Doris Buffett
Philanthropist who helped her brother Warren give away billions
DORIS BUFFETT, who has died aged 92, was the older sister of the multi-billionaire investor Warren Buffett and helped him to give away much of his wealth to good causes.
When Buffett announced in 2006 that he would give away his billions, he was flooded with individual requests for help. Not wanting to disregard the requests, but too busy running his investment company Berkshire Hathaway, he asked his 86-year-old sister to help.
From then on, while her brother concentrated on making a few substantial donations to organisations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Doris, with the help of a small team of volunteers under the aegis of her own philanthropic organisation, the Sunshine Lady Foundation, scrutinised each small request to find people who had fallen on hard times through no fault of their own.
Most appeals to which she responded were modest
– the man who needed a new glass eye; the grandmother who wanted a gravestone for the three children she had lost; a disabled woman who needed a car to visit her daughter.
But Doris Buffett’s drive to help people had developed much earlier during the Great Depression, when she herself experienced want and unhappiness and saw people struggling with hunger and homelessness. That drive grew as she faced her own problems in life.
Doris Eleanor Buffett was born on February 12 1928 in Omaha, Nebraska, the eldest of three children of Howard Buffett and Leila, née Stahl.
Howard was a stockbroker who lost everything in the Great Depression, though he managed to rebuild his business and was later elected as a Republican member of Congress.
However the family experienced lean times in the 1930s and Doris’s childhood was overshadowed by her mother’s mood swings and terrible rages which were often directed at her eldest child. “I never heard the words, ‘I love you,’” she told Michael Zitz, author of Giving It All Away: The Doris Buffett Story (2010). “I never had a story read to me. Rarely was I tucked into bed.”
Her bad luck continued as she grew up. Married and divorced four times, she suffered two bouts of cancer and lost huge amounts of money in the stock market crash of 1987.
Doris Buffett started her Sunshine Lady Foundation in 1996 after inheriting money, and as well as helping her brother to give away much of his own fortune, she gave away $150 million of her own money, mainly focusing on larger programmes including scholarships for victims of domestic violence, educational programmes for prisoners and programmes for the mentally ill.
But it was the personal connections she made to recipients that set her apart. One beneficiary, Michael Shane Hale, a prison inmate in New York state, recalled in an interview with the Guardian in 2018, how an encounter with Doris Buffett had transformed his life.
On a visit to his prison, she had given him a copy of Man’s Search for Meaning, an account of life in Auschwitz by Viktor Frankl, telling him that it had helped her “to get a bearing on the world – what’s important, what’s not important.”
“It was shocking. I’m, like, the piece of s--t that took somebody’s life,” Hale recalled. “I’m the lowest of the low. And to have someone who genuinely seems to care about people – that was a really amazing moment.”
Doris Buffett shared her brother’s commitment to giving away his wealth before his death, explaining that her goal was for the last cheque she wrote to bounce, though in fact Warren Buffett continued to make money faster than she could give it away.
Doris Buffett is survived by her brother and by three children from her first marriage.
Doris Buffett, born February 12 1928, died August 4 2020