by Kitty Kelley
“When we talk about goals and they say they want Cadillacs, I say, ‘If you cannot talk correctly, if you cannot read or do math, if you become pregnant, if you drop out of school, you will never have a Cadillac. I guarantee it! And if you get D’s or F’s on your report card, you’re out of this group. Don’t tell me you want to do great things in your life, if all you carry to school is a radio!’ ”
Even then Oprah was aware of the steep odds. “One girl on the Cabrini Green show said her goal was to have lots of babies, so she’d get more money from welfare….We have twenty-four in our group. Maybe we’ll save two.”
The group did not last long. After Oprah’s show went national, she said she no longer had the time, energy, or resources to shoulder a program that she felt needed more structure. “What happened was that when we took the girls out we would do nice things, good things, fun things…[but] what I realized was that those things were just activities. Good things to do but just activities….I wasn’t really able to deeply impact the way the girls thought about themselves. So I failed.”
Oprah withdrew from personal involvement in her giving, but she continued writing checks and making fund-raising speeches and appearances for worthy causes. From what is available in the public record—Harpo press releases, plus Oprah’s interviews with newspapers and magazines—one learns the following:
• In 1986 she earned $10 million and donated $13,000 to buy a mile in the four-thousand-mile chain of hand-holding across America to raise money to fight hunger and homelessness in what was promoted as “the largest number of celebrities ever assembled.” Oprah told Time, “My mile will be for people who can’t afford the $10 [standing fee]. No rich people in my mile.”
• In 1987 she earned $31 million and donated $10,000 to the Marva Collins Preparatory School in Chicago and $50,000 to the Vernon Winfrey Scholarships at TSU, for which she would contribute $770,000 over eight years.
• In 1988 she earned $37 million and donated her Revlon fee of $100,000 to Chicago’s Corporate/Community Schools of America. She wrote a check for $2,000 for the Special Olympics and one for $7,000 to provide hot meals for elderly citizens in Alexandra, South Africa, which she continued for three years. For this she received the National Conference of Christians and Jews Humanitarian Award for her “involvement in a college scholarship program and humanitarian aid to South Africa.”
• In 1989 she earned $55 million and wrote a check for $1 million to Morehouse College for the Oprah Winfrey Scholars, to which she’d contributed $12 million by 2004. She also gave $25,000 to Chicago’s House of the Good Shepherd, a shelter for battered and abused women; $10,000 to Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco, which provides services for the city’s poor; $25,000 to the Corporate/Community Schools of America; $1,000 to the Purple Heart Cruise; $40,000 to the combined benefit of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); $100,000 to the Rape Treatment Center, Santa Monica, California. In addition, she raised $1 million for victims of Hurricane Hugo during her show from Charleston, South Carolina.
• In 1990 she earned $68 million and wrote checks for $20,000 to the B. Robert Lewis House in Eagan, Minnesota, to open a shelter for battered women; $25,000 to Art Against AIDS/Chicago. In addition, she generated more than $1 million in public donations for the World Summit for Children and UNICEF after a show devoted to the plight of starving children. She pledged $500,000 over two years to the Chicago Academy for the Arts and bought all the Broadway opening night tickets (954 seats) for August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson to benefit A Better Chance, or ABC, which provides scholarships to the best schools for students of color who are disadvantaged but academically able. She also flew Nelson Mandela’s daughter and son-in-law from Boston to South Africa to witness her father’s release from prison after twenty-seven years. Oprah’s publicist told the Chicago Sun-Times that Mandela wanted to avoid “his children sitting around idle for three or four days while they waited for him to be released.” In a prime-time television salute, Bob Hope presented Oprah with the America’s Hope Award for “her career achievements and her humanitarian endeavors.” She was so grateful for the celebrity tribute that she sent Hope a bouquet of roses every week until his death in 2003.
• In 1991 she earned $80 million and wrote checks for $100,000 to buy books for the Harold Washington Library in Chicago, $50,000 to the Rev. Cecil Williams’s Glide Memorial United Methodist Church, and $1,000 to the Purple Heart Cruise.
• In 1992 she earned $88 million and wrote a check for $50,000 to the LaPorte County Child Abuse Prevention Council in Indiana, near her farm, and $30,000 to Every Woman’s Place, a women’s shelter in Muskegon, Michigan. She also donated twenty Dakota adapters for deaf students for closed-caption TV shows.
• In 1993 she earned $98 million, and after filming There Are No Children Here in the Chicago projects, she donated her $500,000 salary to endow scholarships for low-income children in the Henry Horner Homes through a foundation she named “There Are No Children Here.” She gave $50,000 to the Holy Family Preservation Society, one of Chicago’s oldest churches, and $1 million to the city’s predominantly African American Providence–St. Mel School. “The money will go towards setting up scholarships for disadvantaged children,” she told reporters.
• In 1994 she earned $105 million and donated her $10,000 award from the Council on Women’s Issues in Chicago to Providence–St. Mel. She held her first charity auction of her clothes and raised $150,000, which she divided between Hull House in Chicago and FamiliesFirst in Sacramento. More important, she felt financially secure enough to begin engaging again in her giving. This time she made a gesture that captured the country’s attention: she would single-handedly stop the cycle of poverty in America. She held a press conference to say that she would start in Chicago by setting up a foundation called Families for a Better Life, with the intention of moving one hundred families out of the projects and into private housing, giving them job training, health care, financial counseling, educational assistance, and $30,000 in financial aid for two years. She pledged $6 million to her program. “I want to destroy the welfare mentality, the belief in victimization,” she said.
Oprah had no sympathy for welfare recipients and frequently berated them. “I was a welfare daughter, just like you….How did you let yourselves become welfare mothers? Why did you choose this? I didn’t.” The women looked ashamed that they were not good enough to be accepted by Oprah. “When Welfare Warriors, a Milwaukee group of activist moms in poverty, were invited to appear [on one of her welfare shows], we accepted…despite our anger at Oprah’s betrayal of African American moms in poverty and her frequent attacks on all moms who receive welfare,” wrote Pat Gowens, editor of Mother Warriors Voice. “Her contempt for impoverished mothers actually increased Welfare Warriors’ membership when African American moms joined specifically to picket Oprah. (A typical Oprah assault on a welfare mom in her audience: ‘But you sit home with your feet up collecting that monthly check.’).”
Oprah promised there would be no government red tape involved in her Families for a Better Life program, to be run by Jane Addams Hull House Association, one of the oldest settlement houses in the nation. She also said she would use her considerable influence to get other corporations, institutions, and foundations to follow her example.
“It’s a war zone,” she told Entertainment Weekly. “We have to get them out. We’re giving them bootstraps.” Within months, Random House, Inc., and Capital Cities ABC each contributed $500,000 to Oprah’s foundation.
“No one makes it alone,” she said. “Everyone who has achieved any level of success in life was able to do so because something or someone served as a beacon to light the way. What seems to be an endless cycle of generational poverty and despair can be broken if each of us is willing to be a light to the other. When you learn, teach. When you get, give. That is how you change the world. One life, one family at a time.”
During filming she met a youngster named Calvin Mitchell, ten, who captured her heart. He lived in the projects with his four brothers and sisters and their mother, Eva, who was on welfare. After the movie, he visited Oprah at her office every week, and she took him to her farm on weekends, buying him clothes and shoes. Finally she asked her fiancé, “How would you feel about Calvin moving in?”
“If you are willing to move in the whole family,” said Stedman, a board member of the Jane Addams Hull House Association. He explained that such a commitment had to be for the entire family, not just for one family member.
“Although I thought about it, Calvin did not move into my house,” Oprah said. “We got his mother a job. We’re teaching her life skills like opening a bank account, living on a budget and we moved them out of the project.”
Together Oprah and Stedman worked on a plan for Families for a Better Life Foundation that they believed would eradicate the welfare dependency of the country’s most impoverished families. “Stedman was the catalyst for this,” Oprah told People. “He is a systems man and I was inspired by his guidance. And this project together, it’s like we sing. We just really sing.” Their approach relied on the tenets of self-improvement guru Stephen Covey, whose leadership center helped train the Hull House staff. Covey later wrote the foreword to Stedman’s self-improvement book, You Can Make It Happen.
Having lifted one family out of the projects, Oprah now wanted to lift one hundred families out, but by calling so much media attention to her announcement she had conveyed the impression to Chicago’s welfare recipients that she was going to buy their way out of poverty. Hull House received more than thirty thousand calls, which were winnowed to sixteen hundred applicants, but the misconception of a free house remained so prevalent that application forms had to be rewritten to specify, “We will not buy a home for you.”
Having started at the same time the Clinton administration was trying to reform the welfare system, Oprah’s experiment was watched closely and with great hope. She became actively involved in every aspect, helping to select the participating families and develop their eight-week curriculum. She participated in the counseling sessions and closely monitored their progress. But after spending $843,000 over eighteen months and seeing only paperwork, she abruptly folded the foundation and issued a terse public statement: “I felt myself turning into government. I spent nearly a million dollars on the program, most of it going to development and administrative costs. That was never my intention. I now want to figure out, with the help of people who understand this better than I, how to directly reach the families in a way that allows them to become self-reliant.”
She refused to give any interviews about why she’d canceled the program and she demanded absolute silence from everyone associated with it, including personnel from Hull House and the participating families. There was never a report issued or a cost analysis published, and for this she was severely criticized by philanthropists who prize accountability as a curative force. “The problem with Families for a Better Life was not that it failed but that it was a wholly unconstructive failure that provided no systematic knowledge about the transition from welfare to work,” wrote Peter J. Frumkin in Strategic Giving: The Art and Science of Philanthropy. Formerly with Harvard, the professor of public affairs at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and director of the RGK Center for Philanthropy and Community Service faulted Oprah for being so secretive and protective of her image. He felt her welfare-to-work experiment was too important not to be shared with those who remained committed to making progress on the issue. “There should be no stigma attached to constructive failure that builds knowledge…[but] heavily funded initiatives that end in unconstructive failure like Winfrey’s deserve all the criticism they presently receive and more….There is no excuse for being both ineffective and unaccountable.”
Oprah did not feel she owed anything to anybody. With the exception of the donations from Random House, Inc., and Capital Cities ABC, she had funded Families for a Better Life Foundation by herself, and she was not about to finance a public report on its failure. As she had earlier told the graduates of Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut, in her commencement address, “Know this—if you make a choice and come to realize that that choice is not the right one, you always have the right to change your mind, without guilt.” She folded both her foundations, There Are No Children Here and Families for a Better Life. Then she started another one, named For a Better Life. She put Rufus Williams, a senior manager for Harpo, in charge of its operations. In the years between 1996 and 2000, she changed For a Better Life Foundation to the Oprah Winfrey Foundation, to encompass most of her charitable giving, and her largest contributions went to the Oprah Winfrey Scholars at Morehouse, the Oprah Winfrey Boys and Girls Club in Kosciusko, and Oprah’s Angel Network, which she promoted on her show for viewer donations. She had no intention of throwing off the humanitarian mantle of Princess Diana, and despite Professor Frumkin, she was not about to acknowledge any mistakes that might diminish her role as an inspired leader.
In fact, Oprah considered herself and Stedman to be such enlightened leaders that they teamed up to teach a course at Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management, titled Dynamics of Leadership. “It has been a dream of mine to teach,” she told Jet, “and Stedman and I share the same beliefs in the importance of dynamic leadership in this country.”
The university was thrilled by its new adjunct teacher. “The feedback we’re getting from MBA students has been phenomenal,” said Rich Honack, assistant dean and director of marketing and communications in 1999, “because she is truly admired, especially by the women and minority students, who see her as someone who has made it.” Oprah insisted that no press be allowed on campus during her weekly Tuesday night classes, and each of the 110 students selected for the course had to present a special identification card and be checked by four security guards before he or she was admitted to the classroom. University officials warned that any student talking to reporters would be subject to disciplinary action, which could lead to expulsion. The extreme security precautions prompted the student newspaper, also barred admission, to accuse the university of censorship. Oprah arrived on campus each week in her own black security van with bulletproof windows, accompanied by her own bodyguards.
She and Stedman taught their leadership course for two fall semesters, and Oprah sent her plane to bring in guest lecturers such as Coretta Scott King, Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, and former secretary of state Henry Kissinger.
“I was Stedman’s guest the evening Kissinger spoke to their class,” recalled Fran Johns, a Chicago businesswoman. “Kissinger had come as a favor for Oprah….We were sitting behind the students when Oprah came running up the steps. ‘Wait. Wait,’ she yelled to Kissinger. ‘I can’t see.’ She sat down next to me and kept saying throughout his lecture, ‘Isn’t he great? Isn’t he great?’ I’m thinking to myself, ‘Great? He’s a murderer, a creep, Machiavellian…but he’s an interesting speaker because he’s got all these incredible inside stories about things.’ ”
Oprah was so grateful to Kissinger that she commissioned an oil painting of his Labrador and flew to Connecticut to personally present it. “The dog unveiling took place one weekend when Isaac and I were in the country [Connecticut] and the Kissingers invited us over,” recalled Mrs. Isaac Stern, widow
of the famed violinist. “Isaac went and met Oprah. I stayed home and took a nap.”
Having steeped herself in the legacy of slavery to film Beloved, Oprah now became even more committed to helping African American children. Years later she explained her commitment: “The reason I spend so much of my money on educating young black children—$10 million to A Better Chance, which takes inner-city children out of the ghetto and puts them in private schools—is because I know that lives will then forever be changed.” While heavily publicized, Oprah’s giving in the early years of her career was minimal—less than 10 percent of her incredible income. In 1998 she began increasing her charitable contributions and making more sizeable donations to her charitable foundation:
Year Estimated
Net Worth
(Forbes)
(million $) Estimated
Income
(Forbes)
(million $) Contributions to
the Oprah Winfrey
Foundation
(IRS)
($)
1998 675 125 11,323,201
1999 725 125 0
2000 800 150 15,020,932
2001 900 150 8,000,000
2002 975 150 28,038,583
2003 1,000 180 43,657,831
2004 1,100 210 45,000,000
2005 1,300 225 35,978,502
2006 1,400 225 0
2007 1,500 260 43,000,000
Total 230,019,049
Oprah’s polestar for giving was Nelson Mandela, whom she had met through Stedman after he accompanied Mandela’s daughter and son-in-law to South Africa for her father’s release from prison on Robben Island. Although she had financed that trip in 1990, she did not meet Mandela until 2000. By then he had received the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize with Frederik Willem de Klerk for their efforts in uniting South Africa after years of apartheid. The following year, Mandela was elected the first black president of the country and served until 1999. When he left office he toured the United States to raise money for the Nelson Mandela Foundation, dedicated to educating his country’s children. “It’s not beyond our power to create a world in which all children have access to a good education,” he said. “Those who do not believe this have small imaginations.”