David M. Rubenstein
Preserving American history to help people learn from the past
David Rubenstein’s parents were blue collar workers who did not have vast wealth, but they were extremely generous with what they had. Their example helped shape David’s commitment to philanthropy, which emphasizes education and historical preservation of U.S. documents, monuments, and memorials to help people become more informed citizens. David credits the Giving Pledge for helping him and his peers find ways to give their money away thoughtfully and effectively.
Transcript
Now, no one person’s going to change the world completely, but you can have some impact in a modest area, and the most valuable thing you have is your time.
You can make more money, you can’t make more time.
My parents didn’t have much money.
They were blue-collar workers, but they gave what they could afford to give.
There was no cause that my mother did not respond to.
Every time anything was on television asking for money, she sent it in.
Anybody came to the door asking for money, she always gave it to them.
And I like to remind people that you don’t need to be a billionaire to be a philanthropist.
You can be a very modest person in terms of your wealth and be a philanthropist.
I’ve spent a large part of my philanthropy trying to give back to the country.
I’ve tried to make sure that memorials, monuments, documents, other things that remind people of the history of this country are able to be seen by people in a way that will make them remember the good and the bad of the country and hopefully make them more informed as citizens and better citizens.
We don’t teach history very much anymore in schools.
If you don’t study history, you’re likely to make the same mistakes that people made before.
Education is the thing that enabled me to go from a relatively modest background to where I became later in life.
Neither of my parents graduated from college or high school, but they always thought education was important.
They just couldn’t afford to get it.
And so I’ve given a large part of my wealth away to scholarships.
In the District of Columbia, I started a program to give scholarships every year to the best high school graduates.
I think everybody should get a chance to go to some type of college and let them see whether it makes sense for them or not.
And the Giving Pledge is a really good way to bring people together and talk about the challenges of philanthropy.
It’s not that easy to give away money intelligently.
Anybody can write a check and do it unintelligently, but to have an impact is not easy, and I think the Giving Pledge has given a lot of people comfort in knowing they can give away money in an intelligent way and has helped them get ideas about how to do that.
It has helped me as well.
