Marcy Doderer, the president and CEO of Arkansas Children’s, received a letter addressed to her in a stamped envelope from B. Thomas Golisano dated May 28.
Golisano said in the one-page typed letter on his personal letterhead that he had a history of supporting children’s health care in his home communities of Rochester, New York, and Fort Myers, Florida. He said he wanted to continue his philanthropic endeavors for children’s health care across the country, and he would like to talk to Arkansas Children’s about a possible major gift in exchange for Children’s naming something after him, Doderer said.
“I must admit, we opened the letter, read it with a little bit of skepticism, because that’s not generally how these things work,” Doderer said. Plus, “I’d never heard of him,” she said.
But she Googled him and found that he is the founder of Paychex Inc. of Rochester, the nation’s largest human resources company for small to medium-sized businesses. And his Golisano Foundation, one of the largest private foundations in the country, supports programs for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, animal welfare and child health, Arkansas Children’s said.
It turned out that Golisano had sent letters to several children’s hospitals across the country.
Doderer and the Arkansas Children’s Foundation team reached out to Golisano’s team and they started talking.
Doderer also traveled to Golisano’s home in Florida in December for a meeting.
“One of the things I enjoyed in my conversations with him, … he is a quick assessor of the situation, of a proposal, of a problem. His mind is quick,” she said.
He studied Arkansas Children’s audited financial statements and “understood us to be a very solid business from a financial stability standpoint,” she said.
“And after those three different conversations with his foundation leader, with our team in Little Rock, and then at his home in Florida, I left there with a commitment for a $50 million gift,” Doderer said. “He didn’t see this as a charitable gift. He sees it as an investment in child health.”
The gift was the largest in the history of Arkansas Children’s.
“It was a pretty awe-inspiring moment, because we know that other health systems have gone through the same process and didn’t walk away with a gift,” Doderer said.
She also said that not everyone he reached out to responded to his letter.
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