Inside Jonas Philanthropies: An Evolving Family Funder Backs Nursing, Climate and More

As Jonas Philanthropies celebrates its 15th anniversary, it is also marking a sadder milestone: Donald Jonas, who created the foundation, died in July at age 92.

Jonas was a successful retail magnate who started off working in his family’s clothing store, then launched his own women’ clothing business, Barbara Lynn Stores, which was named after his wife. He went on to cofound Lechters Housewares in 1977. The business grew rapidly; by 2000, there were 490 Lechters stores in 41 states, according to the New York Times.

In the 1970s, Donald and Barbara Jonas, a psychotherapist and social worker, used some of their wealth to buy artwork, including works by Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning. The couple had originally bought the paintings simply because they loved them. As Donald Jonas told the Times, “We never, ever bought with an investment view.” In 2005, however, the couple began to auction off some of the art, and use the proceeds for philanthropy.

When her husband proposed selling the collection, Barbara took some convincing, according to the couple’s son. “My dad was retired and he was playing golf and sort of looking for new meaning in his life,” John Jonas told IP. “He came home one day — because he’s always coming up with great ideas — he came home and said, ‘Barbara, I want to sell the art.’ And she said, ‘No. Over my dead body!’ The compromise was that they sold two-thirds of the art rather than the whole collection. She cried a bit, but then she came on board full steam.”

The Jonases’ collection had already gained considerable value when they auctioned the works off through the Jewish Communal Fund. Jonas Nursing and Veterans Healthcare, which later became Jonas Philanthropies, was built on the $44 million in proceeds. Today, the funder is notable for backing some areas that are frequently overlooked by philanthropy, including nursing and children’s vision health — while branching out into growing issues like climate and the environment.

Barbara Jonas died in 2018, but Donald Jonas remained closely involved with the foundation’s work and clearly took pleasure in giving his money away. He was known to say, “If you die rich, you die poor, really.”

We caught up with Jonas Philanthropies recently to find out more about its new leadership, its priorities and how the foundation will change — or not — now that its founder is gone. Here are five things we learned.

A family affair

Jonas Philanthropies is headed by John Jonas, Donald and Barbara’s son, and their granddaughter, Lendri Purcell. The two were co-vice presidents up until March of this year, when they became co-presidents.

John Jonas has always been involved in the family philanthropy, and that involvement has grown over the years. He is the founder and CEO of The Jonas Group, an executive search firm for the fashion industry, but that business has increasingly taken a back seat to the foundation.

“I’m at a stage in my life where I’m trying to prioritize certain things, and this is one of them,” Jonas said in a recent interview. “I’m doing less of my quote-unquote day job; health and relationships and family and the family philanthropy and my art are my priorities. It’s a privilege and an honor to be involved in Jonas Philanthropies and I feel a responsibility to do it justice.”

Lendri Purcell was always close to her grandparents; she first became involved with the family philanthropy when her grandfather began to sell his artwork and asked her to help. “It was perfect timing for my grandpa,” she said. “Business had been his whole world and where he put all of his energy. He was able to take all that energy when his business ended and put it into the fund.”

It was good timing for Purcell, too. She had recently graduated from college and was teaching special education. “I’ve always been interested in sort of do-gooder stuff,” she said. “And I needed a little break from teaching. It was a nice way to try something new, and to work with my grandpa.” Over the years, Purcell has helped broaden the foundation’s focus to include environmental causes like children’s environmental health and climate protection.

Support for nurses is still central to the foundation’s mission

From its inception, nursing was Jonas Philanthropies’ primary focus. Today, it’s still the foundation’s signature program, and receives the largest share of dollars. Donald Jonas chose to support the nursing profession, which he called “the backbone of the American healthcare system,” because he felt it had been overlooked by philanthropy. That remains the case for the most part, although the field has drawn attention from a few funders such as Bill and Joanne Conway, the Rita and Alex Hillman Foundation, and the Moore Foundation.

“My father had a phrase: ‘You want to be on an uncrowded beach,’” John Jonas said. “He chose to focus on nursing because it wasn’t something that every other funder was doing.”

The Jonas Scholars program, launched in 2008, provides scholarships for nurses seeking advanced training. Over the years, the program has supported over 1,400 doctoral nursing scholars at universities in 50 states. Three-hundred fifty of those scholars focused on veterans’ healthcare.

Last year, the foundation increased its support for the scholars program by 50%, as IP reported. It has also increased the diversity of the program, and created specialties within it, supporting scholars focusing on Jonas Philanthropies’ other issue areas, including environmental health, vision, mental health and veterans’ health.

Former Jonas Scholar Annie Rohan, who is now dean of the nursing school at Fairleigh Dickinson University, spoke at Donald Jonas’ recent memorial.

Vision health is also a focus, one pair of glasses at a time

Children’s vision health is Jonas Philanthropies’ second major priority area. Vision was personal for Donald Jonas: In 2009, he learned that he had a rare genetic condition that was gradually destroying his eyesight. He believed vision was another area where philanthropy could make a difference, and began to explore how and where his foundation could get involved.

In 2013, the foundation began to fund ophthalmological research. The foundation launched Jonas Children’s Vision Care (JCVC) in 2016, with the goal of preventing blindness and treating vision disorders in children.

“Our way of doing philanthropy is not casual,” Barbara Jonas said at the time. “We do extensive research; we speak to all the leaders of the field because we don’t want to reinvent the wheel. So we spoke to many, many experts, and we spent a lot of time, just as we did with our nursing and our veterans’ healthcare program.”

JCVC supports clinical care, research and genetic testing. It also funds concrete efforts, as Purcell put it, “to get glasses on as many kids as possible.” Jonas supports Warby Parker’s Pupils Project, which provides free vision screenings, eye exams and glasses to students in New York City and Baltimore. The foundation also partners with Vision to Learn to support mobile clinics that provide vision screenings at summer programs for kids in New Jersey. Vision to Learn operates in 14 states and more than 500 cities across the country, deploying mobile examination vans to schools, youth centers and camps in low-income communities.

Eye and vision care aren’t at the top of the agenda for many health funders, but it’s another area that could use more attention. An estimated 1 in 4 preschool-aged children in the U.S. have undiagnosed or untreated vision problems, according to the CDC. And undiagnosed problems aren’t distributed equally, as Vision to Learn points out: “In underserved communities across the country, 95% of kids who need glasses, about 2,000,000 in total, do not have them.”

A recent article in JAMA Network underscored the high cost — individual, social, and economic — of failing to provide eyeglasses to large numbers of Americans, adults and children alike. And undiagnosed and untreated vision problems are a barrier to learning, according to Kaiser Health News. “There is a strong link between children’s vision and their development — especially the way they learn. Struggling to see clearly can be the beginning of many downstream problems for children, such as low grades, misdiagnosed attention-deficit disorders, or lack of self-confidence.”

A recent, growing emphasis on the environment

When Purcell’s son was an infant, a blood test detected elevated lead levels, and that started her on a journey to learn more about the health impacts of environmental toxins, particularly on children. She started the group Families Advocating for Chemical and Toxics Safety (FACTS). She also helped launch Jonas Children’s Environmental Health, which supports initiatives at the Environmental Working Group and the UCSF School of Medicine.

In recent years, Purcell pushed the foundation to become more involved in climate issues. When she first raised the idea with her grandfather, he was resistant. “He said, ‘There are other experts in that space. We’re not scientists. I just don’t think we could have an impact,’” Purcell recalled.

She did more research and came back to her grandfather with a narrower proposal: planting trees. “I kept thinking about how, as a businessman, he was proud of how many stores he had created through Lechters Housewares,” she said. “And so thinking of that legacy piece, instead of a name on a building or X amount of stores, how about X amount of trees or X amount of groves. And that really resonated with him.”

The result was Trees for Climate Health, which has the goal of growing 10 million new trees by 2025. Tree planting has become a popular, feel-good cause in the last several years, as IP reported, but as Purcell quickly learned, it is more complicated than it sounds. Planting trees is the easy part; keeping them alive and ensuring that they are serving local needs is far more difficult.

“Many organizations attempt reforestation, but not every program is effective,” according to the foundation website. “By taking an evidence-based and data-driven approach, we will identify the right trees, the right places and the right communities to create maximum social, economic and ecological benefit.”

Jonas Philanthropies works with a variety of carefully vetted partner organizations that are pursuing tree-growing projects in Africa, Asia, South America, Europe, Central America, the Caribbean and the U.S.

Expanding on a founder’s vision

While it’s impossible for an outsider to know exactly what goes on inside an organization, by all appearances, Jonas Philanthropies has managed to avoid “founder’s syndrome” — when a business, nonprofit or other organization becomes trapped by its founder’s vision and expectations. The problem could potentially be even more complicated when the founder is a relative.

But Donald Jonas allowed his son and granddaughter to have a voice in the foundation’s operations long before he was ready to relinquish leadership. He wasn’t immediately receptive to all their ideas, of course. Purcell had to sell him on the notion that the foundation should tackle climate issues, for example. But he was willing to listen to her arguments and backed the tree-growing initiative once she had convinced him.

His respect for their ideas is mutual. Both co-presidents say they intend to honor Donald Jonas’ goals for the foundation, while adapting its mission to a changing world. When asked how his father felt about the direction of the foundation before his death, John Jonas spoke of him in the present tense. “I think he’s proud of us,” he said. “He’s happy that we’re going to continue his legacy in alignment with where it started, but also continue to address the needs of the future.”

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