

In 2015, the Resnicks added another focus to their Central Valley work — improving the health of the company’s workers and their children. It had found that 87 percent of its employees were likely to develop diabetes or prediabetes by their 50s.

Wonderful built two health clinics for employees in Lost Hills and Delano, where they and their families can receive free screenings for diabetes and high blood pressure. The company employs 42 people in its health division, including primary-care doctors and pediatricians, physical therapists, and mental-health counselors. In its cafeterias, as in its charter schools, it is replacing unhealthful food with fresh fruit and vegetables.

“The kindergartners were throwing the broccoli at us in the beginning,” Lynda says.

Several efforts to improve workers’ health are designed for specific groups. About 90 women who sort pistachios — a sedentary job that often leads to obesity — participated in a trial that Lynda describes as a “full-court press.”

The company brought in doctors, nurses, and health coaches for screenings and advice, put treadmills and stationary bikes in the middle of the factory, and handed out packaged healthful food for home meals.

“Lynda’s vision was, ‘Let’s do this as a house call,’ " says Larry Wolk, the company’s chief medical officer.

In five months, the company’s efforts reduced the prevalence of prediabetes in the women’s group by 75 percent. The company plans to use a similar strategy with other groups.

The Resnicks are coupling their philanthropic work with higher pay: They raised the company’s minimum wage to $15 an hour a year ago, three years before that minimum will be required under California law.

Lynda declines to say how much the company spends on the health and education work, but she describes it as an “enormous investment.” She has created an endowment and a 20-year plan for the Central Valley work. The company’s spending on education and health there over the next 10 years will be “much bigger” than the $750 million gift to Caltech, she says.

“It is endowed, OK, with a capital E,” she says. “Not only do I have a plan, but I have the money set aside. We have endowed much more than we’ve given.”

Giving It Away

The Resnicks have decided not to sign the Giving Pledge — in which billionaires promise to give away the bulk of their wealth during their lifetimes — despite receiving an invitation from Bill Gates, one of the program’s creators.

Stewart says that in addition to providing for their children — he has two sons and a daughter, and Lynda has two sons, from previous marriages — they already intend to donate most of their fortune while they can. Stewart says he was once involved with an institution that he felt ignored a large donor’s intentions after his death. “After a while, the other people thought they had made the money,” he says. “They were giving away to things that were good for them — but not in a way that the founder would have liked.”

The Resnicks remain big supporters of the Aspen Institute. Lynda credits her interactions with entrepreneurs and ethicists at the think tank with inspiring her to take on the Central Valley work.

“Every summer my brain withers to the size of a walnut,” she says. “Then I go to the Aspen Institute and spend the summer and come back with a brain full of ideas about how to make the world better.”

The couple gave the institute $15 million in 2015 to endow the Resnick Aspen Action Forum. Last year they gave $10 million to create a center dedicated to the work of Herbert Bayer, the artist and architect who designed the institute’s campus.

And the Resnicks continue their broad support of the arts. In 2018 they gave $30 million to the Hammer Museum, which houses the collection of the businessman Armand Hammer. Last year they pledged $2.5 million to endow a photography chair at the University of California at Los Angeles.

The Resnicks are also longtime collectors, having started with the old masters before moving on to modern works. Their collection was featured in an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2010 and 2011.

The couple plans to leave their substantial collection to one or more museums — and the Aspen Institute was instrumental in this giving strategy as well. Walter Isaacson, a former president of the institute, advised Lynda to make plans but keep them quiet.

“That way,” she says, “they’re all nice to you until the end.”