A tribute to philanthropist Suzanne Green of the Green Foundation
You might not be familiar with the name Suzanne Green, but if you live in south or central Berkshire County, you or a loved one, including those of the canine or feline variety, have likely been a direct or indirect beneficiary of her generosity over the past two decades. Suzanne died of organ failure on July 23 at Berkshire Medical Center at the age of 56. She did not technically leave heirs, but local nonprofit leaders agree that it would be no exaggeration to claim that the lives of thousands of local children, teens, and adults are the inheritors of her quiet, careful, unusual style of generosity.
Suzanne spent the bulk of her time—when not renovating her big old New Marlborough farmhouse, or caring for her beloved pets, or checking in with her many friends—as an exceptionally hands-on board member of the Los Angeles-based Green Foundation, which focuses on supporting community services, education, and the arts. Her father, Leonard I. Green, made his fortune in the leveraged buyout industry, and once served as President of the Board of the Los Angeles Opera. He created the foundation in the late 1990’s, and the vast majority of the roughly 250 nonprofits the foundation supported each year, to the tune of nearly eight million dollars in grants, were located in and around Los Angeles County. But over the twenty or so years that Suzanne made her home here, she quietly and steadily built up a Berkshire County and Columbia County portfolio of grantees, zeroing in on those who work to meet some of our area’s most pressing needs.
Until this past April, Kylie Wright was the key staff member for the Green Foundation for seventeen years, serving most recently as Vice President of Grants. Even after leaving her post to join the Rose Hills Foundation as the Vice President of Grants and Initiatives, she continued to stay in close contact with Suzanne. She’s quick to credit her for her extensive research in, and sustained advocacy for, local causes. “She brought the Berkshire grantees to our attention. She let us know about Railroad Street Youth Project, Barrington Stage Company, CATA, all of these organizations that we wouldn’t have known anything about.” (A further—if partial—list the other local entities that the Green Foundation has supported through the years include Volunteers in Medicine, Flying Deer Nature Center, Berkshire Hills Regional School District, AnimalKind in Hudson, and Greenagers.)
Many donors seem to be motivated primarily by the chance to put their name on a building or event and to enhance their social standing. Suzanne wanted none of that. She heard a story about suffering, and asked how she could help to alleviate it. Volunteers in Medicine (VIM), has offered medical, dental, and behavioral health care to the region’s uninsured population since its creation in 2003. Dr. Ilana Steinhauer joined as Executive Director in 2014, at which point a well-established relationship with the Green Foundation was already in place. She was struck by Suzanne’s commitment to the Berkshires, her humility, and her single-minded focus on the work. “She understood the mission,” says Steinhauer, “and never said, ‘This is how I think it should be done.’ She listened and engaged and advocated. She knew us so intimately that she could go out in the world and speak about us. Her support was life-changing, but also life-saving. We’re talking about thousands of people.”
Another quality that set Suzanne apart was her interest in expanding the Green Foundation’s reach. She saw giving as the opposite of a zero-sum game. One grant invariably led to, rather than replaced, another. “She would ask about other organizations we worked with,” recalled Steinhauer, “so that she could continue to keep learning about what to support.”
This proactive approach had always been her way. Back in the early 2000s, Suzanne was just visiting the area, and an article in the Litchfield County Times featured an antique store owner named Vivian Kimmelman, who spoke in the piece about her volunteer work with Hudson-based organization AnimalKind. “Shortly after the article came out, I got a call from Suzanne and she said, ‘I don’t usually do this, but I read about you and your work with the animal organization.’” So began a long friendship between the two women, and an enduring legacy of support from the Green Foundation for AnimalKind.
If, for whatever reason, foundation support was not forthcoming, Suzanne was known to write checks herself, unsolicited, with no expectation of acknowledgement. Liana Toscanini, of the Nonprofit Center of the Berkshires, found that the center didn’t fit into Green Foundation program area priorities, so Suzanne sent her a generous gift of her own. I had a similar experience. In 2011, I created the Crocus Fund to offset the costs of out of school enrichment and summer camps for low-income kids. I was running the Crocus Fund out of a checking account, and not a formalized 501-c-3. Suzanne felt badly that the fund was ineligible to apply to the Green Foundation, so she sent me a (generous) check at the end of the year. She continued to do the same at the end of each following year, without my asking her to. She was the only person still supporting the Crocus Fund after I stopped actively fundraising for it. Over the course of six years we sent scores of local kids to summer camps who would otherwise not have attended and then collaborated with the Green Foundation to create an afterschool coming-of-age program at DuBois Middle School with Flying Deer Nature Center, which is still going strong today.
But I will always associate Suzanne with a happy scene of six- and seven-year-olds playing an impromptu soccer game at the end of another unorthodox school day, in the late fall of 2020. A few months earlier local families had learned that the school year would be starting out virtually, and working parents were scrambling to figure out how to prevent their children from spending seven hours alone at the kitchen table with a laptop. A group of nonprofit leaders—I was one of them—came together to create CLuB, a remote, outdoor education site located at Greenagers in South Egremont. In early September, we had the space, we had children signed up, and we had teachers, but we had no money.
Suzanne Green answered the call for support with an emergency $50,000 grant from the Green Foundation, the second largest gift to the program in its eight months of existence. That gift inspired a wave of giving and enabled CLuB to serve 125 young students and their working parents for the eight months of remote school. Maria Rundle, the Executive Director of Flying Cloud Institute, who ran the day-to-day operations for CLuB, says of Suzanne, “She was the first person to support our coalition of service providers … She was willing to walk the walk, and if all foundations had stewards like her this would be a better world.”
Erik Bruun knows as much about the South County nonprofit scene as anyone. He’s been on the board of Railroad Street since its inception, is the President of the Board of the Great Barrington Waldorf School, and recently joined the board of Community Health Programs. He noted that Suzanne will long be counted among those anonymous heroes “who end up as the financial foundation undergirding it all that we never see.”