Making Room for Charity

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Making Room for Charity
Running Family Business: Departing Chief Executive Steve Hilton with a portrait of his grandfather Conrad at the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation’s office in Agoura Hills.

Steve Hilton is checking out.

After more than 30 years as chief executive of the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, the iconic hotel family’s charitable arm, he will hand over the keys at the end of the year to Peter Laugharn, former executive director of the Firelight Foundation in Santa Cruz.

But Hilton, who will turn 65 later this month, doesn’t plan on stepping away completely. He’ll continue as chairman of the foundation’s board and stay involved in several of its initiatives. He also wants to write a book on what he’s learned that he thinks could help the organization going forward.

Despite running a foundation with more than $2.5 billion in assets – Los Angeles County’s fifth largest – Hilton maintains a much lower public profile than many of his other family members.

For starters, there’s his brother, real estate agent-to-the-stars Rick Hilton, and sisters-in-law Kim and Kyle Richards, who both appear on “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.” But perhaps most well-known are Rick Hilton’s kids: Paris and her sister Nicky, who have been frequent tabloid subjects for more than a decade.

Steve Hilton said the celebrity lifestyle isn’t for him, but he’s never been one to judge. If they’re happy, he’s happy.

“All families have so many different personalities, but you try to walk the path that feels right for you,” he said. “I try to be accepting and loving to other members of the family. You have to be who you are.”

Finding role

While he’s been at the foundation for nearly half his life, it took Hilton some time to find his own direction.

He started out in the family hotel business, but found that it kept him cooped up in meeting rooms and airports – far away from his first love: the ocean.

“I really enjoyed learning about business and people, but it just didn’t seem like the right fit,” he said. “And I just couldn’t envision myself constantly working in big cities and high-rise hotels.”

So he left after five years to work at an oyster farm in Hawaii – with a clear ulterior motive.

“As a surfer, it was like mecca,” he said.

But the farm closed and he ended up moving back to Los Angeles. The foundation was set to receive a huge influx of cash from the estate of his grandfather, Hilton Hotels founder Conrad Hilton. So Steve decided to try his hand at philanthropy.

He never left.

Conrad Hilton started his namesake foundation in 1944 and bequeathed the bulk of his fortune to the cause upon his death in 1979. Conrad’s son – and Steve’s father – Barron, who ranked No. 14 in May on the Business Journal’s list of Wealthiest Angelenos with an estimated net worth of $4.1 billion, has pledged to give about 97 percent of his wealth to the foundation upon his death – which means the foundation likely will more than double in size. The Agoura Hills nonprofit, which has nearly 60 employees, has donated more than $1 billion in total, and it will give away more than $115 million this year alone. This week, the foundation is to announce the winner of its 20th Hilton Humanitarian Prize.

Despite his lineage, Steve Hilton did not jump into a leadership role when he joined the foundation in 1983, a decision his father felt strongly about, and he agreed with.

“I started in an entry level position working with the files,” he said. “At any business, when you start at the bottom, you really develop a much deeper understanding.”

Hilton said the foundation’s long track record and streamlined focus on a select group of causes, including homelessness, clean water, pediatric HIV and AIDS, and supporting Catholic Sisters, is crucial to its effectiveness.

“The lesson I have learned in my world of foundations is there’s a tendency to jump in and out of different programs and issues,” he said. “There’s always this temptation that whatever the newest trend, we need to do something to fix this issue, whatever it might be. I think in our foundation we take a much longer-term view.”

That’s given him and other foundation executives the ability to be patient and make adjustments when necessary, Hilton explained, pointing to the foundation’s work in rural Africa as a prime example.

“Initially, our approach was, you dig a well and you put a hand pump on it and you’re providing clean water to a small village in Africa,” he said. “But then we decided to test the water to see if it was really clean. And what we found is that some of the wells had contamination we weren’t even aware of. And even if it was clean in the well, by the time it got to the home of the villager it was dirty.”

So the foundation adjusted and decided to sponsor the Safe Water Network, which provides community-level water treatment facilities, to help solve that last-mile problem.

“When you do things long enough, you always realize there’s something you don’t know,” Hilton said.

Helping homeless

Homelessness has been one of the foundation’s signature causes for more than 20 years, but Hilton is the first to say there’s still a lot that needs to be done.

“It’s shameful when you think of America as the wealthiest country in the world and every day there are people sleeping in the streets of L.A.,” he said.

But fixing the current situation, he added, is beyond the capabilities of charitable organizations and private businesses.

“The scale of the homeless problem in L.A. is so vast, we can only solve it through significant amounts of money coming through local government, state government and even the federal government. I really respect Mayor Eric Garcetti and our City Council, who recently made that announcement (pledging $100 million to fight homelessness). This is the right thing to do.”

Hilton is also fixated on a group of homeless individuals outside Los Angeles – the refugees fleeing Syria. He wrote an op-ed in the Seattle Times in March, calling on governments to do more and saying that corporations doing business in the region have an obligation to help deal with the crisis.

“These are not potential fanatics, just mothers and fathers and daughters and grandchildren looking to survive,” he said.

Hilton might be shedding some day-to-day responsibilities, but he insists his passion for helping won’t waver in retirement. In fact, his first postretirement trip won’t involve a stay at some fancy resort on the beach. Instead he’s going with a longtime donor to various East African countries, where the foundation has made partnerships to improve access to clean water.

“Then I’m going to Indonesia on a surfing adventure,” he said. “I’ll visit some islands I’ve never been to, that you can only reach by boat.”

That’s about as far away from the spotlight as one can get – a place at least one member of the Hilton family couldn’t feel more at home.

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