Although T. Denny Sanford came late to the party that is San Diego, he arrived with the resounding boom of $100 million in donations to scientific and medical research that will echo for decades to come.
In the three years since his arrival he’s earned lifetime achievement status here, with recognition last month as a Lifetime Achievement Award winner at the San Diego Business Journal’s fourth annual Health Care Champions event.
Why San Diego? Was it the golf courses, the sunny weather, the human intellectual capital?
For Sanford, a billionaire who has homes in Vail, Colo., and Scottsdale, Ariz., the reasons were simple.
“I know how selective and effective this community is, taking research and medical techniques to the whole world,” Sanford said. “The way things are connected and the connections between organizations that are working on these advances — I have not witnessed collaboration like this in other communities.
“From the bench to the bedside, we want to advance cures quickly,” he added. “I’m happy to be part of that.”
Sanford is no stranger to philanthropy. He has been involved in charities in South Dakota, where he grew his small fortune into a big fortune in the 1980s, when South Dakota’s less stringent credit card regulations made the state the home to big and small credit lenders, including Citibank N.A. and his company, Premier Bankcard.
A Minnesota native, Sanford started in sales and marketing for the Armstrong Cork Co. after college. He left to start his own company, representing construction and engineering manufacturers, and launched Contech Inc., which he took public in 1972 and sold to Rexnord Inc. 10 years later. Reports say he left the company with about $20 million and set himself up in venture capital as Threshold Ventures.
Four years later, he bought a friend’s banking business and launched the credit line.
Rich and Generous Ranks
Sanford appears on The Forbes 400 Richest Americans list, though the publication notes his fortune is down because of the recession and its deleterious effect on credit.
About five years ago Sanford started turning up on other lists: BusinessWeek’s The 50 Most Generous Philanthropists list in 2006.
His first big gift was to Children’s Home Society, a South Dakota children’s charity. The $2 million donation in 1998 was followed by a second gift of $15 million.
“It began 10 or 15 years ago,” Sanford said in an interview with the Business Journal. “I felt it was an important and smart organization that supported abused children. They have been so harmed.”
The Children’s Home Society works with kids primarily between the ages of 4 and 13 years old, finding them foster and permanent homes and providing support services to help the children get past the challenges of their younger days.
“They have a great history of turning kids around,” Sanford said. “They had to fight to be able to terminate parental rights when the parents didn’t measure up — that’s normal now but it wasn’t then.”
Sanford found his ability to help the group accomplish its mission rewarding, particularly because he was investing in children.
“I like giving them a voice, a chance,” he said. “Kids, especially, deserve to have a good chance at the long life ahead of them.”
Then Sanford became involved with the Sioux Valley Hospital, donating $16 million toward building a children’s hospital.
“I built a hospital for kids that looks like a castle,” Sanford said. “Kids are coming in with some of the scariest news of their lives and the hospital doesn’t look or feel like a lab or a place for illness, it looks like the great place it is, like a theme park and a safe place.”
He tied the bow with a $16 million gift to the Mayo Clinic to link its pediatric research to the children’s hospital, and a $20 million gift to the Sanford School of Medicine at The University of South Dakota.
And he donated $400 million to the Sioux Valley Health chain, renamed Sanford Health, which is 35 hospitals and 180 clinics strong.
Business Savvy
But while Sanford’s heart is in the donation game, his business acumen is in play, too.
For all its hands-on learning and smart practices, Sanford Health lacks a full-blown pediatric research wing — despite his gifts to create special pediatric research, clinics and treatment environments. Creating one is a billion-dollar experiment and, some say, a dicey proposition under South Dakota law.
“It would have been nice to pull it together under one umbrella,” said Ed Gillenwaters, vice president for external relations at the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute. “Then Denny came out and met Malin Burnham and saw the Burnham Institute. Malin said, ‘Why don’t you do your laboratory research here?’ ”
Sanford had met Doug and Betsy Manchester on a round-the-world tour a few months after he made the $400 million gift to Sanford Health, Burnham said. Manchester, a board member of the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, talked the institute up and invited Sanford to visit.
“We made a proposal to start a pediatric research division of Burnham and that’s what really interested him,” Malin Burnham said. “We already had a dozen federal grants but they weren’t in a cluster and we didn’t have the horsepower to push that division until Denny stepped in.”
And then Burnham brought Sanford over to the consortium he’d established with the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, The Scripps Research Institute, and UC San Diego, and showed him the awesome potential of getting pure research and technologic applications for stem cell research under one roof.
The Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine, which taps into the brilliant staff the four institutions already had, is under construction now and expects to open its doors by the end of 2011.
“I twisted his arm for another $30 million,” Burnham said. “And we’re so grateful, we named it after him.”
Sanford sees the consortium as part of the smart San Diego way of getting things done.
“The effect of those young, brilliant post-doc Ph.D.s who will not be encumbered by the overhead and problems of belonging to an organization is very positive,” Sanford said. “They are results-oriented and there will be changes for the better as a result.”
Partners in Philanthropy
But meeting Burnham three years ago, the tan, well-dressed champion sailor and real estate mogul, was more than a business event.
The two self-made millionaires have turned to philanthropy with a vengeance. Burnham agrees that he may have goaded Sanford, but suggests it was just smart philanthropy to get involved with Burnham.
“Denny’s is a unique philanthropy in that he doesn’t jump to opportunities. He looks long term and figures out where he wants to help,” Burnham said. “He looks in a vein of need and figures out those that aren’t being supported the way he thinks they should be. Then he brings his ideas and his contacts along with the money.”
Sanford enjoys his friendship with Burnham, as well as having a partner in philanthropy.
“I have been very involved with Malin. I think so highly of him,” Sanford said. “I plan to die broke and Malin said he’s going to help.”