More donors are combining charity with their profit-making enterprises—and sometimes it’s a challenge to define where self-interest ends and public interest begins.
A case in point is the 11,000-acre Ameya Preserve in Paradise Valley, Mont., about 45 miles from Yellowstone Park. Former finance executive Wade Dokken bought the land in 2005 for $23.3 million. Last fall, the 47-year-old Mr. Dokken received preliminary conditional approval for the first phase of construction from the local Park County Commission. In all, he plans 301 luxury homes and related commercial development. What’s unusual is that Mr. Dokken also promises a package of donations that, he says, has a value of more than $70 million.
He donated a $2 million home site to a recent benefit auction of the high-powered Robin Hood Foundation in New York, which fights poverty and attracts Manhattan’s wealthy. Future charitable plans include earmarking $20 million for local nonprofits. He’s also promised to pay for low-cost Habitat for Humanity housing (total estimated value $300,000) and $1 million for county “social needs,” among other things.
Land sales, even by resellers, will be assessed a 0.5% donation to a nonprofit “community stewardship organization” dedicated to the environment, arts and sciences. (Home prices range from $650,000 to $2.7 million.) Mr. Dokken also pledges to put about 8,000 acres in a conservation easement; he values that gift at more than $30 million.
The development, Mr. Dokken says, “becomes an engine for charity.”
Some locals don’t want the Ameya land development at all, says Larry Lahren, a commissioner who abstained from voting partly because of his past work as an archeologist on the site. “This property is a critical ecosystem for wildlife and plant communities, has topographical disadvantages and is in an area prone to high wild-fire hazards, so some citizens feel the property is not suitable for development,” he says. Locals also worry, Mr. Lahren says, that jobs generated by the project will be low-paying and labor-intensive and that the most desirable positions could go to outsiders.
But the other two county commissioners voted for Mr. Dokken’s plan. “Someone has to afford to set the land aside,” the developer says, and he hopes his philanthropic and environmental goals will help attract home-buyers.
Such new combinations “blow apart traditional categories” used to evaluate for-profit and nonprofit work, says Melissa Berman, chief executive of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors in New York. “It doesn’t’ mean they’re bad, it means you have to think harder” about environmental and economic impact and “who is doing what to whom.”
Jennifer Frank, executive director of Habitat for Humanity of Gallatin Valley in nearby Belgrade, says the Dokken group “are the only developers who have ever come to us and offered to do anything.”
Local environmentalists are skeptical but hopeful. “We want to encourage good development, and if this represents that and it plays out that way that’s great,” says Jim Barrett, who runs the Park County Environmental Council. “If we’re chumps in the end, well, we’ll just have to live with that.”