In 1969, Doris and Don Fisher opened the first Gap clothing store in San Francisco. Frustrated by never being able to find pants that fit Don properly, they went to the root of the problem and began selling their own apparel. Thus, with one pair of pants, a retail sensation was born, and Gap (named by Doris) has since grown to 3,100 stores around the world.
When Don Fisher stepped down as CEO of Gap in 1995, he and Doris began looking for ways to increase their involvement in philanthropy. Don had a long-standing commitment to helping children, honed by more than thirty years of service on the board of the Boys & Girls Club of San Francisco. He was becoming increasingly concerned, as was Doris, about what was happening (or not) in the public schools of the city where he’d grown up. “The interest Doris and I have in improving public education comes from our worry that the gulf is growing, not as much between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ anymore, but between the ‘knows’ and the ‘know-nots,’” Don reflected.
To the Fishers, public charter schools, which offered greater freedom over hiring, budgets, and leadership, seemed to offer the best opportunity to tackle the huge problems facing education. They had another advantage as well: successful efforts could be copied around the country. Rather than support dozens of separate, individual charter schools, the Fishers sought a program where they could use their formidable marketing skills and business experience to help it grow. “I want to do something that’s scalable,” Don commented, “where we can touch a lot of kids.”
Having clarified what they hoped to achieve, Don and Doris next sought advice. They were personally invested and interested in education, but they also knew they had a lot to learn. To that end, they hired Scott Hamilton, then the Massachusetts associate commissioner of education for charter schools, to help them identify high-potential organizations. After a full year of searching and learning, they narrowed their focus to the Knowledge Is Power Program.
At the time, KIPP was just two middle schools in Houston and New York City, but it fit the Fishers’ criteria in every dimension. It had a strong, results-oriented approach. Expectations for students were high: the organization had a compelling focus on making college the goal for all students. And the visionary cofounders, Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, had solid ideas about how to spread the KIPP approach to other cities.
“The movement in general needs to realize we mustn’t accept mediocre or poor charter schools, because they’ll bring down the rest of the schools.” - Don
Beyond these many qualifications, however, KIPP had something equally important. It inspired Doris and Don Fisher, because it resonated with their own deeply held values and beliefs, in particular, the belief that race or income shouldn’t limit a child’s chance to be educated.
Having invested the time to find the right organization, the Fishers were prepared to play a significant role. They committed $15 million over three years to start the KIPP Foundation, designed to help KIPP begin growing toward national scale. In addition, through their frequent communication with KIPP’s leaders, they began to realize that more would be needed to make a real difference in the students’ lives—first and foremost the right teachers and principals. So when the Fishers learned that, like Feinberg and Levin, two-thirds of the KIPP principals were alumni of Teach for America (TFA), they increased their commitment to help that organization grow as well. Today, 28 percent of KIPP teachers are TFA teachers or alumni. The Fishers also worked with KIPP to launch and fund the Fisher Fellowship, a yearlong leadership-development program with intensive coursework, residencies, and coaching, designed to prepare individuals to open and lead high-performing KIPP schools. Through programs like this, KIPP has developed and retained its best faculty; 73 percent of KIPP school leaders began as KIPP teachers.
Relentlessly seeking results, the Fishers and KIPP strove to learn what was working and what wasn’t through transparent sharing of real results. If bad news came, they wanted it unvarnished. KIPP’s public, annual report card, which publishes the results of every KIPP school, was Don Fisher’s idea.
The results speak for themselves. Since the KIPP Foundation was established in 2000, KIPP has grown to ninety-nine schools in twenty states plus Washington, DC, teaching more than 26,000 students. Moreover, KIPP is nationally recognized as the gold standard in charter education. Of the students who complete eighth grade with KIPP, 95 percent graduate from high school, versus the national average of fewer than 70 percent. Some 88 percent of KIPP eighth grade completers have gone on to college, far beyond the national average. KIPP is also continuing its ambitious growth, planning to double the number of students served by 2015.
The Fisher family is KIPP’s largest national partner, having provided more than $70 million toward the growth of the network—a significant sum, to be sure, but, ultimately, perhaps not as significant as the cumulative time, influence, and leadership they have also given. Don Fisher died in 2009, but Doris continues to support KIPP and their son, John, has succeeded Don as chair of the KIPP Foundation board. This tremendous philanthropic journey, and the opportunity it has created for tens of thousands of young people, began with the strong beliefs of Don and Doris Fisher and their equally strong, self-imposed quest for excellence.
Don and Doris Fisher were active donors outside of education too. They assembled a large collection of contemporary art—some 1,100 works, with pieces by Roy Lichtenstein, Gerhard Richter, and Andy Warhol—which will eventually be housed permanently at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Fisher was a major booster of the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, for which he served as governor. He endowed the Fisher Center of Real Estate and Urban Economics, as well as the Fisher Center for the Strategic Use of Information Technology, both at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.
"We want to give back to the city we love by sharing the art that means so much to us" - Doris and Don
Don Fisher was not the biggest funder of education reform in the last century. But he may have been the most consequential. Fisher was among the very first to find and fund almost all of the most promising ideas and programs of the last 20 years. He seemed to have an uncanny knack for discovering effective people, which was coupled to a fierce independent streak that encouraged him to back them long before anyone else.
References
Give Smart: Philanthropy that Gets Results. Book by Joel Lawrence Fleishman and Thomas J. Tierney
