photo © Jeffrey Hornstein
“I don’t understand why people feel they need a billion dollars.”
—LAUREN EMBREY, philanthropist
“I don’t understand why people feel they need a billion dollars,” Lauren Embrey tells me as we sit down for her interview at a trendy boutique hotel in New York City’s West Village neighborhood. Lauren had flown in from her hometown of Dallas, Texas, for a number of meetings with nonprofit boards on which she serves. The hotel’s lobby is as iconic as it is eclectic. A 1950s L.C. Smith & Bros. manual typewriter sits on one long vertical table alongside a round table where Time Out New York, IN New York, and Where New York Traveler magazines showcase the nightlife, culture, and entertainment in this bustling neighborhood. Three rows of Andy Warhol photos, identical but in different colors, grace the mahogany wall behind the registration desk.
Lauren arrives wearing all black, sporting a chic short haircut, her chestnut-brown round-rimmed eyeglasses matching her hair color. She appears trim, poised, and proper. The two earrings she’s wearing do not match. “I like surprising people,” she says. “It opens them up to thinking in a different way.”
Lauren was born into a “wealthy southern upbringing,” as she describes it, the youngest of two daughters. Her father was a successful real estate developer. After speaking for a while about her background, she tells me that her partner is an artist from El Paso, TX. “It has been challenging bridging our cultures and upbringings, mine wealthy southern in the 1960s, his Chicano in the 1970s, but we have learned a lot from one another. It has deepened our character and understanding of others,” Lauren said.
In 2004, Lauren’s father established a family foundation. Although he was already giving personally, the foundation was a way to not only formalize his giving but also to determine how much of his estate he wanted to dedicate to philanthropy and how much he wanted to pass on to future generations. “From inception, we worked together as a family, and very little was in the corpus until after his death one year later, in 2005. That is when the money started coming in … his formal documents had no restrictions on what to give to or where … so it was open for my sister and me to decide,” Lauren said. One of the first decisions the foundation made was to fund and help build the Embrey Human Rights Program at Southern Methodist University. “I will never forget the first human rights course I took during my graduate studies,” Lauren recalls. “I was stunned to learn about the litany of atrocities that have occurred around the world, most of which I was not aware of, but most stunning to me was learning about America’s involvement in many of these atrocities,” she continued. “I feel learning about human rights earlier would have planted a seed for my passion and my career path had this been a part of my undergraduate education.” Today, the program at SMU is one of only a handful to grant a bachelor’s degree in human rights education, and the only one in the South.
To hear Lauren tell her story is to learn that her penchant for breaking barriers started when she was very young. In an article that appeared in Women’s eNews on August 9, 2016, where Lauren was a subject in our My Passion, My Philanthropy series profiling outstanding female philanthropists, Lauren talked about her childhood: “When I was young, I wanted to drive a moped, but was told I couldn’t because I was a girl. I did not understand this. When I got older, I was invited to train for the Olympics in swimming, but my mother’s response was, ‘Why would you want green hair and big shoulders?’ I didn’t understand that either. Then at the elite girls’ school I attended in Dallas, my hometown, the message changed. I was taught that I could accomplish anything any man could. I was not to consider myself ‘lesser’ in any regard, and definitely not because of my gender.”
This was only the beginning of what would result in her life-altering change. “My parents divorced after my sophomore year in high school,” she tells me now. Although she was still attending the private school, Lauren decided to change to the public school in her area in order to, as she put it, “See the real world.” Her mother moved to San Francisco, and although Lauren continued to live primarily with her father in Dallas, she visited her mother often. This enabled Lauren to experience the culture there from the early seventies to mid-eighties. “My mom took me to drag shows, and I was immersed in the hip cross-cultural community of that time,” she continued.
Stepping out into “the real world” was what reinforced her determination to support the rights of others. The official motto of the Embrey Human Rights Program at Southern Methodist University is “There is no such thing as a lesser person,” and Lauren lives these words through her support of human rights.
In 2008, when the Dallas Women’s Foundation was running a multimillion-dollar capital campaign, they asked Lauren to support their work with a grant of $250,000. Lauren knew that Women Moving Millions, a nonprofit organization that supports gender equality as a human right, was growing due to the involvement and leadership of the Women’s Funding Network, of which the Dallas Women’s Foundation was a part. Lauren proposed a much larger amount, one million dollars, to her board, which the board approved. Lauren then notified the Dallas Women’s Foundation that they would not be making a gift of $250,000. “Instead, I was able to tell them we would be contributing one million,” Lauren says with a huge smile. “I wanted to be a part of this incredible group of women that were making bold statements with their money. I wanted to do the same.”
This initial gift connected Lauren to a broader community of individuals investing in women and girls, and, she says, “helped me realize how badly they need money.” Her million-dollar investment in this sector has since grown to donating over $12 million in aid of projects that support women and girls.
Lauren recalls that in 2010, due to the continuing recession, she learned that a lot of philanthropic giving was moving backward at a time when suffering was increasing. “I proposed to our foundation’s board that we embrace a new mantra: ‘Give Big and Bold … Now.’ We got the board to approve an initiative named Mission Without Borders that would support initiatives that drive systemic change in five areas: human rights education and awareness, women and girls’ leadership, racial and gender equity, art for social change, and domestic human trafficking.” This initiative would last from 2010 to 2014 and put over $15 million dollars out into the world.
Just one week before our interview, Lauren spoke about the importance of giving to a room filled with over three hundred women and men upon receiving an award from the Women’s Media Center. Yet she also announced that her foundation was sunsetting and will therefore be putting all of its money out into the world over the next few years. She spoke about what was next for her, telling the room, “I am enshrined in a wonderful feeling of connectedness, but at the same time disturbed by the systems of separateness that surround us. I want a way out!” she said. Embracing what may lie ahead, she quoted Rabbi Abraham Heschel, who said, “It can be an ecstasy of deeds, luminous moments in which we are raised above our will, moments filled with outgoing joy, with intense delight.”
For Lauren this is a season of not knowing, and she’s okay with that. She tells me that she “must live into this unknowing.” She recalls what Maya Angelou said at the inauguration of President Bill Clinton in 1993:
“Here, on the pulse of this new day, you may have the
grace to look up and out
And into your sisters’ eyes, and into your brothers’ face,
Your country, and simply say, very simply, with hope:
Good Morning.”
Lauren acknowledges that, while the specifics of her next stage of life are still unclear, she knows it will continue to involve providing resources for change. “But not just capital resources,” she says. “It will provide human and knowledge resources as well. Resources grounded in heart and compassion. To come to any challenge as a partner with deep involvement, true listening, and total commitment. That will always be my conviction.”