For the past decade, Hope Woodhouse, a longtime Wall Street executive who got her start on the mostly male trading floor at Salomon Brothers and went on to become George Soros’ chief operating officer, has re-directed her skills toward philanthropy.
This time, the neediest are reaping the rewards.
After serving as president of the John’s Island Community Service League from 2018 to 2020, Woodhouse now chairs its strategic grants committee – and the volunteer league, operating for 41 years out of one of the island’s most affluent communities, has become one of the largest generators of donor dollars in the county.
While the membership of more than 1,000 John’s Island residents includes several hundred men, new members increasingly are women like Woodhouse, retiring from high-intensity careers, now able to apply their leadership and strategy skills to local philanthropy.
In the past year, the league raised a record $1.5 million, and gave it away to scrupulously selected causes benefiting the county’s women, children and families.
For Woodhouse, her turn from Wall Street to philanthropy would seem natural, given the long line of powerful women volunteers in her family. Her grandmother, Katherine Neuberger, a Barnard graduate, championed causes like equality and prison reform and chaired New Jersey’s Board of Higher Education for 12 years.
“She was a tremendous role model,” said Hope of her grandmother. “All of my friends loved her because she was highly unusual, very progressive, a very strong woman and pro-choice. She cared about education more than anything else. I was the oldest grandchild and she played us off against each other to see who could get the highest SAT and that sort of thing.
“My grandmother would have been a businesswoman or a judge if she’d been allowed to,” said Woodhouse. “It wasn’t socially acceptable to do that in the early 1900s. But for her to be a board member and CEO and chair of various nonprofits was acceptable. So that’s what she did.”
Katherine’s daughter, Joan – Hope’s mother – attended the academically elite all-girls Brearley School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. From there, she went to Sarah Lawrence, majoring in political science. One spring break, she went to Bermuda and fell in love with a Yale man vacationing from Grosse Pointe – Henry Macauley Woodhouse. Hope was the oldest of the couple’s three children, and the only one to follow her parents to John’s Island. Mac Woodhouse passed away last November.
Joan Woodhouse, who has lived in John’s Island for 30 years, is perhaps best-known in Vero for raising money to build a pool at the Gifford Youth Achievement Center. She was an early advocate for reproductive rights, joining Planned Parenthood soon after her marriage in 1953.
She was active in the Junior League, and was instrumental in getting a Detroit PBS station to air the city’s first Black-produced, Black-hosted TV show following the Detroit riots in 1967.
Both Hope’s mother and grandmother were outspoken progressives, and major influences on Hope growing up. They poured themselves into nonprofit work, largely because careers for women at the time were limited at best, frowned upon at worst. “They made their careers in public service,” said Hope.
But the family always told Hope that she would get a job on Wall Street. No one expected her to one day apply her vast experience with hedge funds to raising funds for charity.
“I didn’t see it at all,” said Joan Woodhouse of her daughter’s change of focus. “It came all of a sudden. I’m not surprised she’s done a good job, but I’m surprised she got caught up in the nonprofit world the way she has. She was so active in her own career that I thought, if it comes, it’ll come, but don’t count on it. People can’t do everything.”
These days, for many women, the “everything” is coming sequentially: family, career, and then philanthropy. When the third phase lands post-career powerhouses in Vero, the entire community benefits.
“It used to be when the man retired, a couple moved to John’s Island,” said Hope. “Now it’s when the man and woman retire.” Those women leaving high-powered careers are changing the social landscape at not only John’s Island but at Windsor and other communities, residents say. Their drive, redirected toward philanthropy, comes with years of leadership experience and is turbo-charging Vero’s already legendary giving.
Hope Woodhouse reels off name after name of women who have retired here from Wall Street and elsewhere, all volunteering for nonprofit causes, and all worthy of coverage, she noted, hoping to deflect attention from herself.
But her peers in philanthropy are vocal in their praise of Woodhouse; last May, when Woodhouse had just wrapped up her final year as league president, dozens wrote letters to a local magazine urging her to be named a “hometown hero.”
Among the mentions: Hope’s fast action when the COVID-19 pandemic struck. Convening a service league meeting by Zoom, Hope garnered a unanimous vote to give $50,000 of league money to the county’s United Way COVID response fund. In the weeks that followed, she pulled together a challenge grant that quickly raised $400,000 for the response fund.
The John’s Island group also funded a position with Florida Rural Legal Services for a locally based attorney to help those facing eviction or foreclosure during COVID.
In all, 40 local agencies or programs are helped by the John’s Island group’s fundraising, running the gamut of need from homelessness to mental health services to afterschool programs. Donations also go toward scholarships for John’s Island employees and their families.
Woodhouse made strides for women just by her choice of career.
With a degree in economics from Georgetown University and an MBA from Harvard, she got a job on the trading floor of Salomon Brothers – one of only a few dozen women in a room that held 400 traders. At the same time, she started a family, marrying Richard Canty, an executive at Chase Manhattan, and raising two daughters.
“I couldn’t have worked how I worked without him,” said Woodhouse. “His job was very important, he was a very senior guy at Chase, but he always supported my career.”
During her years at Salomon Brothers, Woodhouse had little time for philanthropy.
“I was working 80 hours a week and raising two kids,” she recalled.
Woodhouse credits three post-Salomon employers with opening her eyes to the complexities of nonprofit fundraising and distribution. The first was Julian Robertson, the billionaire hedge fund operator, whose company, Tiger Management, Woodhouse joined as treasurer of funds in 1998 after 15 years at Salomon Brothers.
At the time, Robertson was “the most famous hedge fund operator in the world and extremely philanthropic,” Woodhouse said.
Robertson found a unique way to occupy his senior partners’ spare time while furthering his mission.
“He allowed us to be trustees of a foundation and he left us alone,” Woodhouse said.
The foundation’s goal was to break the cycle of poverty in New York City. To that end, it had essentially three areas of focus – education, jobs and social services.
Woodhouse took on education.
“We ended up funding all these charter school start-ups – KIPP Academy, Uncommon Schools, Achievement First. We were really experts in the New York City charter school movement. Through allowing me to volunteer in what I thought was really cool at that time, I learned. I was just drinking from a fire hose.”
Woodhouse has continued with the Tiger Foundation even after Robertson closed his fund in the early 2000s. “I’ve served on that committee for 20 years, and I’m still liaison to all this good, well-researched philanthropy.
“Because of who he was, we got access to so many speakers and organizations. Essentially we were giving away probably $20 million a year out of the foundation and he taught us how to do it right. This was all volunteer, but it was so fascinating.”
With the Tiger Fund closed, Woodhouse moved on to work for the man who would become her next mentor in philanthropy: George Soros.
Soros encouraged Woodhouse, chief operating officer of Soros Fund Management, and other top executives to step up their own giving with a three-to-one matching gift program – a match that was “unheard of, and with a very high cap,” Woodhouse said. “Instead of one dollar in my name, I could give four dollars. It really encouraged me to give my own money.
“Julian ignited my interest in philanthropy and taught me what good philanthropy is. George Soros, because of his generosity, made it so I could do meaningful philanthropy. I never could have done that with what I was making.”
Her last mentor was Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the world. “He wasn’t focused on philanthropy; he was focused on meaningful work and meaningful relationships.”
Together, the three financial legends helped Woodhouse find meaning in her post-career existence.
“You’re going through a mental evolution in your life,” said Woodhouse. “Those people were all catalysts to move from my working world into my non-working world.”
There was one final step in her preparation. With her husband getting situated at John’s Island, Woodhouse signed up for a year-long leadership program at Harvard.
Woodhouse heard about the new program at a Harvard Business School reunion – she and Canty are both graduates.
“Its goal was to take people who’d been leaders in the business world and make them leaders in philanthropy,” she recalled. “I did a lot of soul-searching and I felt that it was time for me to flip to this ‘phase three.’ It all mentally came together for me that I wanted to make this change.”
She gave a long notice to Dalio at Bridgewater, and went straight into the program, which involved taking 10 classes across all disciplines aimed at helping enrollees “solve society’s most pressing challenges.”
One particular course, on early childhood development, made a big impact. “I’m not necessarily a person who likes little kids, but I liked the idea of how the brain is wired and could be changed in the first three or four years of life, and that that could be affected by racial disparities in health and affect college access and success.”
Moving to Vero in 2010, Woodhouse signed on to Indian River County’s Child Services Advisory Committee, a group established by ordinance that advises the county commission on child-related expenditures. Woodhouse still chairs the children’s needs assessment that guides the grant-making process through its data.
Four years later, she joined the board of the Kindergarten Readiness Collaborative and served through 2020.
Today, there is another aspect of giving in Hope’s life, though she may not acknowledge the effort. The mother Hope calls “awesome” and “incredible” may be the cause closest to her heart these days, as Joan Woodhouse deals with the loss of her husband amid challenging times.
The attention has not gone unnoticed.
“I don’t know what I would do without my kids,” she said. “They have just been amazing and I am so thankful and grateful. I don’t know if they realize how much I appreciate what they’re doing,” Joan Woodhouse said.
