On May 16, until the very end of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth’s convocation, the graduates thought their main memory of the day would be the torrential rain and bitter cold they had endured during the outdoor ceremony.
Then, as the shivering and soaked mass finally prepared to march for the presentation of the scrolls, guest speaker Rob Hale, who had had to cut his speech short due to the rain, returned to the lectern with two hockey pockets: there was money in there, he said, and he was waiting for each graduate at one end of the stage to hand them $1,000 as they passed: $500 for yourself, $500 to give to a good cause.
“My friends and I looked at each other: let’s see, it’s a joke,” says Ali McKelvey, one of the students.
No, it was serious. Mr. Hale, co-founder and CEO of Granite Telecommunications, is one of the richest people in the country and his donations are to match. With his wife Karen, he donated $1 million every week in 2022, to causes known and unknown.
As he told graduates during his speech, he has not forgotten that he lost everything when his first company went bankrupt after the dot-com bubble burst in March 2000.
“No kidding, have you ever met someone who lost $1 billion? asked Mr. Hale, who co-owns the NBA’s Boston Celtics.
Since this disaster, he and his wife have found joy and satisfaction in giving their money. By giving students the opportunity to feel the same way, he hopes to ignite a spark that they will take with them, even if there is no guarantee that they will honor his request. (He is confident that the vast majority of them will.)
“If they feel that joy, maybe they will want to do it again throughout their lives,” Mr. Hale, 57, said.
In the United States and elsewhere in the world, we are living in a time of turmoil: the more we help each other, the better things will go.
Rob Hale, Co-Founder and CEO of Granite Telecommunications
To each his own cause
In the week since they were handed two damp envelopes – one marked “GIFT” and the other “GIVE” – new graduates packed their bags, polished their resumes and took their last selfies on campus. They also thought about which cause to send the largest sum they have ever had to give.
Tony da Costa, a graphic design student who graduated with honors, decided after some thought to give his $500 to an acquaintance of his mother whom he has never met; he knows she is sick and having trouble paying her bills.
“I thought giving them to a specific person was better,” said Mr. da Costa, 22, who grew up in Dartmouth, on the southern coast of Massachusetts, near Cape Cod.
Kamryn Kobel, a literature major, donated her $500 to the YWCA in Worcester, Massachusetts, where she learned to swim as a child. She loves her programs for young women and victims of violence.
This donation is a source of pride for her. But it took her a moment to realize that the envelopes she had buried under her poncho contained exactly what Hale had promised: “At first I wondered if there was really money in there.” , she says. Then she was like, “Oh, my God, it’s true. »
Public establishments
The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth has approximately 5,500 undergraduate students: 80% of them are from Massachusetts, 80% have loans or scholarships, and more than half are first-generation students.
This is the fourth time in four years that Mr. Hale has made this type of split gift to graduates. Each time, he chose a public institution in Massachusetts with a high concentration of first-generation, low-income students who had “worked hard to get there,” he said.
In 2023, he distributed his envelopes at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where 66% of freshmen describe themselves as people of color.
By contrast, at Deerfield Academy, a private high school in western Massachusetts (a prosperous area), he gave students nothing, depositing funds into a school-run trust so that each graduate can donate $1000. Mr. Hale, who grew up next door in Northampton, attended high school in Deerfield and was admitted in 1984 to Connecticut College.
In an interview, he emotionally recounted how a UMass-Dartmouth graduate donated her $500 to a local nonprofit that provides Christmas gifts to children in need – a program her family benefited from when she was growing up.
“Seeing things like that, it’s really cool,” he said.
Mme McKelvey, 21, donated her $500 to a women’s shelter in her hometown of Ashland, west of Boston, inspired by classes she took as part of her health and society, where she studied the issues facing disadvantaged women.
“I remember during some classes saying to myself, ‘Someone has to do something about this,’” she said. And now I’m the one who can do something. »
This article was published in the New York Times.
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