John Moores likens his philanthropic strategy to one of investment. ‘For the same reason you wouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket, you’d be better off having a somewhat but not overly diversified portfolio of charities or beneficiaries.’ (photo/lambertphoto.com)

“It’s probably more difficult giving money away well than earning it in the first place,” muses John Moores, owner of the San Diego Padres, who made a fortune in software development.“There’s recently been a lot of criticism of some philanthropists for not doing a particularly good job. Public universities, especially those like UCSD that have a long track record, are pretty safe places for donors to put money to work because they’re essentially eternal. There are some things I’ve done with some of my donations in the past I wouldn’t do again. But UCSD is a place that I feel very comfortable when I think about what they’ve done with funding.”

He’s given “somewhere around” $25 million to UCSD.

“When you decide to be a donor, I think you have a responsibility to do it well. For the same reason you wouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket, like having an investment portfolio consisting only of GM stock, you’d be better off having a somewhat but not overly diversified portfolio of charities or beneficiaries.”

He says he’s doubling his usual donation to Father Joe’s St. Vincent de Paul because of the recent wildfires. “When one of these horrific natural disasters hit, his organization is always the first one to be adversely affected. People write the $500 or $1,000 checks especially toward the end of the year. When something like this, like the Witch fire, wipes out huge numbers of houses and throws people out of their homes, that’s a real tear-jerking moment. So it’s easy for a donor to want to redirect something that would typically go to an organization like Father Joe’s.”

He says giving anonymously “has its clear virtue. It sort of protects the donor from other people asking for money, not an insubstantial benefit. But naming opportunities carry a certain cachet to the benefit of the recipient, not the donor. Named chairs or institutes or buildings of schools often increase the attractiveness of the organization. So I’ve done that a couple times, and to be honest, I’ve been somewhat reluctant to do so. There’s a little bit of a loss of privacy.”

Moores says he enjoys “more bang for the buck than anywhere else” from the Atlanta-based Carter Center, which he chairs. “I’m trying to do a little bit of a balancing act. I really like UC. I can’t tell you how fond I am of the school. But my portfolio says I need to balance that with something. I’ve given more money and been more involved with the Carter Center than any other charity.”

Founded by the former U.S. president, the Carter Center serves people who are “utterly without hope in very, very rural areas in Africa and they just have no hope because of a number of diseases that people, especially in North America, cannot possibly conceive of. One of them is river blindness. We can kill the parasites that cause this by putting a free pill in somebody’s mouth. The pill is clinically safer than aspirin and is donated by Merck, which is astonishing.

“The world’s leading preventable cause of blindness is something called trachoma. There are a number of NGOs, nongovernment organizations, working on trachoma. All you have to do to prevent it is wash your face. This is Jimmy Carter’s project, teaching people all over Subsahara Africa: wash your face and you won’t go blind.”