After more than a quarter century of giving a total of about $21.6 million to nonprofits in South Central Texas, the Genevieve and Ward Orsinger Foundation plans to give away its last dollar before Dec. 31.
The foundation started spending down its assets in 2018 to preserve the funding priorities of Genevieve Orsinger, the family matriarch who established the foundation in 1997.
“She always wanted to help people who wanted to help themselves get better,” said Linda McDavitt, the foundation’s retiring president and CEO and Orsinger’s niece. The mission of the foundation is to “give people the tools to become educated, healthy, and self-reliant.”
This dual-generation approach to philanthropy is aimed at breaking generational poverty.
“As a family member, [McDavitt] felt a duty and an obligation to maintain the integrity of Genevieve’s vision,” said Michael Bacon, a member of the foundation’s board and Trinity University’s vice president for alumni relations and development.
It’s natural for foundation leaders to worry that the founder’s vision could get lost 10 or 20 years later, depending on who is in charge, Bacon said.
“It’s been fun to come together twice a year and do positive things by making these grants, but we also respect Linda’s decision,” he said. “This is the right way to honor their legacy in a way that fits with their vision. … A wonderful, generous gesture Genevieve made is finally coming to an end. But it’s been a great ride.”
The foundation’s grantees include dozens of nonprofits in Bexar, Comal, Guadalupe, Hays, Kendall and Travis counties, including SAMMinistries, Cibolo Nature Center, Children’s Bereavement Center of South Texas, Communities in Schools, Healy-Murphy Child Development Center, Boysville Inc., Respite Care of San Antonio and others.
By sunsetting the roughly $10 million foundation, the organization was able to give bigger, more impactful grants in recent years, McDavitt said.
Prior to 2018, the foundation would give out about $500,000 per year divided among 30 or more grantees, she said, a funding strategy that she felt was lacking. “You feel like you’re putting Band-Aids on. You never feel like you’re going anywhere.”
But this year, the foundation will grant nearly $3.5 million to drain the rest of the account.
The foundation also made a change by allowing its grants to be used to pay for additional staff, Bacon said.
“To make the bigger impact, staff had to be part of it,” Bacon said. “You can’t launch these programs at the scale we were willing to fund and not help pay for the staff to implement it.”
McDavitt, a retired high school band teacher and director, took over the foundation after her aunt died in 2004 at age 89, but there is no succession plan once McDavitt retires this year. The Orsingers, who built their wealth through the auto industry and investing, did not have children.
In 2018, it became clear that McDavitt would be the last president of the foundation, with no one to pass the torch.
McDavitt remembers playing as a child on the 15 acres of land that the Orsingers would eventually donate to Bexar County to establish Orsinger Park.
Decades later in 1997, when McDavitt was teaching band at Judson High School, her aunt told her to come by for a chat.
“I’ve got something I want you to do when you retire,” McDavitt recalled her aunt telling her. “And I said, ‘OK.'”
When she started working with Orsinger at the foundation, McDavitt said she didn’t realize how deeply entrenched in poverty families and children were in San Antonio.
“It was an eye-opener for me,” she said.
Now 77, she hopes to tick some more travel and experiences off her bucket list.
She has already sailed around the world, played a key role in establishing the local Big Give and was entered into the Texas Bandmasters Hall of Fame.
“I want to see the Northern Lights, I want to go to the Galapagos,” she said. “I want to experience sailing in a lot of other different places.”
