Jerry Stone’s Sharp Fundraising

Board Building Donors Move

Allen Turner reminisces on Jerry Stone’s incredible fundraising abilities.

So the natural person to head our [building] campaign was Jerry Stone. Jerry, who founded the Alzheimer's Association here in Chicago, had a gift for raising money, which I didn't have.

I had raised some money in my time at the Goodman and other places, but he had an extraordinary gift. He got people to give money more than they wanted to. He got me to give double my gift. I was moderately unhappy about all that, but in the end, it worked out alright, and I actually ended up giving more than that.

But it was Jerry. And Jerry knew all the people on the Board of Trustees. These people who had grown up together with Jerry. We had a lot of older people on it and they were his age. And so he went after them. And he'd have lunch and he'd come back and say I got $300 thousand. He'd come back and he'd say, oh, I got a million dollars today at lunch.

So our campaign went extremely well. And the closer we got, of course, as always is, the finish of the building, the more money we raised. So the consequence of that was, I think we ended up raising $73 million. The building cost $55 or $56 million, plus some extras.

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