Education and Endangered Wolves Are Top of Mind for This Wall Street Couple

Richard and martha hunt handler at the wolf conservation center

Given all the debate around institutional philanthropy and what constitutes “strategic” giving, it can be easy to forget that for the majority of donors, giving is deeply personal and reflects the funders’ individual life stories. Such is the case with Martha Hunt Handler and Richard B. Handler.

A New Jersey native, Richard Handler, 60, earned his bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Rochester in 1983, and his MBA from Stanford University in 1987. He was a bond trader at Drexel Burnham Lambert before joining Jefferies Financial Group in 1990, where he’s been CEO for more than two decades. In fact, he’s one of the longest-serving banking bosses on Wall Street. Richard and his wife Martha Hunt Handler, an active conservationist, reside north of New York City in Westchester County.

It’s unclear how much the family is worth, but a recent Bloomberg article referred to Richard Handler as a billionaire.

The Handlers are also philanthropists, giving through the Handler Family Foundation, a low-profile vehicle that gives away a sum in the low six-figure range annually. Grantmaking touches education and youth, the arts and the environment. I recently caught up with Martha, who told me more about her environmental work, Richard’s philanthropic interest in education, and their overall plans with their giving.

A Wall Streeter with an interest in education

While most of the couple’s giving is collaborative, Martha and Richard each bring their own philanthropic interests to the table.

For Richard, Martha explained, it all comes back to understanding the privileges he had growing up. His parents fully paid for his college tuition and room and board. Much of his philanthropy has been focused on making sure kids can go to college and graduate without being saddled with debt. Richard’s giving centers on the University of Rochester, where he was first elected to the board of trustees back in 2005. In 2018, he was elected board chair.

The couple established the Alan and Jane Handler Scholars program at the school, serving undergraduates with diverse backgrounds, leadership potential and high financial need. In 2007, the Handlers launched the program, named after Richard’s parents, with an ultimate commitment of $25 million. At any given time, there are 60 Handler Scholars.

“It’s been a really interesting project for him. He’s really gotten involved in the kids’ lives,” Martha said. “You realize these are incredible stories. A lot of these scholars were saying they couldn’t even afford their college application fee. But they’ve somehow persevered, gotten amazing grades, despite not having any money or support systems. Abusive situations. Everything you can imagine.”

Early on, it became apparent that the scholarship program would need to harness University of Rochester brass to make sure these students were making a smooth transition. This writer remembers his own liberal arts college days and the realization that while some kids could easily afford bonding dorm trips into town for dinner just as they easily afforded new books each semester, this wasn’t true for other students.

To tackle these realities, the Hander Scholars program embraces a “pay-it-forward” model in which upperclassmen help first- and second-year students make the transition. “This is a strong and growing group that keeps in contact with each other—even after graduation,” Martha said, adding, “I always wanted to adopt children, and I feel like I’ve got them. Anyone who doesn’t have a place to go for Thanksgiving, we bring them to our home.”

The Handlers have four of their own children, who also engage with Handler Scholars. Apart from the University of Rochester, the couple writes more modest checks to other educational causes. But it’s Richard’s alma mater that receives the most attention.

The call of the wild

Over the pandemic, Martha Hunt Handler published her first book, “Winter of the Wolf,” a mystery novel that explores spirituality, grief and Inuit culture. The book’s proceeds go toward conservation. Martha serves as board president of the Wolf Conservation Center (WCC) in South Salem, New York, which promotes wolf conservation by educating visitors about wolves, their relationship to the environment, and the human role in protecting their future.

Martha’s love affair with wolves goes way back. “I always had a wolf in my dreams when I was little,” she told me. It was a black wolf that seemed to guide her in certain directions—a totem animal of sorts.

Raised in rural Northern Illinois, surrounded by woodlands, Martha spent a lot of her childhood out in nature. Her brothers were much older than her, and her parents were busy working, so the natural world became her refuge. When she was six, housing developers arrived on the scene and started cutting down trees to build more homes. She remembers feeling hurt by this, and wanting to become a voice for animals and the environment.

She headed west to the University of Colorado Boulder, where she received an environmental conservation degree and quickly got a job working in environmental consulting in Washington, D.C., San Francisco and Los Angeles. One of her clients was the EPA—she worked as a community specialist at various Superfund sites designed to investigate and clean up spaces contaminated with hazardous substances.

When she met Richard and started a family, they ended up settling in suburban New York, where Martha began thinking about the next chapter.

“I was not feeling like the work was really touching my heart. It was better in D.C. But as I moved to the other offices, it got less and less so. We were now outside of the commuting district of New York City. We had four small kids. It was time for me to leave, but I wanted to do something,” she said.

In a real-life story with a literary aura, Martha started to hear wolves again. Only this time, she says, the wolves were actually in her midst. 

Deep in the woods behind the family’s backyard, she discovered an enclosure with three small wolves and a trailer nearby. She knocked on the trailer door and out walked Hélène Grimaud, a French artist with whom she connected over their love of canids. Grimaud was thinking about starting an environmental center—what eventually became the WCC—and wanted Martha to join her.

Today, the Wolf Conservation Center participates in federal Species Survival Plan recovery programs for the Mexican gray wolf and the red wolf, two of the rarest mammals in North America. At one time, both species were extinct in the wild. The WCC helps house and breed endangered wolves, conduct critical conservation research, and make recommendations for wild release. The coordinated effort involves zoos, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Mexico’s fish and wildlife agencies, and more.

Challenges on the ground

In a familiar refrain, the WCC has doubled down on its work in the wake of President Donald Trump, who took gray wolves off the federal endangered species list, which Martha calls a disaster. “I don’t think in all of our worst nightmares could we have seen this, with wolves being gassed, being run down by snowmobiles and shot, pretty much in all the states that border Canada and Canada itself. It’s been devastating to watch,” she said.

While the WCC has worked hard to get these wolves to decent numbers, this backslide has been disappointing.

According to the National Wildlife Federation, the historic range of the gray wolf once covered over two-thirds of the United States. Today, gray wolves live in Alaska, northern Michigan, northern Wisconsin, western Montana, northern Idaho, northeast Oregon and the Yellowstone area of Wyoming. The Mexican wolf, or “lobo,” a subspecies of the gray wolf, can be found in Mexico, New Mexico and Arizona.

Wolf conservation work can be a long slog. By the mid-1980s, hunting, trapping and poisoning caused the extinction of Mexican gray wolves in the wild, with only a handful remaining in captivity. In the late 1980s, these wolves were reintroduced into the wild as part of a federal reintroduction program under the Endangered Species Act. Today in the states, their wild population comprises 186 wolves, up from 163 counted at the end of 2019.

Martha mentioned the challenges of cultivating genetic diversity in the field, including artificial insemination and moving wolves around, which is both expensive and not always comfortable for the wolves.

“If you’re religious, Noah didn’t stop some animals from getting in the ark. They were all put here for a reason. We really need to understand them more and follow the science,” Martha said.

On that point about science, Martha noted that only about 0.02% of cattle and sheep are taken by wolves. She also said ranchers don’t always follow best practices, leaving sick and diseased animals out to pasture—resulting in an unsurprising outcome. So part of her mission is to work with ranchers to do things like hire range riders to protect cattle, which used to be common practice 100 to 200 years ago.

Looking ahead

Through the years, Martha has been involved with other environmental organizations, including Lewisboro Land Trust, which she continues to support as a donor. She calls the land trust community “really good,” noting that people with land can give away large parcels for public use, while also taking a tax write-off.

Overall, though, she remains focused on her beloved wolves and working to change relevant laws at the state and federal levels. She recalls a group in Wisconsin that put up billboards that said, “Real hunters don’t hunt wolves.” A study published in PNAS showed that a higher wolf population led to fewer car accidents from deer, a change due more to the behavioral response of deer to wolves than a deer population decline caused by wolf predation.

Martha’s immediate goal is to get wolves back on the federal endangered species list. Though the wolf conservation community believed this move would be high on President Joe Biden’s agenda, it hasn’t panned out that way so far.

“I’m not sure who he’s beholden to, or why he hasn’t had the time to do it yet, but that would be a huge step. We just want to wake up people to the importance of wolves,” she said.