By Marcello Di Cintio / Photography by Marc Rimmer

Michele Fugiel Gartner, self-described “philanthropy junkie,” didn’t truly understand that there was a world outside of her hometown until the Russian letters started to arrive. She was in the eighth grade, in Chicago, and had written to a school magazine looking for a pen pal. Her query was translated and published in a similar publication in Russia. The responses filled her mailbox – she received more than 300 letters – and opened her up to hundreds of different lives, most similar to her own. “That was a big marker for me,” Gartner says. The letters showed her that “there is something else out there.” The experience sparked an interest in intercultural dialogue that has led her around the world and, now, to Calgary.

Philanthropy junkie Michele Fugiel Gartner of Social Venture Partners Calgary. Photo by Marc Rimmer

Gartner and I meet over coffee not far from her digs at Social Venture Partners Calgary (SVP), where she is executive director. A private philanthropy firm that matches individual donors with local non-profits, it is a member of the global association SVP International. Beyond telling me the story of her post-Soviet pen pals, it’s difficult to get Gartner to talk about herself. Her impulse is to talk, instead, about the “sector,” about policies, about the “we” of her colleagues at SVP. In anyone else, this tendency to stay on message would suggest stiffness or even evasion. But she laughs so easily and so often, I realize talking policy is what brings Gartner joy. She is not merely promoting the non-profit sector, she is revealing what fills her heart.

Gartner studied communications at Arizona State University and, after graduation, taught English for two years in Japan. She returned to academia with a focus on Asia and made her way to the East-West Center in Hawaii, then to the School of Orient and African Studies at the University of London, where she studied public diplomacy. Eventually, Gartner joined the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in Seattle. This was her first foray into the world of large-scale, multifaceted private philanthropy.

At the Gates Foundation, Gartner quickly learned that philanthropy was about more than just a Robin Hood transfer of dollars from the rich to the poor. She learned the difference between giving and “giving well.” She learned the due diligence of grants and grant writing. The government side of philanthropy. The political side. The grassroots side. She learned about tax and legal implications and the policy intricacies of policy that would bore most people into numbness. Philanthropy is “really layered,” she says. “That’s why I am so captivated.”

After rounding her way from Chicago to Arizona, Japan to Hawaii, and London to Seattle, Gartner arrived in Calgary last year with her husband, Craig, a Canadian-born banker she met in London. While she navigates the world of local philanthropy – SVP has invested more than $1.5 million in local “investees,” as they call the organizations they fund – Craig is educating her in the finer points of Canadian culture. Her father-in-law, meanwhile, gives her books about hockey. (Gartner has already joined the Flames faithful, itself an act of charity.) But it is a northern brand of philanthropy that most intrigues her. In the United States, the struggle is to get government to support non-profits. In Canada, the government is by far the biggest investor in the sector. The challenge for Canadian non-profits, then, is to attract private donors, those people and businesses that can make an impassioned and personal commitment to a cause – not to mention bringing in serious dollars. NEXT PAGE

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