Entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist — Mark Gerson, co-founder and chair of 3i Members, has embraced all these roles. In a conversation with Crain Currency, Gerson delves into his philanthropic initiatives in sub-Saharan Africa and Israel, shares his philosophical approach to giving and reflects on his personal journey evolving in the years ahead.
Why do you believe in giving? What’s your philanthropic philosophy?
We believe in giving, first and foremost, because we are Jews, and the Torah commands us to do so. As usual, the Torah has very good reasons for doing so. In the building of the Tabernacle, God commands people to "take an offering." Why "take" instead of "give"? Because there is nothing as enjoyable, fulfilling and generative as giving as the Torah instructs — generously and enthusiastically. Therefore, giving really is taking as it, when done in accordance with biblical principles, leads to building deep and meaningful relationships, financial prosperity and the fulfillment that comes with knowing that a charitable gift has alleviated the pain, saved a life or created an opportunity for someone who would otherwise be without.
When we deploy capital philanthropically, we do so the same way as when we make commercial investments — with a projected expected return, based on a rigorous consideration of return on investment (ROI). Our goal is to save the most lives, ameliorate the most pain and create the most opportunities for the poor per dollar donated.
Tell us about your work in Israel with United Hatzalah of Israel.
More than 20 years ago, Eli Beer reflected on his experience as an EMT on an ambulance. He realized that he got to a lot of scenes of emergency calls — heart attacks, choking, accidents — but did not save nearly enough people for one reason: Ambulances are too few and too slow to function as effective emergency-response vehicles. When someone calls the emergency number [in the U.S., it's 911], they don't need an ambulance right away. They need a trained and equipped first responder within three minutes, and hopefully faster. Eli realized that such care could be delivered by a distributed cohort of volunteer first responders, trained and equipped medics in every community, who could drop whatever they were doing and immediately rush to a neighbor in need.
We co-founded United Hatzalah on that premise and with that strategy, oriented toward getting people in their most vulnerable moments assistance as fast as possible.
Fast-forward two decades to 2024, and we have more than 7,000 volunteers in Israel from every segment of society: Jews of all kinds, Christian Arabs, Muslim Arabs, Druze, men and women. With continually innovating technology and equipment funded by generous donors from around the world, United Hatzalah volunteers respond to over 2,000 emergency calls a day, saving countless people who would have died if they had to wait for an ambulance.
You also have a rather unique approach in sub-Saharan Africa with African Mission Healthcare (AMH). You and your wife are the largest donors to Christian missionaries and their work. Why?
In 2002, my great friend Jon Fielder called me as he was finishing the residency program at Johns Hopkins. He told me that as a Christian, he felt called to serve those who Jesus called in the Book of Matthew “the least among us” — who were, in those days, people in Africa who were being ravaged by HIV/AIDS. Jon went to Kenya as a medical missionary.
In his early years as a Christian medical missionary, Jon discovered the greatest humanitarian problem in the world: the lack of consistent access to reliable medical care for almost everybody in Africa. There was one small group of people who were providing consistently outstanding care and building, to the extent they financially could, the institutions that would both train more physicians and deliver care to the poor. These were Christian missionary physicians. And, for a variety of reasons, [they] had been effectively abandoned in the field.
We founded African Mission Healthcare to partner with Christian medical missionaries at Christian hospitals throughout Africa, providing clinical care to the poor, building infrastructure such as power and oxygen, doing training and sometimes hospital administration. We now have 31 partners in 17 countries and are working to build the Christian hospitals in Africa so that every African whose child breaks her leg, who needs a C-section, who needs a hernia operation to get back to work, who needs treatment for pneumonia — really, anything and everything — has an excellent hospital that they can rely on. The ROI that AMH enables is truly spectacular. For around $300, a donor can fund a C-section or repair a birth injury for a mother, enabling her to live and live well and be able to care for her children and her community for decades to come. For $300,000 or $3 million, a donor or group of donors can make life infinitely better for a huge number of people over decades and longer.
Yes, Erica and I are the largest donors to Christian medical missionaries. Doing so has, among other things, made us better Jews, as it has enabled us to fulfill our biblical commandment to “love the stranger” in the most profound way and has provided friendships for us and role models with our children with the best people in the world: Christian missionary physicians, who devote their entire lives to serve the poor so effectively.
How do you see your giving evolved in the next decade?
We believe in doing rigorous analysis to genuinely determine the ROI of a charity and then getting deeply involved, both financially and otherwise. Consequently, we give 95% of our giving to the several organizations we currently support and expect it to stay that way with the percentage and the organizations.
Dealing with a changed climate: The urgent need for action and adaptation
By PETER KRULL
In recent weeks, we’ve experienced two major hurricanes, one of which has greatly affected me and my team. Our home base of Asheville, North Carolina, was devastated by the intensity of Hurricane Helene.
Since Dr. James Hansen’s testimony before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources in June 1988, scientists have been warning us that unregulated growth in greenhouse-gas emissions would drastically alter our climate and produce more intense storms, as we’ve seen with hurricanes Helene and Milton.
At the same time, politicians and other individuals are acting as chaos agents, spreading misinformation and creating disinformation about the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other government-run relief efforts. Their actions are unconscionable during a time of great suffering and tragedy. One politician even went so far as to tweet, “Yes, they can control the weather.” While the politician may have been right, it was not in the way he intended. Our climate is being affected by us — our continued use and support of fossil fuels.
For a long time, we’ve viewed climate change as something that would happen in the distant future. This mindset has driven our “kicking the can down the road” approach to action. Unfortunately, that strategy has led us to where we are now. Instead of climate change, it’s now dealing with a changed climate.
A report released by World Weather Attribution on Oct. 9 details many of the impacts that fossil-fuel-driven climate change is having on the intensity of the recent storms. Yale Climate Connections summarized the main findings:
- “Hurricanes as intense as Hurricane Helene are today about 2.5 times more likely in the region. They would be expected to occur on average every 130 years in a preindustrial climate but now have a 1-in-53 chance in any given year.
- Hurricane Helene’s wind speeds on the coast of Florida were about 13 mph, or 11%, more intense due to climate change.
- Climate change increased Helene’s rainfall by about 10%. As a result of climate change, the level of rainfall that led to catastrophic flooding in the Appalachians has shifted from a once-in-115-year event to a once-in-70-year event today.
- The high sea temperatures that fueled Helene were made 200 to 500 times more likely by climate change.
“Yet again, our study has shown that hurricanes will keep getting worse if humans keep burning fossil fuels and subsequently warming the planet,” Friederike Otto, lead of World Weather Attribution and a senior lecturer in climate science at the Imperial College London, said in a news release. “Americans shouldn’t have to fear hurricanes more violent than Helene; we have all the knowledge and technology needed to lower demand and replace oil, gas and coal with renewable energy.”
One statistic that stuck with me was that a 5% increase in wind speed increases a hurricane’s destructive power by 50%. This increase is not linear. Therefore, the 11% increase in wind speed quoted above is considerably more destructive than it would appear — it more than doubled the wind-driven impact.
In a separate analysis by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, scientists found that the changed climate caused over 50% more rainfall in parts of Georgia and the Carolinas and made it up to 20 times more likely for that extra rainfall to occur.
The burning of fossil fuels is the cause of the extreme heat that we’ve been experiencing over the past several years. July 22 was the planet’s hottest day on record, and the records have continued to be broken year after year. “World Weather Attribution estimated that climate change made the Mexico heat wave in the spring of 2024 about 1.5°C (2.7°F) hotter and 35 to 200 times more likely to occur.”
The changed climate is likely going to make life more expensive for everyone. The costs of insuring property in storm-, drought- and fire-prone areas will increase exponentially; or insurers will pull out of these areas altogether, leaving homeowners to self-insure and bear all of the climate risk.
There is also the supply chain impact. Nearly all of the world’s high-purity quartz, one of the essential minerals required for the production of semiconductors worldwide, comes from a small town just north of Asheville. Spruce Pine, North Carolina, was not spared from Helene’s wrath. According to CNBC, production at the mine was halted on Sept. 26 after the hurricane, and there is no timeline for when normal operations will resume. Given how many products now have semiconductors, even a short disruption in quartz supply could have ripple effects across the economy.
In 2023 and early 2024, a drought limited navigation through the Panama Canal. The drought is attributed to the El Niño effect — which, according to a recent study, may be intensified by climate change. The study found that “current sea surface temperature extremes driven by El Niño have intensified by around 10% compared to pre-1960 levels.” While rainfall has picked back up, the economic costs of the drought were substantial. According to S&P Global, “During the crisis, crunched supplies saw a single transit slot fetch $4 million at auction, excluding a canal toll of $500,000 — a cost translating to a 50% hike.”
Meanwhile, S&P 500 companies tout their 2050 plans to become carbon-neutral while the climate grows more unstable. Fossil-fuel companies continue to be supported by politicians and the investment and banking communities.
This paradigm has to shift, and it has to shift now. It’s time to invest in the clean economy. It’s time to reinforce our systems and infrastructure to make them more stable and resilient. Adaptation to the changed climate is not something we can plan for tomorrow; action needs to be taken today.
As I think about the destruction we’ve seen in Asheville, I can’t help but wonder: Will they rebuild? How will they rebuild? Will the rebuild be insurable? And should we be rebuilding in flood zones at all?
Eventually, the economics of the climate crisis will price high-risk areas out of the reach for ordinary Americans, who will be forced to move to “safer” areas. But we’ve learned recently that there are no actual climate-safe zones.
Herein lies our dilemma and our opportunity. By investing in a cleaner and more resource-efficient, resilient and equitable economy, we still have a chance to help future generations to thrive — but we must act now.