Grilled shrimp and chicken Milanese for 3,200.
Music by the Black Eyed Peas. All this, by the gilded standards of the hedge fund world, seemed like a lean night out. The Robin Hood Foundation’s spring fund-raising event has long set the pace for charity benefits, raising tens of millions of dollars from publicity-averse hedge fund moguls who engaged in raucous bidding wars to win, say, dinner for 10 with the celebrity chef or a trip to Australia that included lunch with Hugh Jackman. That was then, this is now. The highlight of this year’s benefit, held Tuesday night at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, was a far more conventional challenge grant announced by , a granddaddy of the hedge fund industry and one of the country’s biggest philanthropists. Mr. Soros, who had flown in from Sweden hours earlier, pledged $50 million to address the rapid increase in people in New York City seeking basic support like food and shelter if Robin Hood and its board members raised almost the same amount in each of the next two years. That is one of the largest gifts ever made to satisfy basic needs, according to fund-raising experts, and Mr. Soros said he hoped it would inspire other philanthropists and philanthropic institutions to make similar contributions. “Just as needs have increased so tremendously, the philanthropic organizations have been also victims of the crisis, and they have to cut back,” he said in a telephone interview. “We want to reverse that with this gift.” The spirit of generosity was reflected in the total reached at the event, more than $72 million.
Foundations and major donors are wary of being drawn into &151 and sometimes legally constrained from &151 the kind of checkbook philanthropy needed to support social services in harsh economic times. Typically, big-league philanthropy focuses on specific issues and tries to find strategies to resolve or eliminate them rather than work to fill empty bellies and put roofs over heads.