LEXI LANDSMAN

BOBBY Sager lives a life of extremes. When we speak over the phone, he is in Harare, Zimbabwe preparing to meet with Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe and the Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai about economic opportunity initiatives.

He’s then heading to Rwanda to check on a radical business-pairing project (more on that later). Then he will make a quick stop in South Africa for another project, before arriving in Sydney to give the keynote address at the Jewish Communal Appeal’s (JCA) gala dinner on August 15.

All of this in the space of three weeks.

It’s not unusual, or even different to his normal schedule. For 10 months of every year for the past decade of his life, the entrepreneur turned full-time philanthropist and his family, who hail from Boston, have travelled to some of the poorest nations on earth, living in villages and cities in developing countries to set up problem-solving projects.

“What makes me want to do it is that I’m not a do-gooder, I’m a doer, who has figured out that hands-on, eyeball-to-eyeball kind of philanthropy is a way to live a full life,” Sager says from Harare in his thick Boston accent.

The reason Sager began his world expedition was his success in business.

He was the president and partner of Gordon Brothers Group, a global advisory, acquisition and capital solutions company -– and the driving force behind their growth.

The company expanded to more than 20 offices in North America, Europe and Asia and acquired or started up 12 other companies in just three years.

The firm conducts more than $40 billion of transactions and appraisals annually, making it one of the largest providers of these services in the world.

“The reason I got into business was so that I could create choices for myself and family. And once I had a certain amount of money, making more money was kind of a waste of time,” he says.

So in 2000 with his wife Elaine, daughter Tess and son Shane, the family made the decision to pack up their things and establish the Sager Family Travelling Foundation and Roadshow, in order to “live a full life [and develop] a way where my family and I could learn and feel and experience” by helping people.

It’s that philosophy of living a full life by giving to others that Sager will address at JCA’s gala dinner from a Jewish perspective, as his Jewish identity has played an indelible role on his philosophy of giving.

“I’m obviously Jewish, my parents go to Temple every Friday night and my dad was president of the synagogue back in Boston. I never feel more Jewish than when I’m helping people.”

The foundation doesn’t accept donations and its projects are funded entirely by Sager. Mostly, they travel together as a family to the different destinations, except when security issues -– and there have been many -– see him go alone.

While most people would write a cheque for charity, which Sager commends, he asserts that type of giving lacks a crucial ingredient -– engaging with and helping others, and having a full life in return.

“If all I did was write a cheque, then my family and I wouldn’t have an opportunity to look into the eyes of people that we are trying to help and to feel their humanity and to have them feel ours and to have all the experiences that you have in helping people.”

But there is another aspect to Sager’s “eyeball-to-eyeball” philosophy, and that’s making themselves the currency -– the currency of helping, which he divides into two parts: cash and individual skills.

That in turn, he explains, creates a double return on investment: the impact you have on others and on yourself.

But Sager makes the point that he’s not going around the world wanting to go give people a hug, or see them smile; he is demanding the highest possible return on his investment -– both of money and time.

“What we do in the foundation is try to impact people that we think have the potential to impact lots of other people,” he explains.

An example of this model of thinking is a project in Rwanda where the foundation runs the Sager Women Opportunity Fund Trust, a micro-enterprise program for women, where those whose husbands were murdered in the 1994 Rwandan Genocide -– the mass killing of Rwanda’s Tutsis -– start businesses with women whose husbands did the murdering.

“Most of the time, micro-enterprise is about poverty alleviation, for me in my world of demanding extreme high returns on investment, simple poverty alleviation would be a really good thing and I applaud anyone that helps with micro-enterprise … but that’s not enough for me.”

In this project, bringing the wives together in business is also a means to enable reconciliation and bring about social change.

“Once these women have started business they have more of a say in their family, in their community, they are better parents, better citizens. Their kids are more likely to go to school. There is a tremendous multiplier effect that comes with it.”

On one of his early expeditions, Sager found himself picking up his camera and photographing the children he met and he has since photographed children in war-torn areas, such as Afghanistan, Rwanda, Iraq and Pakistan.

“The camera, for me, is a device to connect to people and to the situation I am in.” He spends from one hour to even a whole day before he takes a single photo of a person. “So a photo for me – the actual clipping of the shutter and thinking about light and composition and so forth -– is like one per cent of the experience, 99 per cent is the tuning in it allows me to do and most of time [you can] see that in the eyes of the people.”

To continue the longevity and reach of the foundation’s projects, his photos were incorporated into a tour of Sager’s close friend, British rock musician Sting, when the band Police did a world reunion tour to an audience of some four million people.

It was one particular song they played, Invisible Sun, that Sager drew on for the title for his soon-to-be-released book, The Power of the Invisible Sun, which will feature his photographs interspersed with his philosophy of sustainability.

“The reason I added the word ‘power’ is that I talk in the book and try to show pictorially the idea of how incredibly important hope is -– that people think about hope as something that’s nice and empowering, but I think of hope as truly a game-changing thing.”

Is that the fundamental lesson he’s taken away from his journeys across the world? “Absolutely. It’s the fuel for everything. When things get screwed up in a community, it is almost always because people have lost hope -– because [they see] no light at the end of the tunnel and then people become radical and belligerent, and all kinds of bad things happen.

“All there needs to be is the slightest ray of hope to ignite the human spirit’s ability to overcome.”

The JCA gala dinner will take place in Sydney on August 15. Enquiries: (02) 9360 2344. Visit: www.teamsager.org.

Listen to Lexi Landsman’s interview with Bobby Sager