Rosalyn Koo was fundraising powerhouse for Chinese communities

Rosalyn Koo, a powerful fundraiser for the Chinese community in the San Francisco area and for schoolgirls in China, died Jan. 30 at her home in San Mateo. She was 94.

The cause was chronic kidney failure, her daughter Debbie Soon said.

Koo had had a successful career as the chief financial officer and a partner of MBT Associates, a large architectural firm based in San Francisco, when in 1988 she retired, at age 62, to devote herself to good works. She became the kind of funding angel of whom nonprofits dream.

She was a force behind the 70-unit Lady Shaw Senior Center, serving the Chinatown and North Beach neighborhoods, which faced considerable community opposition and took seven years to build.

“She knew who to ask, how much to ask for and when to ask,” said Anni Chung, the president and chief executive of Self-Help for the Elderly, a nonprofit of which Koo was a board member.

At one community hearing, Koo often recalled, a prominent resident challenged her by saying, “Why don’t you go back to Chinatown?” Koo stared her down and replied: “You know what? I’m going to outlast you.”

Among other civic endeavors, she oversaw and helped fund the expansion of the Chinatown branch of the San Francisco Public Library and was a founder of the 1990 Institute, which supports, through educational programming and other efforts, “a constructive environment for both U.S.-China relations and for Asian Americans,” according to its website.

But the project dearest to her heart was the Spring Bud Program, an offshoot of the 1990 Institute, which, beginning in 2001, educated 1,000 girls in China’s rural Shaanxi province. Partnering with the All China Women’s Federation, which helped find the girls, Spring Bud took children who were living in poverty and would not have been educated past the third grade, and paid for their education through college, and often through graduate degrees or certificate training as well. After an earthquake, the program also built a school to replace the ones that had been destroyed.

Drawing on her network of friends and collaborators — her soldiers, as Chung, who counted herself among them, put it — Koo not only funded the girls’ schooling; she also bought laptops and other necessary equipment once they got to universities, and identified mentors to nurture and guide them in the big cities they landed in.

All 1,000 girls completed middle school; 275 graduated from high school and 200 from vocational schools, and 170 went on to college.

It was a deeply intimate project for all the contributors, as Chung noted: They stayed with it for 15 or more years and attended all the girls’ graduations. The girls called Koo Grandma Koo.

When Spring Bud began, thousands of girls in the region were not attending school, in part because the culture’s gender bias favored boys. For her own part, Koo remembered wanting to be a boy from a young age, cutting her hair short and wearing boys’ clothes over her school uniform.

When her brothers brought home C grades, they were punished. When she brought home an A, she was told not to study so hard.

Rosalyn Chin-Ming Chen was born Nov. 11, 1926, in Shanghai. Her father, K.F. Chen, was a senior executive at the Bank of China; her mother, Margaret (Sang) Chen, was a homemaker, although she was college educated, which was unusual for her generation. (Margaret’s father was a minister who educated all 10 of his children.)

In addition to her daughter Soon, Koo is survived by another daughter, Jackie Hackett, and a granddaughter.