The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Alisa Swidler is the social networker extraordinaire. Alex Preston discusses philanthropy, fundraising and Hillary Clinton with her
Alisa Swidler plays cards with Bill Clinton and has Charlize Theron on speed dial. She parties with the Prime Minister and hobnobs with Boris Johnson. But it’s all for a good cause, she tells Alex Preston. Photographs by Jooney Woodward
Two years ago, when her son Ash was 12, Alisa Swidler took him to visit Bill Clinton at the headquarters of t he for mer president’s charitable foundation in Litt le Rock, Arkansas. While they were there, they ran into Dr Raj Panjabi, co-founder of Last Mile Health, a charitable organisation providing medical aid to remote communities in the developing world. Ash asked Panjabi what his charity needed most; the answer was first-aid kits. ‘So when people came to dinner, or to a party here, we’d ask them to bring firstaid kits instead of wine or flowers,’ his mother tells me, with a small, self-deprecating grin. ‘I mean, I don’t need another bottle of Dom. We ended up with more than 5,000 kits.’
It’s an anecdote that illustrates the triangulation of politics, philanthropy and family that drives Swidler’s expansive, effervescent life. She and Ash took more than 1,000 of the first-aid kits out to a remote area of Liberia
themselves. ‘We hardly packed any clothes,’ she says. The village they stayed in when distributing the kits – without running water or electricity, more than nine hours’ drive from Monrovia – was hit by Ebola a week after they departed. Those medical kits saved lives.
I meet Swidler in the light-filled morning room of her Georgian mansion in Windsor Great Park. Set in acres of rolling, deer speckled parkland, Windsor Castle is visible in the distance, its stone t he colour of t he misty autumn air. The morning room’s walls are a pi x ilat ion of hundreds of photog raphs of Swidler and her family. Her husband is a hedgefunder and she shows me their five children – Nate, Ash, Rosie, Ava and Lily. One of the pictures catches my eye: Nate, who is now 15, standing smudged and smiling against scrubland, a garland of marigolds around his neck. ‘That was from the first trip we did, working wit h a n educat iona l foundat ion teaching English to sub-Dalit tribes in northern India.’ Nate was nine at the time. ‘He did card tricks for the kids. By the end of the trip he’d picked up some Hindi. He’d always been a good traveller, so I had no concerns about taking him with me. I just told him to eat rice if he was hungry.’
Swidler is, at first glance, rather typical of her class. Her knuckles shimmer and dance with diamonds, a golden jag uar prowls along one finger. Her groomed hair and burnished skin give the impression of one used to strolling the decks of super-yachts. She’s far from the bridge-and-country-club cliché, however. Swidler, 44, sit s on Hilla r y Clinton’s finance committee, one of the ‘international donors’ that Donald Trump claims ‘control every move’ Hillary makes. She is on the development board of the Royal Albert Hall and of the English National Ballet, as well as the advisor y board of Charlize Theron’s Africa Outreach Project. At a Goldie Hawn fundraiser at Annabel’s in September, Swidler got into a bidding war with Boy George over a painting during the charity auction (he won). She works with both the Clinton Foundation and Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Unite charity, and was executive producer of the 2014 film Food
Chains, an exposé of the multinational exploitation of migrant farm workers. But what is perhaps unique about Swidler is the central role her children play in her philanthropy.
‘The best trips are the ones led by the children,’ she tells me. ‘We’ve had a bar or bat mitzvah every year for five years, and we give the children the choice of which charity to suppor t. Both of the boys went to spend time at fa r ms ru n by L eket Is r ael [a nondenominational food bank], and Nate decided to support them. He knew that if he raised £35,000, he’d be able to buy a refrigerated tr uck for them. So that’s what he did.’ The Swidlers give four or five parties a year, and ask guests to write cheques to their children’s chosen charities. ‘Part of me thinks it’s really tacky, part of me doesn’t care,’ Swidler says with a laugh. ‘At the parties, I ask the kids to work the room, to talk to people about the project, so they can raise even more next time.’
The boys a re compet it ive. While Bor is Johnson was mayor, Swidler was trustee of the Mayor’s Fund for London. When Ash’s bar mitzvah came round, he chose that charity (he was on its youth board anyway), which had launched a project to provide free breakfasts to primar y school children in London. Ash financed 10 schools for three years with the £40,000 he raised. ‘People say to me, “Why don’t you let your kids keep some of the money, 10 per cent or whatever?” But they don’t need it, and it can do so much good.’
I wonder what it must be like for the parents whose children are in the same class as the Swidler boys – both are at Eton. ‘Parents would say, “You’re always gallivanting around,” and I’d reply, “This isn’t gallivanting, it’s making a difference.”’ Swidler tells me of one trip, to establish a blood bank in a remote area of Ghana, when she persuaded a friend to bring her child ren a long. They needed to ra ise £10,000 each to finance the project. ‘The other mother just said she’d write a cheque for the whole thing. I told Rosie, my daughter, that she needed to fundraise it.’ Rosie, who was eight at the time, organised a swimathon at the lake in New Hampshire where the family spend their summers, raided her mother’s address book and the money was raised.
Swidler g rew up the daughter of fiercely ethical parents on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Her mother continues to practise as a child psycholog ist; her fat her init ially taught humanities in the South Bronx, then
Swidler sits on Hillary Clinton’s finance committee, one of the ‘international donors’ that Donald Trump claims ‘control every move’ Hillary makes
became the principal of a school near the family’s West 86th Street home. ‘We couldn’t eat grapes because of the way they were treating Chilean workers,’ says Swidler. ‘There was never any veal. We were always marching for something – no nukes, civil rights.’ Her brother was nine years younger, so her upbringing was that of an only child, with a strong social conscience the lynchpin of her parents’ child-rearing. ‘They were always encouraging me to figure out ways to give back. So even if I didn’t have money, I could always go and serve in a soup kitchen, or stack shelves at a food bank. But I had friends whose parents were on the boards of the Lincoln Center, BAM [Brooklyn Academy of Music] and other venerable institutions, which gave me a window into that – I was always really interested in what they were doing.’
A‘People criticise me for never saying no, but I really believe in the power of saying yes. Even just a telephone call or email, you never know the difference it’ll make’
fter attending a liberal arts college in New York state, Swidler moved back to her parents’ house and began working as a grants writer in the events department of BAM. ‘It was fine when I was 21, but you can only stuff a certain number of envelopes, you know.’
Late at night, coming home from fundraisers, Swidler would see piles of unsold bread outside New York’s high-end bakeries. It was the spark that launched her career as a philanthropist. She telephoned City Harvest, who ran a series of food banks across the city. ‘I told them that Zabar’s was throwing out 700 rolls every night. They said that they didn’t have the capacit y to pick it up t hemselves, but if I brought it to them they’d be able to use it. So I told my father who, God bless him, said he’d help. So I started calling up all of these bakeries and getting all this bread. I had to physically go to these places in my father’s car to collect it.’
Eventually, Swidler’s mother said that it was getting too much for her father, driving to bakeries all over Manhattan and the Bronx into the small hours ever y night. She suggested her daughter put advertisements in church and synagogue weeklies, requesting volunteers. ‘A man answered an ad in the synagogue newsletter,’ says Swidler. ‘He rang up saying that he was a night owl, and would come and drive me around. I thought it was a little bit creepy, but I said, “OK, I’m up for it…” So he would drive me, four nights a week. And that was how we started Bread Aid [now part of City Harvest].’
A year later, the man who’d been sitting next to her most nights – sombre and taciturn – told her that he had a large family fortune, and that he would like her to come and sit on the board of his foundation. He was Paul Guilden, heir to the Bulova jewellery company and owner of Stetson hats. ‘It did just really ram home to me – and this is something I constantly repeat to my children – how important it is to put yourself out there, because you never know what it’ll lead to. People often criticise me for never being able to say no, but I really believe in the power of saying yes. Even if it’s just making a telephone call, or sending a few emails, you never know the difference it’ll make for you, or for the person you’ve just helped.’
The glass front door of Swidler’s home is a busy collage of her children’s drawings and campaign stickers for Hillary. There’s a ‘Hill Yes!’ next to the doorbell. Inside, there are a series of small shrines to the Clintons, with pictures of Bill at the house, smiling with an avuncular hand on Ash’s shoulder, or with the blond beacons of the children’s heads bobbing around him. There’s Swidler herself with Hillar y, with Richard Branson, with David Cameron and Boris Johnson. Although she is a staunch Democrat in the US, Swidler chaired this year’s Conservative Summer Ball at the Hurlingham Club just after the referendum, and was seated between Cameron and Israeli ambassador Mark Regev. More than 650 people went, paying between £500 and several thousand for tickets.
But it is Hillary who is the focus of her energy. ‘When Hillary was running for Senate we were still in New York and a friend of mine was working for the campaign. When we moved over here, my friend came to visit and was like, “This house is amazing. Hillary is gearing up for the big race, you should do a fundraiser here.”’
Since then, Swidler has organised numerous events for the Clintons, starting with a visit from Bill in 2007. There were fundraisers at The Dorchester and in Waterloo Vaults, and soon Chelsea was accompanying her father on the trips. It was on one of these visits that the possibility of Swidler becoming involved with the Clinton Foundation arose. Soon she was taking
Ash to briefings in Little Rock. ‘Ash is convinced that he and Bill have got a connection, that they’re mates. And they kind of are. He wants to be a politician and Bill has encouraged him.’ She recalls flying to New York for a poker night with Bill, Ash at her side. Her son spent the evening hanging out with the musician Ed Sheeran – ‘He was so charming, really took Ash under his wing’ – while she and Bill played cards.
Before I leave, Swidler takes me on a tour of the magnificent house. It was built in the 1770s as a grace-and-favour property and was also t he home of Sir John Aird, Edward VII’s equerry. The rooms are alive with photographs and art; there’s a ping-pong table in the centre of the red-carpeted ballroom; a pinball machine on one side of the drawing room. We stop in front of a picture of a young, handsome Bill Clinton, and I ask if she’s confident about the forthcoming election. ‘It has been rough, it has been really hard,’ she says. ‘We’ve been here 15 years and we’re dual citizens. In this situation, you go back to America and it’s zinging at you constantly. Here, you can put your head in the sand. But I want every expat to vote.’
Swidler, who has been fundraising for Hillary in both the US and the UK, feels that, with Trump’s indiscretions and a sense that the American people are finally taking Hillary to their hearts, things might finally have turned a corner. ‘Right now, I’m thrilled with the position, but don’t take anything for granted. You can’t rest on your laurels.’