Philanthrocapitalism_ How Giving Can Save the World - Matthew Bishop [64]
It was heartbreaking. Thea Leopoulos was just seventeen, a good student, a gifted artist essentially self-taught, a beautiful girl inside and out, so beloved by her fellow students that two thousand people attended her memorial service. I loved her too. When I left Arkansas for the White House, I had a special zip code established for my personal friends so their letters wouldn’t get lost in the crush of mail. Thea wrote me often, and through her letters I saw her growing up into a young woman of great faith and generous spirit, wise beyond her years. Some of her best letters came in times of trouble. They were always full of love, affection, and keen observations on current events from her often humorous perspective.
David and his wife, Linda, were devastated by their daughter’s death, as were her brothers, Thaddeus and Nick. But they were also moved by the seemingly endless accounts of Thea’s kindness and good deeds not just from her fellow students but from their parents as well. They decided to set up a foundation in Thea’s name to focus on strengthening families and supporting the arts. Andy Manatos, a Washington, D.C., lawyer David had gotten to know working on issues of interest to Greek Americans, helped him get the organization started, and the first board members included longtime friends like Mauria Aspell, a gifted social worker, our grade school classmate Rose Crane, who does much of the strategic planning, and me.
The THEA Foundation held a few successful family conferences but soon decided to focus exclusively on the arts, especially on preserving arts programs in the schools and giving arts scholarships to help more young people go on to college. David gave up his career and went to work full-time on the foundation. In 2002, the THEA Foundation gave its first three performing arts scholarships worth $1,700. By 2006, it was giving away twenty scholarships worth $266,000. So far, fifty-five winners of visual and performing arts contests have won scholarships worth $600,000: $100,000 from the foundation, $500,000 from Arkansas colleges and universities and THEA business partners.
THEA also sponsors acting and dance workshops for hundreds of students featuring Arkansas natives Mary Steen-burgen (and her husband, Ted Danson), Harry Thomason, Lawrence Hamilton, and Elizabeth Williams; teacher workshops, helping 1,500 teachers deal with kids with personal and/or learning problems; THEA’s Art Closet, offering free art supplies and materials to public school teachers who otherwise would have to pay for them out of their own pocket; and Art Across Arkansas, which has helped place a piece of fine art in sixty-eight public schools this year and will do so in another 150 schools next year. So far, almost fifty artists have made permanent donations of their work to Art Across Arkansas.
I believe the THEA Foundation will spark a revival of arts education in my native state. Just as with music in the schools, exposure to and involvement with fine arts aids the learning process in other areas, improving self-confidence, concentration, problem solving, and academic performance. Painting changed Thea Leopoulos’s life. She became a better, more self-assured student, and she produced some remarkable pieces.
The worst fate that can befall a parent turned my friend into a great social entrepreneur. For the past five years, he’s funded THEA’s operations and scholarship portions mostly out of the proceeds from an annual benefit, hosted by Andy Manatos in Washington, and contributions from me, but its donor base is expanding as it becomes better known. In 2007, most of Arkansas’s institutions of higher education and thirty-four