Ex-Seattle Foundation head had a grace that could open wallets

Mid-'70s: Women rarely step into a boardroom and can enter the largely male corridors of the Rainier Club only through a side entrance. Anne Farrell decides to have a midlife career with the résumé of a homemaker and volunteer with little formal business training.

Today: Anne Farrell is one of the most respected CEOs in town. She sits on nearly a dozen boards, including those of REI and Washington Mutual. And while her résumé doesn't mention it, she was the first woman president of the Seattle Rotary and the Rainier Club.

As president and CEO of the Seattle Foundation, she has increased the endowment of the state's oldest and largest community foundation, from $10 million to $300 million.

Yesterday, Farrell stepped down from the $201,000-a-year position, but she will stay involved as a consultant to the foundation. In her 19 years at the top, she is credited with grooming future nonprofit leaders, expanding the foundation's reach and credibility, helping thousands of people from all walks of life, and cultivating a greater sense of philanthropy among the city's people and corporations.

The foundation's new head is former U.S. Bank of Washington President Phyllis Campbell, a fellow high-profile executive whose 1998 United Way of King County campaign raised a record $68.7 million.

Ahead of her time

It is tempting to call Farrell a modern-day pioneer, breaking ground in Seattle philanthropy and as a woman in the workplace, but she looks back on the past 30 or so years like the all-business, business officer she is: articulate and gracious, cautious and reserved.

Sure, "a little blood, sweat and tears" were involved in her success, she said, but so was good timing, on her part. And she saw what she wanted, mapped it out, learned on and off the job and avoided getting clobbered.

"I am not an iconoclast, nor did I ever see myself as being a huge trailblazer," said Farrell, who turns 68 this month. "I just had some things that interested me and saw the need to progress one foot in front of another."

She had an unusual childhood: born in China, the daughter of a U.S. Marine officer, attending 13 schools in 12 years. Her father was gone a lot during World War II, and then her parents divorced and her father died when she was 17.

She went to the University of Washington, intending to learn law, an uncommon choice then for women. But marriage and an early family threw her off a career until her early 40s. She did volunteer work, including service on the Girl Scouts national board and as president of the Junior League of Seattle. Then she found herself looking at an "empty nest" and reconsidering what she was going to do with the rest of her life.

She decided to go back to some sort of paying work, another odd choice when, if her peers worked, they worked as volunteers. People talked, suspecting something was wrong for a married, middle-aged woman to suddenly work for money.

"The immediate question that people asked was, 'Oh dear, is Bob well?' — Bob being my husband — or, 'Is this marriage in trouble?' " she said. "Neither was the case. But it was that unusual to decide to do what I did that people would assume that there had to be some reason other than wanting to do something focused."

Putting experience to work

To be sure, Farrell had already built up some sound business experience. Colleen Willoughby, a fellow Junior Leaguer and president of the Washington Women's Foundation, recalls that Farrell learned how to organize a board and manage a budget. The league had a monthly magazine, Puget Soundings, and a thrift shop, The Wise Penny.

"It wasn't a multimillion-dollar corporation," said Willoughby, "but at the time, it was an interesting operation and it wasn't dissimilar to many small businesses. So you cut your teeth on those kinds of businesses."

Still, as Farrell said, "I didn't have any credential that said, 'Yes, she knows what she's talking about in the financial world.' "

She took a few accounting classes at the UW and in 1977 became director of development for the Seattle Children's Home. Three years later, she became the executive vice president of the Seattle Foundation and the office's only full-time employee.

"There's not a job here that I haven't done," she said.

The foundation's list of grantees reads like a who's who of needy nonprofits. In just the second quarter of this year, it gave to 45 groups, among them the Boys & Girls Clubs of King County, El Centro de la Raza, the Bellevue Philharmonic Orchestra, the Deaf-Blind Service Center, the Intiman Theatre Company and Northwest Environment Watch.

Last year it gave out $38 million, nearly four times its total endowment when Farrell started.

A wider community reach

When Farrell wasn't putting toner in the copy machine, she was talking with prospective donors, reviewing applications, visiting nonprofits and broadening the foundation's reach into neighborhoods and the business community.

Helen Hicks, founder and executive director of the Tiny Tots Development Center, credits Farrell and the Seattle Foundation with helping the center grow from serving three children to 450 in three after-school programs.

"She's not a CEO," said Hicks, playing off the stereotype of the cloistered executive. "She's actually been in the community walking around."

When the Tiny Tots center in the early '80s found a portable classroom for $500 but had no money to move it, the foundation gave $7,500 to move and refurbish it as an infants and toddlers center. Later, the foundation helped with a 4,000-square-foot expansion, then matched a challenge grant for a land purchase that got the center on a more secure footing.

"She was there to help you get trained, make sure you had proper bookkeeping records," Hicks said of Farrell. "She was a mentor to so many nonprofits. The Rainier Valley would not have made it without her."

Seattle Foundation grants tend to be modest, in the $10,000 to $20,000 range, but over the years it also gave out grants of $75,000 and $100,000. Recipients say the foundation's thorough review and blessing has come to lend a credibility, like a Good Housekeeping Seal that opens the door for funding from other groups.

The foundation has funded long-term, stable organizations, said Farrell, but it also funds relatively new, grass-roots startups, often responding to a rising need like serving an influx of Southeast Asians in the late '80s and more recent arrivals from former Soviet states and Africa. It has served hundreds of these organizations and fielded proposals from hundreds more.

"You see both the tragic side, the needs, but you also see, when you go out, the positive side of what comes of a community that really tries to alleviate those needs," she said.

She tends to avoid specifics. When a visitor says she may have seen more heartache and tragedy in Seattle than most anyone and presses for examples, she declines, saying she fears the appearance of playing favorites.

She does not trade in anecdote or candid emotion, and sticks to the general outlines of policy and procedure, the CEO's domain of governance and structure: "Take the vision and design the mechanism that can make it happen."

She is also profoundly diplomatic. Her friends refer so often to her "grace" that one might think they were comparing her with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

"I look at her as a mentor in many ways," said Tom Lattimore, CEO of Impact Capital, who met Farrell while working for a community-development corporation in the '80s. "She has a good way of bringing people together with a lot of grace and dignity. If you know me, you'd know I have a lot of rough edges, and she has polished them."

As president-elect of the Rainier Club in 1996, she brokered a move to lift a suit-and-tie dress code for men, a burning issue with pro-tie traditionalists and the newer open-collar types, particularly among the high-tech crowd.

"In typical Anne Farrell fashion, I decided we can't upset the apple cart," she said.

Her solution: a trial period in which ties were mandatory in the dining room, while the more casually dressed could still get a meal elsewhere in the club. After several months, members saw the world was still spinning and the club changed the dress code to business-casual everywhere.

"I call it managing change," Farrell said. "I think that's my greatest skill: I know how to manage change, and you don't do it necessarily with a sledgehammer."

Her fluid style has helped her move among various groups, rich and poor, making her what Neil Nicoll, president of the YMCA of Greater Seattle called, "one of the best-connected people across all parts of the community in Seattle."

In some ways, Farrell's success is the product of social changes: the growing acceptance of women in business, the rise of nonprofits as government-funded social programs ebbed, the mounting wealth of the Seattle area, and the ability of the foundation to act as an administrative haven for would-be philanthropists.

Judy Runstad, an attorney and chair of the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce, said Farrell was in the second wave of women breaking into the business world.

The first wave involved women born to wealth, like timber heiress Dorothy Stimson Bullitt, whose philanthropist daughter Priscilla "Patsy" Bullitt Collins died last week. Then came women from the volunteer world, like the late Mary Gates, the first female president of the United Way of King County, and Kate Webster, who in the '70s chaired the Children's Hospital board as it forged a joint agreement with the University of Washington School of Medicine.

Then there were women with professional degrees in law or business. Runstad, herself a lawyer with Foster Pepper & Shefelman, was the first woman president of the Downtown Seattle Association and the first woman elected to chair the United Way of King County campaign.

"I think in some ways Anne's group had a tougher road," Runstad said, "because they had to win acceptance in the business world coming out of what many men considered 'women's work.' "

Recognized for competence

As Farrell came on to the scene in the '70s, the Rainier Club had already started shedding its original "gentleman's club" roots, said Walt Crowley, director of HistoryLink.org, a foundation beneficiary and author of the club's 1988 centennial history. The first Japanese-American member was admitted in 1966, and the first woman and African-American members were admitted in 1978.

By the time Farrell had a chance to be the club's first woman president, members said, her competence was the chief factor.

"I'm sure it had less to do with the fact that she was the first woman than, when you looked at the slate of leadership coming up, she just rose to the top," said Patrick Patrick, a retired banker and past president of the Rainier Club board.

Added Farrell: "I was probably the most nonthreatening person to do it, that had the respect and all the rest. They weren't taking on some flaming feminist."

Meanwhile, Seattle's wealth grew, and a growing number of people looked to the Seattle Foundation for help in putting their money toward philanthropic ends. It's a collaborative, educational process, she said, patiently built on long-term relationships developed over years.

"These things don't happen overnight," Farrell said. "There are long relationship-building periods of time. So if you are an impatient sort, and I can be impatient, patience is an important part."

Farrell insists she has never asked anyone to give money to the foundation.

But this may be a function of her grace, as well.

Said Crowley, "I think no one who has ever given her money realized they had been asked for it."

Whatever her method, Farrell can take credit for helping the region open its wallet, said Mimi Siegel, executive director of the Bellevue-based Kindering Center, a nonprofit neurological center for infants and children with special needs.

"Giving hasn't been as ingrained a reflex (here) as you saw in the East," she said. "And I think that Anne elegantly changed that habit."

Farrell came into her Pike Street office yesterday to handle some correspondence and phone calls and finish packing, but she was gone by 5.

She now plans to keep an office space at Perkins Coie while she acts as president emeritus for the foundation. She also still has those 11 board positions to worry about.

Eric Sorensen: 206-464-8253 or esorensen@seattletimes.com