Community Notebook > Our Community, Our News
Giving it Back: The Dyson Foundation
by Jane Smith; photo by Michael Weisbrot

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“What do they give away—chickens?” asked my husband.

“No, not the poultry people,” I said, “the Dyson Foundation.”

To be fair, I suppose my husband knows as much about the charitable family foundation based in Millbrook as the next Hudson Valley resident. Here’s the quick scoop: there are approximately 46,800 charitable foundations in the United States, and the Dyson Foundation ranks among the wealthiest 150. Created by Charles and Margaret Dyson in 1957, the foundation has given away more than $90 million dollars in its 44-year history. This year its assets amounted to $280 million, and the foundation awarded $14 million in grants to 125 national and local programs, causes, and organizations.

Who benefits from all this philanthropy? Forty-three percent of the annual grant pie supports family interests like Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Thirty-four percent endows the Anne Dyson Community Pediatrics Training Initiative. And 20 percent nurtures organizations right here in the Mid-Hudson Valley, especially Dutchess County, where the Dysons put down roots.

Even if you haven’t heard of the Dyson Foundation, chances are that you do know about one of its recent projects, a survey called Many Voices, One Valley, which prompted lots of discussion this fall on local television and radio—and around the dinner table. Conducted by the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, the survey asked Hudson Valley residents to rate the degree to which their day-to-day and quality-of-life needs were being met.

“The idea was to get a snapshot of the region,” says Michell Spaight, Program Officer at the Dyson Foundation, “and share the information with other nonprofits.” Later the foundation realized that the results of the survey were too important to be kept from the public.

“There were some scary revelations,” she says. Most residents—60 percent—are dissatisfied with the quality of jobs available in the Hudson Valley. Nearly half of families which earn less than $30,000 annually need better child care and early education programs. Thirty-three percent of children in households with a yearly income of $15,000 have either intermittent health insurance or none at all.

“People are surprised that there are so many needs in this region,” says Spaight. “You know that New York City has disenfranchised communities, but when you think about Rhinebeck and Millbrook you think about horse farms, not people in need of food.”

For almost half a century, the Dyson Foundation has nourished local and regional causes, most especially those that help economically disadvantaged children, improve access to healthcare, support the arts, and strengthen the infrastructure of nonprofits.

“Just a little bit of money can do so much,” says Program Officer Spaight. Just this year, Dyson grants have subsidized an academic skills program for school children living in Poughkeepsie’s Harriet Tubman Terrace public housing complex, helped the Eastern Dutchess Rural Health Network connect the uninsured with healthcare providers, and presented the Dutchess County Arts Council with the means to publish a directory of cultural resources.

Where did all this largesse come from? Charles Dyson certainly didn’t start out with much money. Born in 1909 and raised in Paterson, NJ, Dyson was the son of English immigrants, modest, hardworking people without formal education. As a young man he worked as a bookkeeper by day and sat in accounting classes at Pace University at night, figuring that crunching numbers would be the quickest way to make a living.
Dyson might have stayed a number cruncher, albeit a brilliant one, if World War II hadn’t intervened. Leaving a managerial job at Price Waterhouse, he went to Washington, DC to serve as a consultant to the Roosevelt Administration. Among his many worthy wartime contributions, the most significant is the Lend-Lease Act, a program he masterminded that gave Roosevelt almost unlimited freedom to supply Europe with tanks, aircraft, and ammunition without compromising the erstwhile neutrality of the United States. In essence, the Lend-Lease Act was an act of philanthropy.

It was in Washington that Dyson met Margaret McGregor, the woman he would marry. She, too, was the daughter of immigrants, a Scottish couple who raised their child in Perth, Australia, before jumping continents to North America. After the war, Charles and Margaret settled first in Scarsdale, gave birth to four children (three boys, one girl), and eventually moved their young family to Millbrook.

After the war, Dyson bought a manufacturing business with $10,000 out of his own pocket and a $5 million loan from the bank. To that business, he added another and another, acquiring here, merging there. Today, this investment company is called the Dyson-Kissner-Moran Corp and is one of the largest privately-held companies in the country, generating annual sales of $600 million.

“He was simply a genius in business,” says Diana Gurieva, Executive Vice President of the Dyson Foundation. “Long ago, Forbes called him the inventor of the leveraged buyout, before that was a bad word.”
Dyson was also a prominent political progressive. By all accounts, he was a man a few words, but he wasn’t afraid to speak up for what he believed in. He helped found Common Cause, an organization that works to prevent big money from influencing US politics, and he spoke out against the Vietnam War, actions that probably account for Dyson’s rank of number five on Nixon’s infamous enemies list.

Not long after Gurieva came to the foundation, she asked Dyson why he’d set up a charitable foundation “When I asked him that,” says Gurieva, “he didn’t understand why I was asking the question. It never occurred to him not to give back. He felt strongly that the money he’d been so successful at making was his only for a short time. It may have been because of his strong Christian faith or because he was a fundamentally good man.”

By all accounts, Dyson brushed off thanks. Until the 1970s, he didn’t allow the family name to be attached to its good deeds, which explains why you rarely hear the name in the usual litany of US philanthropists from Andrew Carnegie through Bill Gates. Only after Charles Dyson’s death, in 1997, did many in his Millbrook community learn the extent to which the businessman had enriched their lives.

What does the future hold for Dyson Foundation? Like most charitable organizations, its assets were diminished by the recent stock market dive, though staff say the foundation came out pretty well considering, with a loss of only 20 percent. Still, the market drop concerns them because state and federal budget cuts mean that nonprofits are shouldering more social responsibilities while their coffers are dwindling.

Program Officer Michell Spaight wishes more people knew about the role philanthropy plays in the history of the United States and the varied forms it assumes. “People just don’t know that foundations like Dyson exist, that there are people with a lot of money—capitalists, landowners—who are concerned about other people and want to give. Or about the donor sitting in a one-bedroom apartment on Main Street, Poughkeepsie, making out a $25 check to charity.”