The Art of Giving

Very little about Paul DeBruce’s background suggests that he was destined from birth to become one of Kansas City’s most active entrepreneurs. 

At his boyhood home in the southwest Kansas hamlet of Ulysses, he recalls, “There weren’t those kinds of influences. We had no TV until I was seven or eight, and it only had one channel.” The closest he came to being exposed to the arts was through his father’s passion for photography and singing with a barbershop quartet or his mother’s piano-playing, “but I was surrounded by some art form early on.”

The story wasn’t dramatically different for Linda Woodsmall-DeBruce, his wife, during her upbringing in Kansas City after her parents moved here from Tennessee. She did learn something about the values and rewards of altruism, she says, by setting part of her allowance aside each week to give at church, contributions that she believes planted the seeds for her own philanthropy.

And those seeds—for both—have produced deep roots. 

Fast-forward more than half a century, and the DeBruces have emerged as one of the Kansas City region’s most engaged philanthropic couples. Working largely through The DeBruce Foundation, which Paul launched just a decade after starting a one-man agribusiness concern, and through opportunistic individual gifts that have funded body cameras for the Kansas City Police Department or brought a casting of the famed Gates of Paradise sculpture from Florence, Italy to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, they have given tens of millions of dollars over the years to support more than 90 non-profit organizations.

The breadth of that giving has been as impressive as its depth: funding for the Nelson and the Kansas City Art Institute to support the visual arts, Children’s Mercy Hospital to support health care and research, UMKC, KU, and Rockhurst to further the mission of higher education. For zoos, aquariums, research institutes, social-services providers, civic causes like Union Station and public-policy think tanks, wildlife preservation, domestic-violence services, and promotion of entrepreneurship—it’s likely that if you can think of a cause, The DeBruce Foundation has been driving the mission.

Beyond an open checkbook, the DeBruces have opened their calendars with service on various boards, advisory committees, or consultative and mentoring roles. 

For those contributions and others well beyond the count of kindness, Paul and Linda DeBruce share Ingram’s 2023 Philanthropist of the Year honors, joining a philanthropic honor roll adorned with iconic names including Bloch, Dunn, Helzberg, Haverty, Sherman and Sunderland.    

As for the genesis of that giving, “there’s nothing there,” says the wry-witted Paul DeBruce. “I don’t know where that came from. Something from my parents, I guess, but other than the church, it wasn’t any huge thing we did as a family in terms of philanthropy. I have no artistic talent—I can’t sing, even in the shower—that, I suppose, gave me some background in the arts, which almost by definition need philanthropy for support.”

From the Ground Up

Five years after he left the University of Kansas with a bachelor’s degree in business, Paul DeBruce rolled the dice on … Paul DeBruce. Setting out on his own, he founded an agribusiness company that would eventually comprise grain elevators, milling facilities, fertilizer distribution, feed mills, and a soybean-crushing plant. At its zenith, the DeBruce Grain operation had operations in 25 states and Mexico, able to store 180 million bushels.

It might have been the biggest entrepreneurial bet this region has seen in the past half-century. “When you’re 27, you’re pretty invincible,” DeBruce says. “The good news is that I had nothing to start with, so I wasn’t afraid of failure because there was no downside.”

The combined reach of his interests would form the Kansas City region’s third-largest private company, with annual revenues of roughly $6 billion, before he sold it in 2010. At that point, the annual donations he’d made to prime the foundation’s pump for giving ballooned from the half-million-dollar neighborhood into a much more impressive ZIP code. The millions that DeBruce has poured into those coffers greatly expanded the number of non-profits receiving support through the foundation.

Linda, as well, came to realize the power of commerce to bring positive change to others’ lives. Her focus as a student at KU was on education, and for a while, she taught. Then, she began working at a teacher’s center, where she came to understand the challenges that classroom instructors face, often without support or resources to assist them. She went on to get her master’s degree at KU in child development, and worked with a team of professors conducting research for Sesame Street on ways to use television as a resource for learning.

Later, she would start a business with her daughter, importing embroidered handbags like those they’d seen on a trip to Vietnam. “On the plane back, we looked at each other and said, ‘we want our business to be about more that handbags.’ We had enjoyed the culture of the country and the women who worked there. We got involved in some micro-financing, went back twice a year, and arranged to go out and visit the women who had received this money.”

The impact of even those comparatively tiny investments was immediately visible. One woman, Linda says, had started a dessert stall in a local market; another had used that money to plant a large garden and some rice that she could sell at the market. In each case, their lives had improved through the engagement of Linda and her daughter. “It was wonderful to go out and see their enthusiasm and appreciation for what we did,” she says. “It was the first time I thought, ‘all right, this is a path—a pathway.’ ”

Their separate philanthropic interests came together when they were married, a union that quickly produced artistic dividends for Kansas City. Linda wanted to introduce Paul to Renaissance-era sculpture with a trip to Florence, and an unexpected change in their itinerary brought them to the place where the original Gates of Paradise were on display. 

It turned out that the Italian foundry that had made sister a replica of the 17-foot-tall, 4-1/2-ton bronze gates had a Kansas City connection, having also produced some of the fountains we see every day on the Country Club Plaza. The two doors that now sit in the Nelson’s Bloch building were being stored in India by a Japanese patron who had funded restoration of the original doors and the subsequent replica casts. After bringing an executive to Kansas City and showing off the Nelson, the decision was made: This should be the future home for the 1990 edition.

“It was all very serendipitous,” Linda says. “I’m good at asking questions; Paul is good at putting together all the pieces.” Indeed, Paul worked with attorneys—from Italy, India, Japan, and the U.S.—to untangle the bureaucratic Gordian knot and bring the pieces to their new home in 2017.

It was, Paul says, an example of being able, on a personal level, to address an immediate and unplanned opportunity. The same was true in 2020 when he was watching the evening news. Troubled by images of the civic unrest sweeping the nation and even here on The Plaza, just a few hundred yards from their beloved Nelson-Atkins, he made the decision on the spot to help fund body cameras for the police, hoping to quell protestor concerns. That initial pledge of $1 million inspired an additional $1.8 million from other donors to fund the camera purchases.

“And the whole thing,” he notes, “came together in 18 hours.”

A Structured Process

Successful philanthropists know that, in the long run, you don’t just throw money at problems. But sometimes, it can be a lever to produce quick results.

Spontaneous things like the Gates of Paradise acquisition or the body cameras, Paul says, “are easy in one sense because there’s stuff going on and you have to make a decision,” just as you would in business. “The other things we approach, such as the Nelson, or for the art institute, KU and KU Med—we’re exposed to a lot of different things. We’ve done about 90 organizations, so we take a little more structured view of what they’re trying to accomplish.”

That means a serious examination of a non-profit’s mission, its board composition, whether the board is functional, and more. 

“There have been a couple of organizations where we believed in their mission and suggested to them that they get with the Center for Non-Profit Leadership at UMKC to make some moves,” he said. “So many smaller organizations tend to put friends on the board. We have a core belief that board composition needs to be more strategic, and you need to have somebody who understands legal, somebody who understands finance. Absolutely, you need to have volunteers, but you also need people who can support that mission.”

And once inside the inner circle of their beneficence, the non-profits must perform. Even if support can be considered a gift, nothing is gifted in perpetuity.

“It’s so important,” Paul says, “that the board is aligned with the mission, that the board and CEO be aligned together, and that they are working together as a team. It’s pretty easy for a founder to dominate a board, particularly if friends are on the board. We try to avoid those situations. We’re looking for situations where it’s a team concept.”

Having built a for-profit company with a multinational presence, having international connections to the art world, and being engaged in one of the nation’s most philanthropic cities, the DeBruces’ combined experience gives them a unique perspective on the charitable ecosystem here. It’s hard to compare levels of philanthropy between one U.S. city and another, he says, “but in the rest of the world, you don’t see the same levels as in the U.S.”

The pool of talent with highly qualified people who can populate strategic board roles, Paul says, “is larger than you might guess. The problem that some board leaders run into is that they don’t know the right people, and that’s where UMKC has been helpful in some instances. They can help guide the founder to think about a different subset of people.”

Giving Begins at Home

Linda served for more than 20 years as a docent at the Nelson, where Paul remains on the board of trustees, and they were long-time acquaintances before they married. But their lives and interests have aligned so well that it’s not unusual for one to finish another’s sentences, even during a brief conversation. 

Together, they have found common cause, especially with the foundation’s efforts targeted at improving career pathways for students and young adults nationwide. “The foundation is a passion for us to further the skills and pathways for them,” she says, “by finding those target groups and creating economic opportunities for them.”

Of their philanthropic yin and yang, Paul says, “It just flows. There’s not a form or a mold that says, OK, we’re going to talk about this decision tonight. It’s ongoing conversations, a process more than an event.”

“Some of it,” Linda says, “is involved with being in contact with people who run those organizations.” “That’s a good point,” Paul continues. “We are involved; I’m still a trustee at the Nelson, Linda was on the advancements board of KU Med, is on the advisory board of the Guggenheim in Venice, Italy, and the steering committee for the KU campaign, the university, and the med center. When you’re involved in the community, you are exposed to a lot of different ideas.”

Paul tells the story of longtime acquaintance Lou Smith, former head of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation (and before that, the Honeywell plant), who had passed along invaluable philanthropic guidance from Mr. K himself. Smith had arrived early for a foundation meeting, and was chatting with Kauffman, who confided that one of his biggest regrets was that “I waited too long to start giving away my money.”

Thirty years after Ewing Kauffman’s death, Paul DeBruce still finds inspiration in that call to action for those blessed with the ability to act.

“Are we doing everything correctly? I don’t know,” he says. “But if we do nothing, we know what the results will be.”