The family’s ‘retail philanthropist’
Doris Buffett, a selfstyled retail philanthropist who once declared that her billionaire younger brother, Warren Buffett, “loves to make money and I love to give it away,” died Tuesday at her home in Rockport, Maine. She was 92.
Her death was confirmed by her grandson Alexander Buffet Rozek.
Ms. Buffet had been a benefactor in her own right when her brother, one of the world’s most successful investors, announced his intention in 2006 to donate nearly his entire fortune before he died, opening the gates to a flood of supplicants. At the time, his worth was estimated at $44 billion.
While he ran Berkshire Hathaway — the conglomerate that includes Dairy Queen, Duracell and Geico, among other major firms — Mr. Buffett entrusted his sister, and a group of women whom she had recruited, to sift through the requests for financial help, assess their merits and monitor the impact of those that were granted.
In some cases, they were sanctioned to satisfy more modest requests — for money to help pay for dental work, legal bills in custody cases, wheelchairs, automobile repairs, electric bills and the like.
Ms. Buffett’s own Sunshine Lady Foundation, which she founded in 1996, and, more recently, The Letters Foundation, which she and her brother founded, have focused tens of millions of dollars in large and small donations on individuals and organizations committed to educating prison inmates, battered women and low-income teenagers, and to improving the lives of the mentally ill while also easing the burden on their caregivers.
Ms. Buffett shunned what she called “the SOBs” — symphonies, operas and ballets — as recipients of largesse and instead concentrated on the underprivileged, as she did with The Letters Foundation.
“I rounded up a bunch of ladies, and we started reading letters,” she recalled. “Some of them were nutty, but most of them were from people who were genuinely desperate and just needed a little help . ... Decent people who just didn’t have the breaks somebody else did.”
The requests were vetted initially by an informal group of seven or eight women she had brought together in Maine. Their stated goal was not so much to enable the beneficiaries as to empower them.
“I do consider these as investments rather than giveaways, and I’m looking for a good return on them,” Ms. Buffett said. “The best return is when lives change for the better in some way. That’s the commanding thought behind all I do.”
Mr. Buffett recalled in an interview that his sister, who was three years his senior, was always a “doer.”
“She would talk to every one of these people; she didn’t just write a check,” he said. “She was enormously empathetic and did something about it.”
Doris Eleanor Buffet was born Feb. 12, 1928, in Omaha, Neb., a descendant of a 17th-century Long Island pickle farmer. She represented the sixth generation of her family to live in Nebraska’s largest city.
Her father, Howard H. Buffett, was a stockbroker and four-term Republican congressman; her mother was Leila (Stahl) Buffett, whom Doris Buffett believed was bipolar.
Doris and her siblings were given intelligence tests when they were children and, she later discovered, she had scored only two points below Warren. “He got a lot out of those two points,” she said of her brother.
After graduating from Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington, she attended George Washington University and later earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Nebraska. She married Truman Wood, in the first of four marriages that would end in divorce.
In addition to her brother Warren, Ms. Buffett is survived by three children from her first marriage, Robin, Marshall and Sydney Wood; her sister, Bertie Buffett Elliott; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.