It started with a conversation on a Lake of the Ozarks dock.
Comedian Rob Riggle was describing his recent visit to Kansas City’s Children’s Mercy Hospital.
“He had hosted the hospital’s annual Red Hot Night fundraiser [in 2009] and they had taken him on a tour,” Julie Riggle McKee, Riggle’s sister, said recently.
Like anyone who has ever had reason to visit a children’s hospital, Riggle was affected by the experience, meeting patients as well as their parents.
“At the time, Rob’s children were very young,” McKee said, “so it struck home with him.
He said ‘Okay, you’ve got me. I want to do more.’ “
Riggle imagined a new fundraiser: a poker tournament called Big Slick. Having grown up in the Kansas City area, Riggle would include two of his professional peers with local ties, Paul Rudd and Jason Sudeikis.
Over time, other entertainers with area backgrounds would appear, among them Eric Stonestreet, David Koechner, and Heidi Gardner.
This year’s fundraiser, in May, generated a record $4,530,012 for Children’s Mercy. Since the first Big Slick in 2010, the annual event has raised more than $30 million.
“Every year, we strive to raise at least one more dollar than the previous year,” said McKee, a Kansas City area lawyer. “This year exceeded our wildest expectations, a tribute to the generosity of Kansas City.”
Passing the Torch
Any owner of a cellphone today wakes up to a ceaseless river of content, some of it consisting of heartrending charitable appeals.
Big Slick is anything but those unsolicited messages, with Kansas City’s philanthropic community embracing the celebrity organizers as potential trailblazers for a new generation of benefactors.
Count Tom Bloch among those hoping for a Big Slick ripple effect. He is a son of Henry Bloch and a Bloch Family Foundation board member.
His father, Bloch said, “was always hopeful that the next generation of successful entrepreneurs would do what he was doing — creating their own foundations — so that the cycle continues.”
The history of Kansas City philanthropy reaches back to the early 1900s, and is full of those who — like Riggle after his Children’s Mercy visit — acted on their own experiences.
For Henry Bloch, co-founder of the H&R Block tax preparation firm, it was a determination to pay off a debt to those Kansas City clients who supported the business when it opened in 1955.
For Bill Dunn, Sr., JE Dunn Construction chairman emeritus, it was a daughter born with Down syndrome in 1967.
Foundations bearing the Bloch and Dunn names, like others, have for decades invested millions of dollars to enrich the everyday lives of area residents.
But now, Kansas City’s legacy of largesse takes on new relevance, given a decline in nonprofit federal support that could persist even after the dramatic cuts made by the Trump administration.
It’s been a topic at the Dunn foundation quarterly meetings, said Tim Dunn, company chairman and chief investment officer. Board members are pondering what impact such a decline could have on individual organizations.
Board members, he said, are asking questions like: Which organizations are feeling the most pressure? How can temporary assistance from the foundation help them find their footing?
“It’s been a volatile time,” Dunn said.
Charity’s Rough and Tumble
The first donors to what is now Children’s Mercy Hospital were children themselves.
In 1897, girls in southwest Kansas forwarded linens for use in a single bed set aside in a Kansas City women and children’s hospital, then operating near a brickyard rail crossing. Word had reached them of Alice Berry Graham, a dentist, and Katharine Berry Richardson, a doctor.
The two Kansas City sisters had established what they called the Free Bed Fund Association for Crippled, Deformed and Ruptured Children.
The linens represented the first gift to what in 1919 became Children’s Mercy Hospital, which has been located on Hospital Hill since 1970. Much of its early charity came from kids, who donated the pennies they collected as admission to their staged theatricals.
“It amazed me how, between from about 1900 through the early 1920s, these small acts of kindness just grew,” said Tom McCormally, author of “For All Children Everywhere,” a 2017 hospital history.
By the 1920s, many local charitable organizations had formed, some established by those who recognized their own family’s immigrant experience among the newly arrived indigent.
Alfred Benjamin, a Kansas City furniture executive, in 1905 became president of United Jewish Charities and donated much of his annual salary to its operation.
Benjamin ”personified a unique blend of high talent for organization and innovation with a sympathetic understanding for the immigrant poor,” wrote Frank Adler in “Roots in a Moving Stream,” a 1972 history of Congregation B’nai Jehudah, considered Kansas City’s oldest synagogue.
Benjamin’s parents had arrived in Leavenworth, Kansas, from Canada in 1880.
In 1919, Benjamin advocated for a nonsectarian clinic at a Jewish community center near Harrison Street and Admiral Boulevard in Kansas City.
His associates built the facility and named it for Benjamin. The clinic evolved through the years to become Menorah Medical Center in Overland Park.
Hundreds attended Benjamin’s 1923 funeral.
“But Benjamin would not be as well known as William Volker,” said Bill Worley, retired Metropolitan Community College history professor.
Volker’s immigrant parents had arrived in Chicago three days after the city’s catastrophic 1871 fire. The 12-year-old Volker walked the streets, seeing the desperation of those affected and the charity shown them.
In 1882, Volker moved to Kansas City to start a picture frame business. He assisted the penniless men who came by his offices asking for help.
By the 1890s, Volker’s business had begun growing into a wholesale distributor of home furnishings.
In 1893, the Commercial Club of Kansas City — the forerunner of today’s Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce — announced it was not its responsibility to assist the city’s needy. The Panic of 1893 had led to high unemployment across the country.
Many again came to Volker for help, and got it.
His compassion continued through the Depression, when the desperate wrote Volker letters detailing the lost jobs and unanticipated hospital visits that had ruined them — and the chagrin they felt in asking him for help.
“I am sorry to be troubling you again, but I promise you it is for the last time,” a Kansas City woman with elegant handwriting wrote in a 1930 letter held today among the William Volker and Co. papers archived by the State Historical Society of Missouri.
Volker helped her and many others, signing small authorization slips for amounts as small as $2.
“The Lord shovels money to me faster than I can shovel it away,” he once said.
Yet Volker remembered how his mother often cited a passage from the New Testament’s Gospel of Matthew, advising how those assisting the needy should “not announce it with trumpets.”
Through his quiet philanthropy, Volker came to be known as “Mr. Anonymous.”
Following his 1947 death, grateful Kansas City residents ended Volker’s anonymity, placing his name on a fountain, a boulevard, a neighborhood association, and the campus of what is now the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Two years later, the Kansas City Association of Trusts and Foundations hired Homer Wadsworth, a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, native and community planner, as its first executive director.
If Benjamin and Volker had acted out of benevolence, Wadsworth had his own motivations.
In 1956, he told a reporter about the severe leg injuries his father had suffered in an industrial boating accident.
“Modern rehabilitation,” he said, “would have saved my father’s life.”
Wadsworth helped redevelop Hospital Hill, forming new leadership for what is now University Health Truman Medical Center, and advocating for the establishment of the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine.
He proved a controversial figure, taking grief from those both inside and outside the Kansas City power structure.
In 1956, the Kansas City Star quoted an anonymous City Hall official who called Wadsworth “one of the most dangerous men in Kansas City” because he was skilled at finding foundation support for programs which, once successful, created a demand that city administrators felt obliged to fill.
Meanwhile, in 1968, Saul Alinsky, a Chicago community organizer who had formed his own Kansas City social justice organization, insulted Wadsworth, saying he “gives off the smell of bank board rooms and men’s cologne.”
In 1970, Kansas City, Kansas, native Richard Rhodes incorporated into his book, “The Inland Ground: An Evocation of the American Middle West,” a chapter on Wadsworth that he entitled: The Most Influential Man in Kansas City, Missouri, Has No Money and Is A Native of Pittsburgh.”
Rhodes asked Wadsworth why he had spent 20 years in Kansas City, while he could have been a candidate for leading a national foundation.
“I think the action is here,” Wadsworth said. “I don’t want to be removed from active participation.”
Wadsworth, Rhodes wrote, “liked the rough and tumble.”
Wadsworth did, in fact, eventually leave Kansas City — in 1974 to head up the Cleveland Foundation.
Four years later, several Kansas City area donors — among them Henry Bloch — passed a hat in which they collected $210.15.
That helped establish the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation, which has provided more than $8 billion in grants since its inception, according to its website.
Repaying the debt
Brothers Henry and Richard Bloch opened their bookkeeping business in 1947.
“They were serving small clients, just the two of them, living hand-to-mouth,” said Tom Bloch.
That changed with the 1955 tax season.
According to an oft-told story, a Kansas City Star advertising account representative convinced them to place an ad detailing their services.
The following morning, clients lined up outside their office near 39th and Main streets.
By the 1960s, his father found time to devote to nonprofits, Tom Bloch said. Soon, he became a donor.
Henry and Richard Bloch established the H&R Block Foundation in 1974.
In 2011, Henry Bloch with his wife established the Marion and Henry Bloch Family Foundation. His father, Tom Bloch said, was determined to repay what he considered a debt owed to Kansas City residents.
Before his 2019 death, his father would remind him of that, Bloch added.
“He’d say, ‘I want 100% of the gifts from this foundation to go to Kansas City organizations.’
“He was very specific about it. He had to repay the debt.”
The Dunn family, meanwhile, long had believed in community investment.
Company founder John Ernest Dunn during World War II, famously had refunded almost $200,000 in profits following the 1942 completion of a Hannibal, Missouri, quartermaster depot.
The philanthropy of his son, Bill Dunn, Sr., today company chairman emeritus, grew more urgent upon the birth of his daughter, Mary Kathleen. The child’s challenges changed the perspective of Dunn and his wife, Jean.
“Special needs, Down syndrome — I think it rocked their world,” said Tim Dunn, a grandson of Bill Dunn, Sr.
But, he added, “it was both a cross and a blessing. They went all in to make sure she had a great life, and also to help people with disabilities and special needs.”
The Dunn Family Charitable Foundation, established in 1981, remains committed to those communities, Tim Dunn added.
The crucial support such charitable foundations today provide figures to grow ever more so, Tom Bloch said, given possible declines in federal support of nonprofits.
“If there is less funding coming to these worthwhile organizations, it means those who are still supporting them are all the more critical to their operations,” he said.
David Miles, president of both the Bloch Family Foundation and the H&R Block Foundation, agreed. In recent months, he has been meeting with other area foundation officials seeking “collective knowledge” and consensus.
“That is the piece we need to try to figure out,” Miles said.
“How do we manage the best use of our money to make sure we are still serving individuals in our community, while at the same time having to make some difficult decisions?”
Still, he added, charitable foundations cannot replace what the government has been providing.
“Even with all the charitable money in our community, we cannot replace Medicaid cuts.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
