By giving a lot, a California couple gains gratitude and a critical eye
Standing on the grand staircase of Lynda and Stewart Resnick’s lavish Beverly Hills mansion at a party last fall — where Diane Keaton, Bob Iger and Brian Grazer were among the celebrities chatting over crudités and Sazerac cocktails — the author took Walter Isaacson takes a moment to thank his hosts.
Not only did the Resnicks throw the party to celebrate his new biography of Elon Musk, they were also major supporters of his former professional home, the Aspen Institute, donating $36 million to the think tank over the years.
Isaacson wasn’t the only one in the room who had reason to be grateful. Walking around the house, where works by Picasso, Fragonard and Boucher line the walls, were museum directors Michael Govan of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (which has received $90 million from the Resnicks) and Ann Philbin of the Hammer ($30 million) and Michael Milken, the former king of junk bonds who later founded a think tank, the Milken Institute ($25 million).
Overall, the Resnicks — whose Wonderful Company business empire includes Pom Wonderful pomegranate juice, Wonderful Pistachios, Fiji Water, Halos tangerines and Teleflora, the flower delivery service — have donated $1.9 billion of their estimated $13 billion fortune to academic institutions and climate change initiatives. , cultural organizations and programs in California’s Central Valley. Their gifts landed them on the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s annual list of the 50 largest donors three times.
“You really have to see them as one of the biggest proponents of investing in LA’s public institutions,” said Mr. Govan, director of LACMA.
Mrs. Resnick, 81, the driving force behind the couple’s charitable efforts, is focused on giving back in the Central Valley — especially Lost Hills, where one in two households contains a Wonderful Company employee.
Over the past decade, the Resnicks have invested about $580 million in Lost Hills and Delano, another Central Valley city, and created charter schools that electives robotics, yoga and mariachi; health, wellness and fitness centers; affordable housing; a park; and a new pedestrian bridge over Highway 46.
“It’s the most satisfying of anything I’ve ever done in my life,” Ms. Resnick said in a recent interview at her home. “You meet these young people. You see them going through school. You see them coming back to the valley, which was my dream. Some of them go into politics. Many of them have come back to work with us in middle management jobs, and not in the sector like their parents.”
But at a time when philanthropists are under increasing scrutiny — museums have distanced themselves from the Sackler family over their role in the opioid crisis, Warren Kanders stepped down as vice chairman of the Whitney Museum of American Art after protests over the sale of tears through his company. gas, and climate activists have protested museum donors and board members – the Resnicks have discovered they are no exception.
They have come under scrutiny for their use of one of California’s often scarce resources: water. A 2016 investigation in Mother Jones found that the Resnicks’ farms were “thoughts that they use more of the state’s water than any other family, farm or business,‘ and their activities were criticized the following year in the documentary ‘Water & Power: A California Heist’.
Last fall, a few activists protested against the Resnicks at both LACMAwhich are named Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion in recognition of a $45 million giftAnd the hammer, which named its Lynda and Stewart Resnick Cultural Center in honor of the couple’s $30 million gift. One of the protesters, Yasha Levine, who has been working on a documentary called “Pistachio Wars,” carried a sign that read “Hamer celebrates climate criminals.”
“They have made a lot of improvements, but it is not all glitter and gold,” said Rosanna Esparza, an activist from Kern County. pronounced against the Resnicks over their water use, said in an interview.
In response to such criticism, Ms. Resnick said, “We have been attacked over water for generations. We don’t get anyone’s water from the tap. I have nothing to do with the municipal water supply.”
“These are the rules of the road and the rules that we put in place, and they are parroting them,” Mr. Newsom said. “If we are going to point fingers, as policymakers we also need to think about the system we have created.”
The Resnicks’ charitable efforts, he added, were authentic, consistent and impactful. “I know a lot of fancy rich people,” said Mr. Newsom, to whom the Resnicks, along with other Democratic candidates, have given generously. “Many of them use their philanthropy. Many of them are looking for a big name on the building. This is something different. They are the real deal.”
On a recent afternoon in the Central Valley, Naomi Cruz stood in the classroom at Wonderful College Prep Academy, where she teaches high school Spanish, years after graduating from the school herself in 2018. Manpreet Kaur – who won a Wonderful Fellowship that helped her complete her degree – is now Wonderful’s corporate social responsibility program manager and was elected to the Bakersfield City Council last year. Andy Anzaldo, the grandson of an undocumented farm worker, started working at Wonderful Company’s pistachio factory straight out of college and is now Chief Operating Officer for Corporate Social Responsibility.
“One day there will be no more Stewart and Lynda Resnick. So what’s going to happen is happening to this community?” Anzaldo said, adding that the company therefore wants to build a sustainable model that will “last for hundreds of years.”.”
The Wonderful Company said the impact is measurable: the rate of prediabetes among Central Valley employees has dropped, more than 90 percent of Delano students graduate each year and about 70 percent go on to a four-year college. (The Resnicks award more than 300 scholarships to graduating seniors each year.)
The environment was also among the Resnicks’ priorities. In 2019 they gave $750 million to Caltech for research on climate change and sustainability, the second-largest gift to an American university at the time, behind Michael Bloomberg’s $1.8 billion donation to Johns Hopkins. A new Resnick Sustainability Center will open at Caltech next fall.
“If you can’t solve climate change and sustainability, what’s the point of curing cancer?” Mr. Resnick said. “This is a long-term problem.”
The couple has donated more than $110 million to other universities over the past five years and is now announcing a $20 million gift to California Polytechnic State University to establish a career services hub for first-generation college students.
In Los Angeles, a city without a long tradition of philanthropy, the Resnicks have set the example of major giving and served as a glamorous nexus of Hollywood, art and politics. They are close to Nancy Pelosi, who hosted Norman Lear’s 100th birthday party (attended by Warren Beatty and Jane Fonda, among others) and recently co-hosted a Los Angeles fundraiser with Steven Spielberg, Shonda Rhimes and others for President Biden.
“The Resnicks have set a great example,” said the Hammer’s Ms. Philbin, who plans to resign in November. “We didn’t ask them directly for our building campaign, but Lynda reached out and offered the largest gift we have ever received.”
And while Mr. Govan worried that when the economy collapsed in 2008, the Resnicks might abandon their naming rights for LACMA’s new pavilion, which had just begun construction, he said Ms. Resnick told him that support now more than ever necessary. .”
Raised in Philadelphia – where she regularly visited the Philadelphia Museum – and Los Angeles, Ms. Resnick founded her own advertising agency at age 19. (She helped Daniel Ellsberg copy the Pentagon Papers onto her advertising agency’s Xerox machine.)
In the years since, she has applied her market research approach to charities like those in the Central Valley, where she heard from focus groups and questionnaires that residents feared for their children’s futures.
“You can’t come in and build a school and walk away, you can’t come in and build a hospital and walk away,” Ms. Resnick said. ‘If you are going to help, you have to go and stay. You have to stay, because staying is the most important thing. And so we stayed.”
Over many years of art collecting – Mrs. Resnick is a life trustee at LACMA and a trustee emeritus at the Philadelphia Museum of Art – the couple has amassed a treasure trove of paintings, sculpture and decorative arts from the 16th to the 20th centuries. Art fills their offices and their homes in Beverly Hills and Aspen.
Since 1993 they have had their own full-time curator, Bernard Jazzar, who previously worked at the Getty Museum.
Ultimately, their artwork will go to public institutions such as LACMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Ms. Resnick said. To this end, she recently allowed museum directors to visit and express their preferences.
“I’m not building my own museum,” she said. “This all goes to museums. I think you borrow it while you’re alive, and then you give it back to the people when you’re done.”