In just two decades since he emigrated from Turkey, Hamdi Ulukaya, the founder of Chobani Yogurt, has built a fortune in the United States. Meanwhile, he has watched in anguish the heartache washing over the Middle East in recent years as refugees have poured into his homeland and elsewhere fleeing violence and chaos.
Mr. Ulukaya, who is Kurdish and grew up on dairy farm in Erzincan, Turkey, is now in a position to do something about it, with wealth pegged at roughly $1.4 billion by Forbes. He pledged $2 million in October to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Rescue Committee. And that’s just a start. The entrepreneur recently signed the Giving Pledge, and promised to devote the majority of his wealth to help refugees around the globe.
He plans to do so through Tent, a new foundation he is launching to provide direct relief to refugees, raise awareness of the plight of displaced people around the world, and identify, establish, and support creative, long-term solutions.
Mr. Ulukaya says he knew something about the plight of refugees because he has hired displaced people to work in his factory in upstate New York
His understanding of the full magnitude of the crisis grew not just from reading the news but also from hearing first-hand stories related by friends and family back home. “All these people were suffering and dying, and seeing people with faces like my uncles, my aunts, that kind of made me urgently do something,” says Mr. Ulukaya. “I had to do something about it before it was too late.”
Mr. Ulukaya, 43, came to the United States in 1994 to learn English, and he started a small feta-cheese company, called Euphrates, in 2002. A few years later, with a loan from the U.S. Small Business Administration, he bought a dilapidated Kraft yogurt plant that was closing, hired four of the factory’s employees, and started Chobani Yogurt.
He says his late mother taught him the importance of giving to those in need. Since Chobani’s early days, he has directed 10 percent of the company’s annual profits to charity though the Chobani Foundation. The foundation gave $624,920 to nonprofits in 2013, according to the grant maker’s most recent tax filings.
While Mr. Ulukaya won’t say how much money he has put into Tent so far, he says he sees it as an “ideas factory” through which he is taking a deeper dive into using his fortune to help solve the global refugee crisis.
He is enlisting technology and international-aid experts to help Tent design creative programs of assistance and advocacy, and to address what he sees as a gap between public policies and what organizations like the United Nations and refugee charities are able to accomplish. His ultimate hope, he says, is that Tent will be able to develop new tools and programs to help governments, businesses, nonprofits, and others put an end to the crisis.
“We can play a really unique role and be a different voice,” says Mr. Ulukaya. “We can get angry sometimes and say what needs to be said, and at the same time come up with solutions that haven’t been tried before.”
He says he is in it for the long haul and wants to get off to a fast start. He hopes to have a solid plan for some of Tent’s first efforts created by October.
“This is not, you pledge some money and then you move on to the next thing,” he says. “This one, I’m going to be involved in for a long time.”
He says he also hopes to motivate more people to get involved.
“Here in America,” he says, “we’re living in a country with the most generous people, but they need to know more about this, and they need to understand this issue and relate it to everyday people.
