Stop & Talk

Singer
Stop. Talk to me.

Crystal Page
Hello, Grant.

Grant Oliphant
Hey, Crystal, how are you?

Crystal Page
I'm well, how are you?

Grant Oliphant
I am good. Today, we get to talk to somebody who is near and dear to her heart at the foundation.

Crystal Page
Will you tell us?

Grant Oliphant
Yes, I will. I just wanted to see if you would react. So Peter Ellsworth, who is one of the board members who participated in hiring me onto the foundation, and this is part of our ongoing series of helping the community understand who our board members are. Peter is a, you know, you almost want to say a fixture in San Diego. He's been around a long time. He's worked in the in the law and in healthcare, and then in philanthropy. He was at the vanguard of a lot of really interesting practices, and he is so important to us here.

Crystal Page
Yeah, I agree. I love working with Peter on the Prebys Leadership Awards. He's on our selection committee.

Grant Oliphant
Fantastic. Fantastic human being. All right, let's go into it. Let's do it.

Grant Oliphant
Peter Ellsworth, thank you for joining me.

Peter Ellsworth
Thank you for having me.

Grant Oliphant
I've been looking forward to this interview. I was just joking with someone this morning, a leader in the community who you know pretty well, and we were talking about our mutual association with you and I, and I said, you know, I've spent much of my time since I moved to San Diego, running around, trying to catch up with where Peter Ellsworth was many years ago. Well, it feels that way quite often. You've been when I get to a place you've been there before me, and I've just been looking forward to this conversation, because you've had such a history in this community, but also in philanthropy. And really where I wanted to start was with with that history, you've been an attorney, very successful attorney in town. Then you went on to Sharp HealthCare to help build that system into the entity that we know it as today. And then you made a segue into philanthropy, and I'd love you to share a little bit about why you made that shift into philanthropy. What it was that attracted you?

Peter Ellsworth
Well, it was sort of interesting. It was in the newspaper that I was retiring from sharp and retiring, and an old client of mine, Legler Benbow, called me on the phone and said that he was ill and that he wanted me to come and run the charitable foundation that he had created that would be funded upon his death. And I sort of, well, you know, I don't know anything about philanthropy. No, he said, You're the guy to do it, and I'd like you to put this together for me. I said, Well, let me think about it. So I sort of thought about it. And because of my commitment to charitable and alien masonry work, which went clear back to college. I thought, well, I give it a try. So that's how I got to do it. That's so.

Grant Oliphant
So what we're to take away from this is, you're bad at retirement.

Peter Ellsworth
Yeah, and everyone said I failed retire right some years ago.

Grant Oliphant
Yeah, were there, and I am going to draw this out in the course of our conversation, but were there principles around leadership and service that you went into that job with that were important to you as you took that on?

Peter Ellsworth
Well, as I say, I was, had been in the charitable field for a long time, always on the other side, asking for funds, rather than on the giving side. But I think that I just felt that, I think I'd been so fortunate, really, to put it bluntly, that I felt it was time, certainly. And of course, you know, there was one other reason, I guess, and that is that after I graduated from Stanford and was offered the opportunity to go to Stanford Law School. I went home, and my dad told me he would not pay for it, because the world didn't need another lawyer, and he really wanted me to go to work for his company, which was the last thing in the world I wanted to do. So I went back up to Stanford, and I'm happened to have lunch with the one of the professors who was administ helped our fraternity right and told him what was going on. I said, The problem is that my dad makes too much money. I can't get a scholarship, because in those days, it was all based on need. And I said, and he won't tell me, so I don't know what's going to happen next. And so he said, Well, I'll send you to law school. And I saw really. And he said, Well, he said, I don't have any family. And he said, you're going to be successful, and if you'll promise me to spend a certain amount of your time in charitable and [unknown] area activities, I'll send you to law school. So he did, however, of course, as soon as my dad found out about it, he took over and wanted to pay for it. But I did, made the commitment, so I felt that I had that obligation, and as I went through life in all these different categories, serving in those categories was so much rewarding that it was just became part of my life

Grant Oliphant
during your your years of professional life before you took on the foundation job, did you have heroes who inspired you in terms of what it was like to be a civic leader in San Diego,

Peter Ellsworth
there were certainly people who, like Irwin Jacobs right who I came to know and respect and see the way that he handled His billions of dollars, and what he did with it people like that. There were people like that that I knew and became acquainted with, that were a mentor. It was interesting that there. I didn't feel like I was being trained by anybody, but I did have a lot of context. And I sort of thought of them overall in this field, they were just really people you wanted to know, people you wanted to spend time with, and I also could see how they were rewarded by their service. So that's something. Yeah,

Grant Oliphant
I was, I was struck when I moved to San Diego and you started introducing me to people in town, how many people you knew, and what a long and rich history you had with them. And the common thread was you always thought they were people who were engaged in an interested in civic life and how to make it better. Yeah, right. We're going to get more into that, but before we do you and your wife, Doris, who I also think of as a friend, have been together for is it 68 years now?

Peter Ellsworth
70 years,

Grant Oliphant
70 years. And any tips, any tips for the rest of us,

Peter Ellsworth
how she managed 70 years with me is something else again? No, just, you know, it's not perfect. Nothing's ever perfect, but it's always, uh, paying attention and trying to respect the other person and their interests. We both have our own interests, and I think we've both been helpful and respectful to each other through these years. Been a great light ride all the way.

Grant Oliphant
Yeah, any surprises along the way about San Diego?

Peter Ellsworth
Well, San Diego is interesting, because, of course, the reason my dad was really mad at me when I came to San Diego is he referred to it as the village at the border. Oh, did he really? Well, yeah, because he was from Los Angeles, and that was the big city, and this was just nothing. He couldn't understand why anybody would possibly go to live there. And you chose to. But of course, I chose to because I, number one, I definitely wanted to be in my own and if I was around Los Angeles, everyone said, Oh, you're Phil Ellsworth son. I wasn't interested in that, yeah, and I didn't want to be part of his business. I mean, I love my dad dearly, don't get me wrong. But he had his business, which was wonderful, but it wasn't he was better off selling it to the Burroughs adding machine company, which he did, and so than having me take over, it just wasn't my thing. And so it was everything put together. And then I had a number of friends from law school who had come to San Diego, and they encouraged me to come down here. And so I applied and got a really good job. And so I thought, well, perfect place to go, and it's been the right place.

Grant Oliphant
So the village at the border. I love that, because I've heard San Diego cast from decades ago as as the end of the line. That's right. Yeah, I and I hadn't heard this one. But was there any part of you initially when you made that move that felt like, Huh? I really have fallen off the end of the earth, or did you immediately know you were in a real

Peter Ellsworth
I liked it from day one, yeah, I had been here one time. I was raised up in every summer we spent at Newport, where we would do sailing. And one year, I was invited to come down to San Diego to sail, to compete. And so we came down here, and on the bus, this guy turned to me and said, Now, Pete, just remember that we're going over this place where there's a shoal and it's loaded with stingrays, so if you fall out of your boat, you're in real trouble, so be careful. Of course, I couldn't win any races. I was so scared of falling over the side, but so I've been in and out of San Diego, and I just thought it was a great place to be.

Grant Oliphant
I love that story, because if I think about it as a metaphor, you're not. Afraid to fall out of the boat in terms of taking risks on new ideas and big things, and

Peter Ellsworth
certainly my taking on philanthropy was one of them.

Grant Oliphant
Yeah, right, well, so let's go there. You know, I and I know we're gonna we're fast forwarding past a magnificent career of your work in the law and your work at sharp but that's another podcast. This one is really about community change and how you know our audience is interested in how people lead in a in a civic context. So what do you think you had learned about leadership in San Diego that equipped you to take on the Legler Benbough foundation role.

Peter Ellsworth
What I had learned was that to be a leader, you had to establish people to work for you in some relationship where you trusted them to do the work. You made assignments. They did the work. Brought it back. You reviewed it, you had these relationships, and that was sort of what a leader did. It was if you did that right, it worked. It wasn't you doing everything. It was getting the right people with the right instructions, the right opportunities to go and do whatever needed to be done. Get back to you. And the other thing was that leader, I think, is more about what the future looks like, you know, and what's going to put it's going to look like in 10 years, or whatever. So you can make sure you're modifying the code for the program to meet those objectives. But I didn't think about that particularly in philanthropy, because, as I say, I was brand new when I first started. I thought, Well, I would go. I better go get some training. So I decided to go to a conference. So I went to this conference, and this, the first speech was, Don't get involved with your grantees, really. Yeah. Well, that was a long time ago, and that was the way a lot of foundations acted. And I went home, and I thought to myself, What a stupid Why would you give money to someone? Yeah, that you didn't you know that you didn't have a relationship with So my approach to it was quite unusual in those days, in that I built it around getting to know people who were on the ground, because that was the leadership model that I'd always had. I didn't go down and, you know, do an operation at the hospital or whatever. I got somebody else to do that. And so I felt it was really important to talk to the people that were actually doing the work. And that really worked out to be really the right thing.

Grant Oliphant
That story feels so important to me for multiple reasons. One is that I have seen basically generation upon generation of highly successful business leaders, technology leaders, come into this field, and you know, they've made a lot of money, they've been very successful in business. And they, they think, Well, I know how to do philanthropy. And then they learn, over the lot of the course of a lot of painful years that they they have a whole new field to learn. Yeah, definitely. What?

Grant Oliphant
What was it for you that made you approach this in a spirit of humility, where you wanted to learn and then you wanted to listen to the and engage with people who you were going to be working with?

Peter Ellsworth
Well, it's probably two things. First of all, when I decided I was coming to the village near the border, and dad was very angry. I said, Well, Dad, I'm not going to be here to talk to you every day or whatnot. So do you have any advice for me? And he said, Yeah. He said, Just keep four words in mind. And I said, What are those? He said, It's not about me. And he said, You'll be surprised if you keep that in mind how successful you'll be, and I can tell you whether it was practicing law or running a hospital and talking with the doctors or working with people in philanthropy, it was amazing how successful you could be if you followed that model. So that was part of how I'm put together, right? And certainly was really helpful in the whole philanthropy field. But of course, when I started talking to people in the philanthropy field, like elsewhere, I realized, as always, that the people on the ground are the ones that know what works, what has worked, what doesn't. What are the secrets in this space? What do we need to know? I mean, all this stuff, you know, what are the best ideas? What's a new, innovative project? Those people are the ones that do it. So I wanted to have an association with them, because that's the way I'd been a leader in other areas. That's what we did in the law firm. That's what we did everywhere. So it seemed to me that was the button. The more I got into it, the more it became relevant to the work in philanthropy, and the more helpful it was because every good idea we ever came up with didn't come from me, came from somebody I had a relationship with.

Grant Oliphant
There's so much wisdom in this, and which is, by the way, I don't mean to embarrass you, but something that I associate with you is that you've, you've held on to the wisdom that life has taught you, and it just manifests in the way you talk about this field and the work and the people that we are privileged to work with. I'm curious, you know, as you moved into this role with Legler Benbough, and we should probably say a little bit about that foundation, it was, what were the assets at the time,

Peter Ellsworth
50 million, which in those days was, we were one of the largest foundations in San Diego,

Grant Oliphant
right. And you were at the front end,

Peter Ellsworth
yeah, really, right. Philanthropy story here, yeah. And so that was another reason why I took it was, was a real opportunity, and

Grant Oliphant
the founder, who was entrusting his his fortune to you, basically said, do good work with it.

Peter Ellsworth
Well, basically, after he told me this, and he did die about a year later, so there wasn't a lot of time, and I was concerned, of course, I'm a lawyer, so I took his deposition so that I would have a complete record of what he, you know, what he how he felt about capital campaigns with his name on something, how he felt about these different areas we might be going into and so on, so that if I got into too much trouble, I would have some evidence of what I was trying to carry out. His wish is not necessarily mine. And so I have always had that hidden away, and I used it quite often to look at things, particularly things like capital investments, things like that,

Grant Oliphant
yeah. So he comes to you, asks you to shepherd his foundation. He dies a year later, leaves $50 million in the and another special wrinkle about this was that it was what we now call a spend down Foundation, meaning that he wasn't setting this up in perpetuity,

Peter Ellsworth
right? Absolutely, it was the last. He was very insistent about that, because he'd seen so many instances where people had put money into something, and then 20 years later, that organization is doing something completely contrary to what the donor wanted. So he thought he knew me, and he also knew Tom Sisco, who was his banker. And so it was, he asked me to get Tom to take on the financial piece of this, which he did. And so really, the two of us, it was kind of interesting. Aside from the philanthropy part of it, we had a meeting. And I said, Well, Tom, I said, you know, what do you what kind of things might we do? And he said, Well, I've got one. He says, How many employees did you have when you were at sharp? I said, well, about 10,000 How many do you have at the bank? He said, about 3500 and I said, Well, what's the point? He said, Let's never have an employee. I said, really? He said, Yeah, we don't need one. Hysterical. So we didn't have any, but we had consultants and accountants and people like that, but we didn't have any employees, and that really gave us a lot of

Grant Oliphant
you decided to be the staff.

Peter Ellsworth
We were the staff.

Grant Oliphant
Amazing. Yeah, well, on this Just quickly before we move on from the nature of the foundation, there are two, two predominant schools of thought and philanthropy, as you know, and one is the one that the previs Foundation has embraced, which is that we want to be around for a very long time. Oh, yes, and quite a resource for the future of San Diego. The other is the notion that I want to put to get the money to work more quickly, and I want to have a sense of influence over its actual use. And that's typically what motivates spend down Foundation, as you were thinking about translating that into actual giving, that made you even more powerful in town, because you had this relatively large foundation to lead, and it wanted to give away all its money, yeah, so you must have instantly become The most popular guy in town.

Peter Ellsworth
Yeah, that is true.

Grant Oliphant
And how did you resist the impulse to begin to think of that as your money, or to begin to think of that as your tool for influence?

Peter Ellsworth
Well, again, it's not about me, and it never was, and it wasn't going to be. It was leglers deal, and I just wasn't into that. And after a while, people began to recognize that I didn't appreciate somebody coming up and telling me all this, I wonder, blah, blah, blah, blah, I really didn't like it. So they figured out that was not the way to work with me. Way to work with me was to try to figure out some relationship that we wanted to do something want to do together, figure out what it was, work at it over time and make it happen.

Grant Oliphant
So let's talk about where that first started to happen for you. You were in your time in philanthropy, one of the first practitioners of what we now call trust based philanthropy. You, you. You wrote about it, you talked about it, and you did it, and the and the it, in this case, was going out to potential grantees, meeting with them, hearing about what they needed, believing them and and funding them. Give us an example of where you first started doing that that led you to that as a practice. And when did you start thinking of it as a practice?

Peter Ellsworth
Well, really kind of right at the very beginning, because after that experience of having hearing that we shouldn't get involved with grantees and deciding that wasn't what we wanted to do, we started sort of right from the beginning with the idea that I'd talk to the people in the field, whether it's Balboa park or downtown or wherever, and find out who kind of had was making good sense, who'd been doing something worthwhile. It was educational for me. I had some background in the city, but there's still, there were a lot of things I didn't know about. And so it kind of became a natural thing, right? Kind of from the get go, and the longer I was in it, the more important I could see it becoming. Because, I mean, we had an opportunity to do things that just you wouldn't be able to do otherwise. And there were so many examples I'll never forget the time when one of the local schools came to me and said that they were going to run out of money. Wouldn't have enough money to pay the teachers the next month. And I said, Well, how could that be said, well, the state is so slow on their reimbursement payment. We're a charter school. We don't have a big endowment, so we don't have enough money. I said, Well, that's not well, give you a program related investment, and when you get paid, give it back to me, really? He said, Yeah, sure, but it was because we had that kind of a relationship that he could talk to me about those kinds of things which would be much harder in a normal, you know, grant process, where you have to do a grant every year and then make yourself all over again the next year, and the next year after that, and the next year after that, and it just wasted so much time going through all that process when the real time ought to be spent talking together about what might work.

Grant Oliphant
I'm so glad you shared the story that you did about going to the conference and immediately feeling misled and misinformed by the professionals in the field. That was kind of arrogant. I mean, well, but it was, it's clear that you knew what your values were and the principles that you wanted to guide you in your work. And I think it's important to note what philanthropy was like at that point. Organized philanthropy often was about in those in that period. And what year would that have been? What what time period?

Peter Ellsworth
1980 1985 Yes, 1995 1995

Grant Oliphant
Okay, so at that point, there was still a lot of thought in the field about remaining detached, being dispassionate.

Peter Ellsworth
Well, it was sort of all about the foundation and being right. And of course, I'd been a person who was experiencing this from the other side. I mean, I might not have known about the philanthropy side, but I knew a lot about the other side, about fundraising, how it felt having every time you call up and fill out 25 pages and go through all this stuff like you were starting over after you've been funded three or four years in a row, and then being told, you know, we don't fund more than three years. And all those kinds of things going well, huh? None of that made any sense to me right when I was on the other side, on the philanthropy side. Let's try it. And I think it worked out better because it built a different relationship.

Grant Oliphant
So it, it, it was a fairly radical idea at the time you were doing this too, and I love the fact that it was informed by having been a grant seeker or running an organization, but it was a fairly radical idea to say, hey, we're going to we're going to meet with people, we're going to listen to them, we're going to trust what they have to say. And one of the places that you started doing that in San Diego was southeast San Diego. Let's start by talking a little bit about that neighborhood. Tell us about that neighborhood and what it was that caused you to start paying attention there.

Peter Ellsworth
Well, there was a local foundation, the Jacobs center, and the Chief Executive Officer of that had worked for me in the foundation at sharp so I knew her, and I talked to her, and they were actually located in this area, and I thought, well, as far as our work in community development is concerned, why not associate with them? They were there. They had these relationships and whatnot. And so that's kind of how I became engaged there. But I'll never forget one time we had a program in southeast San Diego, and we'd gone to the principals of the schools and asked them to come up with a real leader. And we wanted to put these table at the people at a table and talk about a project and see what might work. So. Was this girl sitting next to me and and she never said anything or opened her mouth. And so finally they took a break, and I turned to her and I said, you know, I said we got you together because you were identified as a real leader. I'm sure you are, but you don't seem at all interested. And she said, Well, she said, I didn't have anything to eat last night, and I don't know when I'm going to eat today. And he, she's, I just can't think about something else. Wow. Well, there again. You know, this is a different you just can't make assumptions based on your background there. So you've got to start really getting into it and finding out what's going on with people, and have a kind of a relationship that's deep enough so that you can really get at some of those things, then you'll understand better what they're talking about.

Grant Oliphant
So when you started engaging in community, you started listening. I love the fact that you also started hearing candid opinions. Maybe you didn't want to hear Yeah, and, but that was major whether I was being trusted or right Well, and, and that you had the openness to think about, okay, well, how do I do that? And how do I show up? What did you discover about the suspicions in which people held you because you were there as a philanthropist and were there as a foundation head or a very successful former businessman. What were some of the things you realized that they believed? Well,

Peter Ellsworth
they sort of basically no trust to begin with, because this guy's interested in making money and being an important person and so on and so forth. I think that there was also kind of a, I know, sort of a underground feeling that you're never going to really understand what this is about. So I was going to walk you through it. You know, soon as you make a few bucks, you'll walk away in spite of what you say no, right? Because that was the experience that they'd had or I mean, you can't very well tell somebody that I really care about you, but please prove yourself every year by writing me a statement, and I'll decide whether or not I still like you or not. That just doesn't work.

Grant Oliphant
So a sense that philanthropy was sitting in judgment, a sense that you as a foundation leader, were potentially feckless because you would move on to the next big issue and precise all those things, yeah, all of that, sure, how did you start to change people's minds? But

Peter Ellsworth
Well, I think hopefully just by listening to them and then trying something that maybe they wouldn't otherwise do. Well, example was we, for one time that we were working in I asked the people in Balboa Park we were going to put on an art an exhibit of art in southeast San Diego, because we wanted to be near where they would be. But in doing it. I wanted to make sure we it was something that would be of interest. So I got the people together there, and I said, I want you to come up with a theme. And they came up with immigration. So I went back, and, of course, there were some things on immigration that the museums had, but the things on immigration that these people brought, I mean, records of when their ancestor came across the border, what they wore. I mean, it was off the charts, and it got national attention. People coming from all over. Where did the idea come from? It came from them. And there were just endless ideas like that that clearly came from the grantees, not for me, and I was the first to say that's he's the guy that came up with that, and so that that helped the whole situation a lot.

Grant Oliphant
Amazing what you can discover in the village at the border when yes and about philanthropy, yeah, yeah. Let's go back to southeast San Diego, and the model of philanthropy you were working to create, there you were, you mentioned you were following the lead in a in part of the Jacobs center, yes, Jacobs Foundation. And that entity had been created by a local businessman who wanted to devote his

Peter Ellsworth
a Los Angeles businessman.

Grant Oliphant
Oh, he was Los Angeles,

Peter Ellsworth
but his daughter was from here and came down here.

Grant Oliphant
I see so and for I remember, for a lot of years, Jacobs was held up as a rare example of what was called hyper local philanthropy, because he was looking at this model of how to work with the community and engage the community and making decisions. Years and years later, when I arrived in town and you were showing me around southeast San Diego, you showed me organization after organization that you had helped to seed by doing the same thing. And you know, as I'm sitting here off. The top of my head, I'm remembering the work you did to help create the squash center that is using sports to help kids prepare for whatever comes after high school.

Peter Ellsworth
I really wasn't involved in the creation of that. That was really created separately, but it was brought into the community. I supported them when they came in the community.

Grant Oliphant
So so you can be humble later, but well, and I think in case after case, what you explained to me was there were others,

Peter Ellsworth
Certainly like the there were lots of others that I was very

Grant Oliphant
So which ones are you proudest of?

Peter Ellsworth
Several things that I think worked out rather well. The Library Association came to me and they wanted to develop a teen center, and they wanted me to fund it. And I said, Well, I don't know anything about teen centers. I said, if you, if we can put together a group of teens to tell us what they want in a teen center, I'd be willing to fund what they want. And they said, Well, no, that's no, the library has a plan for I said, Well, actually, I won't fund it unless the locals come in, what they came up with was nothing like you or I or anybody would come up with. What was important to them was totally different, and that's what we ended up doing. Now, the Library Foundation actually follows that model in teen centers all around the city, but it was but it was amazing. I mean, they wanted a place where they could go and hang out and lie down on the couch, and they wanted a place where they could play, you know, play games and all kinds of stuff. That is not what you'd normally think about, but it's been enormously successful. And there's a lot of instances like that where, because they were engaged and involved and did the right thing, it really made a big difference.

Grant Oliphant
I love that story. Thank you, because it further exemplifies the approach that you took. I'm thinking more broadly about the range of organizations you worked with while you were there and that you helped fund, and maybe not always getting off the ground, but help them develop more of a community centric feel. And a diverse range of organizations, I think I outdoor outreach was certainly, yes, certainly,

Peter Ellsworth
certainly one of them I was involved in from the very beginning.

Grant Oliphant
And the potential there that you saw was what, well,

Peter Ellsworth
an opportunity for these young people who were living, let's say, just a short time to the beach, but had never been there. Yeah, they'd never been to the mountains, they'd never been anywhere. And here was an opportunity to take these kids and not only have them learn these kinds of things, but also get the whole nature, the support of nature. But one of the interesting things, when you get out on the field, you can see the natural leaders, and one of the processes they go through is to take those natural leaders and then work with them and school them over a period of time and get them into something. So one of the kids on that trip that I would have picked out never for anything, just turned out, when we got out that he was just, he had it, he ended up and years later he called me, telling me, said, just wanted to call you to let you know I just was accepted to Stanford, and he went there and had a great career, yeah, But there were wonderful organizations, and we tried to work with quite a few of them that were particularly engaged, not again. If you have a relationship based foundation, you have to deal with focus, because you can't know everybody. You can't do everything. So we were always focusing our agenda, narrowing our agenda, so that we could deal more specifically with a smaller group. And there's trouble in that, because, you know, you find people that you've been working with you no longer are because you have to deal with this focus issue, but, but it's important if you're going to have the kind of a relationship that you need to have.

Grant Oliphant
One of the organizations that I know you're still a fan of their work today was writer's block.

Peter Ellsworth
Oh, yes, writer's block, yeah.

Grant Oliphant
What was it about writer's block that? Um,

Peter Ellsworth
well, of course, I had nothing. I knew nothing about graffiti. I knew what it was that's about it so but getting to know these people, I found out that it's actually quite a substantial art mode all around the world, not just in not just in the United States, and whereas frequently it's looked down upon and mistreated and only done whatever, there are opportunities like the writer's block, where they had a place where people could come and practice their art. And it was truly amazing. And I think one of the most amazing stories about that was that I was talking to the leader of the Museum of contemporary art in La Jolla one day over lunch, and he was a. Of mine. And we were talking about, and I said, you're building that new he's building that New Deal downtown. And he said, we have a big construction fence. He said, Do you think your people would like to come in and do graffiti on the fence? And I said, Oh my gosh. I said, I think that would be fabulous, because so a few blocks from the police station. And he said, and we'll bring some people by to come by and see him do it. But he said, I think it'd be kind of cool. I said, Absolutely. So I talked to him, and they said, Oh yeah, absolutely. So they did graffiti on the fence at the end of the year, the museum has an event for their donors, and they have to select what was their best donor event of the year. And almost all of them selected when they went down and watched the artists do well, because watching them and seeing how they interacted, getting a different feeling about this. And of course, the arts are so wonderful in supporting these kids, it's something they can do. You know, not all of us can do the kind of great art they do. So they were privileged to be able to do it in that space. And it was really great, but it was all new, very new to me. We got them doing things like, I'll never forget one time we had them do tote bags for a convention, and we kept getting calls from people saying, my one of my children's taking them, and the other children want more of these bags. So lots of possibilities.

Grant Oliphant
You know, Pete, when I've gone around southeast San Diego with you, one of the things I'm struck by is what a hero you still are in the community. And I know you would, you wouldn't you hate that term, yeah, but, but people think well of you in that in the community and organizational leaders think well of you, they appreciate the role you've played, not just because of the financial support, but because they think you care and are engaged. And that's quite a legacy. You can also look at the role you played in helping the neighborhood develop more opportunities for ownership over its own destiny, and more engagement and more voice. Yeah, you also experienced challenges, and what did you learn about the challenges of working in a hyper local context, like a neighborhood?

Peter Ellsworth
Well, there isn't, you know, a super structure so that you you can be helping a over here, and B doesn't like it and takes you on. You get into those kinds of things. It's difficult to where people are unaccustomed to working in kind of a collaborative, kind of a mode, and some people just don't like it. So yeah, you have a lot of challenges to put it together, that's for sure.

Grant Oliphant
Another way of looking at your career and philanthropy is by looking at your legacy around the arts, because you you were also very active in the arts. Oh, yeah. And here is a very different set of challenges than than working in a hopeful, hyper local context in a neighborhood or a community. How did you shift your mindset to work with the challenges of the art scene in San Diego?

Peter Ellsworth
Again, I had to really spend some time talking to people and listening to what they had to say, because a lot of it I didn't fully understand. Early on, I was so impressed with the fact that what art meant to some of these kids that had nothing else. So that was kind of an eye opener for me. But in Balboa Park, it was more that these organizations were totally separate. And one of the reasons, of course, was philanthropy, because they all wanted to have their own philanthropy thing, rather than be together. And so there was very much of a disconnect between the major organizations and one of the that mean that was a barrier. But interestingly enough, at some point the leaders, several of the leaders of those organizations, came to me and asked me to fund putting together the Balboa Park cultural partnership. They weren't even meeting with each other, and they suddenly realized that what they were doing was when one of them would come up with something, then somebody else would undermine it, and then the city wouldn't do it. And so they were absolutely getting nowhere.

Grant Oliphant
Is it fair to say that they had a scarcity mindset too?

Peter Ellsworth
Yeah, I think so they're just, Oh, definitely. I mean it very much. You know, open up the doors. Have enough money to open the doors tomorrow, yeah? And so. So there were lots of those kinds of challenges, and, you know, inter arching egos and all the rest of it. And I but I think that Balboa Park cultural partnership did help, by no means solve, but did help, at least having them meet. They refer to themselves as one Park, one team. They they. Work through those kinds of things, but it was a constant battle to kind of keep it together, to keep people working together, because they had so many reasons to be totally separate, primarily their own monetary sources, right?

Grant Oliphant
Yeah. I mean, I think I think that is such an important thread to pull on because I think sometimes we assume that people behave differently in different parts of the world. And the reality is, people are people,

Peter Ellsworth
unfortunately, well, unfortunately.

Grant Oliphant
And, you know, I think, I think in the absence of a force that can help people see greater possibilities. A scarcity mindset, or a zero sum mindset, will prevail, especially if you're competing every day for resources or wondering how to get the next meal on the table,

Peter Ellsworth
and also the in a museum setting, the leaders come up through that particular sphere. They've started in aviation, involved, and that really is the sole focus of their thinking. Yeah, they're just not thinking beyond that. Everyone must love natural history, because I'm head of the Natural History Museum, you know, and I think that creates a real difficulty for them to sit down and have broader conversations and that can that's just not where they're coming from.

Grant Oliphant
And yet, you've done this a few times in your role in philanthropy, where so you helped in the Balboa Park case, helped them create the Balboa Park cultural partnership so that they could have a collective advocacy voice. You helped create the online collaborative, yeah, which, which wired the the area the park for so that we could have Wi Fi throughout the park, and that that kind of opened up the doors for visitors to understand what was going on around the park.

Peter Ellsworth
What do you think involved in creating the conservancy that's now All right, yeah, very, very

Grant Oliphant
since I was just meeting with those, I should have, I should have mentioned them. I think, by the way, probably the single greatest opportunity that the park now enjoys is the creation of the of forever Balboa park that that you were a part of too. So let's talk for a moment about what it's like to work in an environment where there is opposition, you know, and philanthropy periodically takes on big, bold agendas, and you you see people in community take on big, bold agendas. This has happened here in Balboa Park. It's happened in in various neighborhoods around San Diego, where there's a big vision and bold people backing it, and it doesn't, doesn't pan out. What's your counsel to the next generation of philanthropists coming along about working on big ideas? Anyway,

Peter Ellsworth
it is very frustrating. And as you know, I was in urban asked me to join him in the Plaza de Panama thing, which is another one I was whole nother story to talk about. But I think that San Diego is interesting because it has a lot of very, very strong, big organizational structures that really work, like, like our all of our research organizations are, you know, among the best in the world. Some of them are, you know, all that kind of thing. We've got plays being performed for Broadway. So we've got some people that are really thinking very, very smart people. They could be anywhere in the country, any big city, and they're, they're great, and they have ideas, big ideas. But the problem is there is no big power core in San Diego like you have in a big city there. I mean, that would be foundations, major corporations, those kinds of things, that. And so consequently, people seem to be divided up into these little groups. So when you try to do something, you're bound to offend some of the groups, and then they take on the lawyer, and the lawyer sues you, and then the cost goes up, and blah, blah, blah. So that's been a model. However, my hope is, and I really think this is right, that over the next 10 years or so, that's going to change, because we now have the premise Foundation, which is we didn't have anything like that, or even close to it. We have a group of people who have very substantial assets, who are thinking in terms of philanthropy following their demise, and they're already acting in the philanthropy sphere in a very effective way. But as they move into more organizational structures, I am hopeful that. Becomes more collaborative and will have a power base that then will be able to support major initiatives and get them done. That's the hope,

Grant Oliphant
so as you think about the work you've done over the in your in your philanthropic career, and now as a board member of the premise Foundation, where we're working on very big issues. We talked about Balboa Park and we talked about the arts a little bit. Those are certainly areas where we're focused. We're focused on downtown, the Tijuana River Valley pollution issue. We're looking at the survival of the medical research sector, the availability of healthcare in the community, we have a lot on our plate. Oh, yeah, definitely. And, and part of what we believe is that big things are possible here. Yep, what do you hope we will remember, and that other, other future entrance into philanthropy will remember as we continue to take on these big, bold agendas.

Peter Ellsworth
Well, of course, it's not easy, and there will be frustration and there will be setbacks, but I think having a dream is so important to get anywhere and certainly on big ideas, having the dream and consulting with other people so they feel included, so you get a and then paying attention to the fact you've got to have enough people to make something really happen. One of the problems, I think, is the city in that I think that frequently, because they turn over. Their representation turns over so rapidly. We don't have a city manager, so there's no one here for any length of time. So we deal with someone that's going to be the next going to be gone, the next person. And obviously, people change their views. They're elected for different purposes, so you don't have the kind of city support long term for big ideas, usually, because they just can't do that. That's a problem. Yeah, and it's just something you have to recognize.

Grant Oliphant
Well, I there's so much in that answer. And

Peter Ellsworth
however, there's a lot of power that can be put together to force the city to do the right thing. Right? That's part of having this power group that are able to do that

Grant Oliphant
Yeah, well, I appreciate the way you think about how to move an agenda and the various components that have to be put in place. I also appreciate that at the core of your answer that you just gave, there was, again, an appreciation for the role of identifying your potential partners and of listening to them and finding out, you know, which are themes I know from talking with you all the time, Pete, when you unfortunately, we're out of time, which is, which is ridiculous. Just flew by. Let's take a moment to talk about healthcare. That was, that was a big part of your career, and now it's a big focus of the Foundation, where you sit on the board, what do you think are the major opportunities or needs right now that we need to be focusing on in San Diego?

Peter Ellsworth
Well, on the need side, it's, to me, it's clearly access. We just have demonstrated, without any doubt during COVID That these disadvantaged neighborhoods do not have appropriate access. The clinics that are in these areas frequently close at five o'clock. And of course, the people, both husband and wife, are working. No one's available to take the kid anywhere except to the emergency room. So that access is a big issue, in my opinion, but I think there's another whole thing that gets me very excited, and that's artificial intelligence. And because I think that when you look at what these new systems are able to do in improving operations, in actually developing information together. I was thinking, I was on the national institute of health primary care board putting together the primary care analysis for the United States. And we wrote that number of years ago. And when you think about primary care, a primary care physician needs to know grant Oliphant, what all about him, what he takes, what his rules are, you know, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff. Well, today, with the amount of burden on them and the number of people that they have, there's no way they can know that. Whereas with artificial intelligence, we'd be able to complete all that and more about this person and be able to summarize it in a way, that when the primary care physician has two minutes before he walks in the door, he can pick something up and read everything he needs to know. So there's all kinds of possibilities. I'm sure there's downsides as well, but there's all kinds of real possibilities, I think that are very exciting in the healthcare field.

Grant Oliphant
You you captured in that. Answer so well, the choice that is hard for philanthropy to make, there's probably, there's probably no greater proponent on our board, by the way, for looking at technology and innovation across the range of the things that we fund. And that's one that's sort of the promise and opportunity side of the equation. And then you nailed it by describing the need that exists and access. The problem that we have with access in this community, not just because of COVID, but because of geography, and because of, oh yeah, where people live, and the services that are there, and immunities there, and all of that. So when you think about how we have to balance those two, what do you hope we will keep in mind? Give me some wisdom here that I can, I can make these decisions based on

Peter Ellsworth
that's a hard question. Is sort of dependent. I think there's we should do some of each, yeah, but you have to make choices. I know as you go forward, I don't want to say I'd favor one over the other. I think there's real opportunities in the in the section, in the part dealing with access that's going to require specific philanthropy dollars to help these organizations, you know, be open later. You know, all of that's a monetary thing. On the other side, it's more almost advo- advocacy. And I mean, I think we can be a role player. We can help them in getting broader access to their particular ideas and all those kinds of things. But you've got big players doing this, Apple, other people that are in that space. So I think, but I think in the in the in the community piece, we really need to be there, but we need to look pretty specifically at each need and it's totally independent and separate. Because what works in one community is not going to work at all in the-, they're all different, and that makes it difficult. And that's where focus comes in. Maybe, maybe you just focus in one area and something really works, and then it can be, can be done in other areas, but you just can't start out doing it everywhere.

Grant Oliphant
Pete, again, so much, so many lessons from having done this work and having been a genuinely thoughtful practitioner of it, and you have contributed to the knowledge of the field about how to do it. Well, what do you hope San Diego will keep in mind going forward about itself and and what do you hope it's philanth next generation of philanthropists will keep in mind.

Peter Ellsworth
Well, you know, the the goal of well being, of having a community that can actually, and I know this sounds almost impossible today, but a community that could actually talk to each other, a place where you're really coming together. You know, the arts are, of course, in a magnificent place to do all this. But I was sitting at the opening of the Balboa, 100th year anniversary, the Balboa theater, and here's this guy singing these songs, and everybody is into it and singing and laughing, the blacks, the whites, the young, the old, that we need to think about trying to make sure that we continue to do that, that we continue to come together. Because I think San Diego has had a collaborative experience, certainly in the arts, certainly in science, that we've been a fairly good model of collaboration that needs to be encouraged, but I think it needs to be encouraged in a way, all the way down, so that everybody feels like they're part of this program. I think that's the goal, but it's not easy to get there. And of course, there's going to be people that have more and people that have less, but that doesn't mean that we can't make at least a fair you know, we have a major problem of housing and other things that we've got to address so that people feel included and that they're part of the community. And I think that's what we need to keep in mind going forward.

Grant Oliphant
I have to ask this last question, because I'm just so struck by the moment that we're living through. There is a school of thought that that we're seeing discussed on the national stage, that philanthropy is somehow not legitimate, that there are better ways to make a difference, just by being in business. For example, when you meet somebody who's interested in philanthropy in this community, how do you encourage them to see philanthropy as a beautiful opportunity?

Peter Ellsworth
Well, I usually try to do it by example that would be relevant to their interest. I mean, if they're particularly interested in the arts, there's great examples of what can be accomplished. Yeah, and and again. The philanthropy can be if they follow the model of relating to the people on the ground. They can be the ones that actually find out what the need is. They can address it much more quickly, much more adequately, the government. For all you know, as a bigger organization, it takes some time to do things that things get up there three or four levels. We're right on the ground. We have an opportunity to address these kinds of issues firsthand on the ground, and that's where philanthropy plays, a role that government can't play. They're not in that position right now. If philanthropy starts getting so bigoted and so overwhelmingly how great they are full of itself, well, then they're just as bad as the government. But, but I think if they consider the fact that they're working in the community, they're really looking at what's going on, they're addressing things directly that that's a role that the government doesn't have and can't have, and it's a very important one. And I'm sensitive to the fact there are people who disagree with that. They say we're using taxpayer dollars. They're absolutely right, and that's why, in that case, we need to pay attention to people are paying that money, which is the people out that we're serving.

Grant Oliphant
Yeah? So it comes back to your principle of listening and paying attention, yeah?

Peter Ellsworth
Sorry,

Grant Oliphant
You know, sometimes it takes saying the same thing in many, many different ways for people to to really internalize it and understand it. And it's a beautiful philosophy. And I just really appreciate you for the role you play with this foundation and for the role you've played in San Diego and philanthropy here, it's extraordinary.

Peter Ellsworth
We really all appreciate the role you are playing right now, and you're bringing this national presence and awareness and connections that San Diego has never had before in the philanthropy field, and that's critically important where our voice can be heard broader than just in our community. So we're very grateful to having you here Grant, very lucky.

Grant Oliphant
I'm much more comfortable praising you, but thank you. Pete, all right, okay. I really appreciate it. Thank you.

Crystal Page
Okay, so I love that interview with you and Peter. What really stood out for me was the trust based philanthropy and and it sounds like he was almost a founder of of that type of philanthropy. He

Grant Oliphant
was, he was really in the vanguard of that whole effort to really shift the emphasis away from foundations leading to foundations listening and taking their cues from understanding what community really wanted, and placing their trust in what they heard. You know, I love that, that comment his dad made, that if you remember, it's not about you, you'll be okay in life. And he applied that, apparently, to his law career and his health care career, but he clearly brought it home in his philanthropic career, and he does here at the Foundation, we get to benefit from that every day.

Crystal Page
Absolutely, I think that's like the perfect place to to end on

Grant Oliphant
the Yeah, I hate that we have to, because we've, we've essentially run out of time. But special human being, Peter Ellsworth, and we're lucky to have his leadership in San Diego

Crystal Page
agreed. Thank you

Grant Oliphant
This is a production of the Prebys Foundation,

Crystal Page
hosted by Grant Oliphant

Grant Oliphant
Co-hosted by Crystal Page

Crystal Page
Co-produced by Crystal Page and Adam Greenfield,

Grant Oliphant
engineered by Adam Greenfield,

Crystal Page
production coordination by Tess Karesky,

Grant Oliphant
video production by Edgar Ontiveros Medina,

Crystal Page
special thanks to the Prebys Foundation team.

Grant Oliphant
The stop and talk theme song was created by San Diego's own Mr. Lyrical Groove.

Crystal Page
Download episodes at your favorite pod catcher or visit us at Prebysfdn.org.