Funny, sometimes, how things begin. One of the world’s largest, most effective and respected charities, for example, began in the simplest, humblest and smallest of ways.
With cute little bunnies, to be precise.
When Dr. James Jackson, founder and chairman emeritus of the Denver-based mega-charity Project C.U.R.E. tells the story of the bunnies, he does so with smiles and bouts of robust laughter, well matching an upbeat and outgoing personality sunny enough to quickly melt the iciest of hearts.
He tells of being a boy, the youngest of three brothers, growing up in the 1940s in Idaho’s Boise Valley.
One day, Jackson’s father took James and his brothers aside.
“He told us straight out, ‘I’m never going to be able to give you anything but I can show you how to get anything you want.’”
The father told them how to get ahead in life: “Take what you have and make it into what you need or want”; and how to keep their customers satisfied: “Everybody in the deal has to come out better in the end.”
He then had the boys cut tall grass from their land and fill their red wagon with it.
Finally, he presented them with a gift: A beautiful, and extremely pregnant, white New Zealand rabbit.
Not long after the rabbit gave birth to a large litter, the boys put the bunnies in their grass-filled wagon and hauled them around the neighborhood to show them off.
Other children immediately fell in love with the irresistible little creatures and began making offers for trades. The Jackson boys — already picking up on their father’s lesson plan — were happy to oblige.
In no time at all, the boys exchanged the bunnies for an extensive marble collection, a tricycle, a scooter and a beautiful Schwinn bicycle.
“That’s how we got started in business,” Jackson says today. “It was all about value for value.”
By the time the Jackson boys were teenagers, they were bartering various commodities for such things as Pontiac automobiles, even though none of them were old enough to have a driver’s license.
They were all able to pay their own way through college.
Their business acumen followed Jackson and his brothers when they moved to Colorado in the mid-1960s.
They smelled opportunity in the Colorado Rockies. In partnership with local investors they began buying former sheep grazing land in Winter Park and the Vail Valley for as low as $127 an acre. Developments related to the state’s then-exploding ski industry began to appear on that land.
Jackson and his brothers made millions.
“My goal when I was a little kid was to be a millionaire by the time I was 25,” Jackson says. “By 30, I was umpteen times over whatever I thought I’d be in my whole life.”
By the early 1970s, Jackson was the picture of success. Armed with experience and an education that focused on economics, he had more than fulfilled his youthful dream of succeeding as an entrepreneur — he was a multi-millionaire.
He and his wife Anna Marie, who had been childhood friends, lived in a beautiful home with a spectacular view in Evergreen.
He and his brothers and other business partners had a glitzy headquarters in the lofty atrium of the then-chic Cinderella City mall.
But something was missing.
In Jackson’s aptly-named 2010 autobiography The Happiest Man In The World, he remembers the night his life changed. It was March 12, 1973 and he was driving his Mercedes luxury sedan back home when he realized what was wrong.
“This wasn’t working,” he recalls, remembering the moment as a personal conversation with G-d, with the subject being nothing less than his life and being.
“I was not happy. I realized there was no way to catch whatever I was trying to chase. We’d put a big deal together, we’d get another ranch and subdivide that. I was 30 years old and realized I wasn’t going to do this for the rest of my life. How much is enough? I don’t want to do this.”
His business partners, including his brothers, who had all made fortunes in tandem with Jackson’s, weren’t any better off, Jackson says.
“None of them were happy. My own brother went through three divorces. Almost all of my partners lost their families.”
Jackson and his wife asked themselves when they had last felt true happiness and concluded that it was in the early days of their marriage, when they were back in Idaho and didn’t have anything, “just a dream and good health and love for life.”
At first, Jackson simply tried to slow down, tried to reduce his workload by a certain percentage. But as a Type A personality, he says, that didn’t work.
“I was addicted,” he says. “I was addicted to making one more deal. I had to do it. That’s all I thought about. And I had to break the addiction.”
So he moved in a rather more radical direction.
“I was going down the freeway and I just told G-d one day: ‘I want to do something significant. You get me out of this rat race, out of this squirrel cage, and I’ll never use my talent and ability to earn and accumulate for myself.’”
Jackson and his wife started everything over.
They began by giving away their fortune — all $16 million of it. That amount today, Jackson estimates, would be about $80 million.
All of it went to charity.
“The only thing I couldn’t give away was my house up in Evergreen,” Jackson says.
“It was the best business deal I’ve ever done in my life,” he adds with a smile that appears very genuine.
“I got off the hook.”
The transition from Jackson’s self-imposed impoverishment (he would prefer to call it self-liberation) to one of the world’s most effective philanthropic endeavors was neither quick nor easy.
He began with a process of personal redefinition.
“What do you do?” he asks. “Who are you? It was a bigger deal than I thought. You don’t have any identity anymore.”
He began to write, focusing on economic values and ethics that Jackson — both an educated economist and a religious Protestant — found in the Bible. In 1982, he published a book on those observations, What’cha Gonna Do With What’cha Got?, which he describes as “a reevaluation of economic principles.”
The book sold well in the religious sector and this triggered a domino-like chain of events, beginning with offer from the Christian organization Campus Crusade to train members in the US and Canada. Jackson’s book was expanded into a series of seven textbooks and he ended up working with Catholic, Baptist and other Christian students in universities across the country
The textbooks, to which more than 10,000 students were ultimately exposed, Jackson said, focused on this challenge: “How do you take these laws of G-d’s economy and apply it to where we live?”
The Campus Crusade experience led to a consultant’s position with several major corporations considering international expansion. That in turn led to a interchange with US Bank about poverty and economic development in Third World nations.
A sample of Jackson’s “cultural economics” that formed the substance of his consulting: “A subsistence farmer is easier to govern when he doesn’t have enough money to buy a machete or a gun, and he’s easier to govern if it takes him all of his morning to go down to the river to get water.”
His work with US Bank led to a contact with a representative of Robert Mugabe, the leader of the newly independent African nation of Zimbabwe, who was impressed with Jackson’s theories of economic development in poverty-stricken nations.
Jackson helped Zimbabwe with international trade deals, sometimes based on the foundational lessons of barter he learned as a child. He was able, for example, to exchange excess agricultural crops from Zimbabwe for copper from neighboring Zambia during a downturn in the copper trade.
It was a deal that ultimately left both nations happy, and wealthier.
Word spread about Jackson’s work, his unique blend of capitalist and socialist principles in economic development.
He soon found himself in several South American nations — Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela and Brazil — sharing his ideas and expertise with leaders desperate to invigorate their economies.
Jackson, not surprisingly, was learning himself during the whole experience.
He learned, for example, how to deal with Third World heads of state, cabinet members, regional and local officials.
He also learned about the dire needs of the majority of people in these nations.
Those lessons began to gel sometime in the mid-1980s, when Jackson visited a backwater village in Brazil. During his stay there, he paid a visit to a small medical clinic.
He had been invited to the village, and specifically the clinic, by his Brazilian translator, a woman named Loretta, who was concerned about the availability of health care in remote regions of the country, places so isolated from the rest of Brazilian society, Jackson says, that even the military hesitated to venture there.
The needs that Jackson saw in the Brazilian clinic were profound.
It had little if any modern technological equipment, only the most basic of medicines, and severe shortages of such medical staples as stethoscopes and bandages.
“This is what we would use as a tomato can,” he says of one piece equipment he saw in that clinic. “And they were using it as an X-ray machine. I was amazed by how much they could do with so little.”
The solitary doctor who ran the clinic was treating hundreds of patients, performing procedures in what amounted to a remodeled kitchen.
“I said, ‘Where are your supplies, who’s helping you?’”
“He said, ‘Dr. Jackson, I’m doing the best I can with what I’ve got.”
The experience was life-changing for Jackson. Although he still had no idea how he would apply what he had learned, he realized that he had found his true calling in life.
“It was as simple as that,” he says.
“I knew it when I walked into that clinic in Brazil. I thought, this is impossible and this is going to work because it is impossible.”
Project C.U.R.E. (an acronym for Commission on Urgent Relief and Equipment) began in 1987, in the simplest and most organic of ways
Jackson promised his Brazilian friends that he would acquire whatever medical supplies he could gather in Colorado and ship them to Brazil, so long as the Brazilians could assure him that the supplies would get to their intended destination and not the black market.
The clinic doctor replied that since Jackson already knew the Brazilian president, he was far more likely to get such a guarantee on his own. Jackson did just that. The Brazilian Minister of Health not only guaranteed safe delivery of the supplies but offered storage facilities.
“I thought, shoot, this is getting complicated,” he recalls with a laugh.
“I got back on the plane and held my head in my hands, thinking, what have I done to my life? I don’t know anything. I don’t know what I’m doing and I just made all these deals. I’d made a vow to help these people. I was going to do it but I didn’t know where to start.”
Back in Colorado, Jackson called “a bunch of my friends,” and “tried to paint a verbal picture of what I saw in that clinic.”
The list of needs was relatively easy to compile: “Everything,” Jackson says
His Colorado contacts put him in touch with medical suppliers who provided Jackson with additional education. Jackson learned that many medical suppliers frequently have considerable overstock, caused by lost bids and outdated equipment.
Jackson remembered his father’s adage — “Everybody in the deal has to come out better in the end” — and realized that it would be mutually beneficial for suppliers to unload this overstock and for his own budding non-profit to acquire it.
The idea, which would become a cornerstone of Project C.U.R.E.’s method of operations, caught on immediately. One firm gave him over $50,000 worth of brand-new equipment and supplies.
Jackson put that first load into his pickup truck and drove it up to Evergreen, where “my garage was my first warehouse,” he says.
“Something’s happening,” he told his wife.
The first firm to donate then called other medical supply firms in the Denver area.
“Within 30 days I had collected over $250,000 worth of brand new medical stuff.”
Funny, sometimes, how things begin.
Project C.U.R.E. began to grow before it even had a name, a headquarters, a board of directors or an official existence as a non-profit entity. It grew of its own impetus and the sheer fact that it was a good idea.
“People are dying,” Jackson sums it up, “and here is this incredible supply of waste in America, billions of dollars worth of it. There’s more overstock than we can get to.
“And over here is a bottomless pit of need. Why didn’t somebody see this before?”
Twenty-seven years after its founding, Project C.U.R.E. has become a monster — a very benevolent monster.
The project today is headquartered in a huge new warehouse in suburban Centennial. It operates similar warehouses in Phoenix, Nashville and Chicago. It has an additional 14 collection points across the country.
“My goal is to have 25 of those big warehouses like we have here,” Jackson says.
“We are the largest handler of donated medical supplies in the world now. Forbes just listed us in the top 20 charities in America. GuideStar and Charity Navigator have us now as the number four charity in the United States.”
Project C.U.R.E. operates on a cash budget of over $5 million. In 2014, it expects to send out between $75 and $80 million in medical supplies and equipment, shipping it to 130 countries in 40-foot containers that can carry $450,000 worth of medical material apiece.
The project also sends out thousands of medical kits that can be used to set up small clinics in remote locations, and thousands of “CURE Kits” for families to take care of children when professional care is unavailable, containing such basics as Neosporin and aspirin.
The vast majority of what they ship is donated by the medical supply industry on a nationwide basis, but Project C.U.R.E. also runs its own fundraising operation to cover overhead and shipping expenses and such things as international tours for suppliers and donors to see firsthand how the project’s operation works.
And it does work. In a hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for example, an angiograph and catheterization laboratory with imaging equipment donated by Project C.U.R.E. is saving the lives of an estimated 2,000-3,000 children a year.
“That’s one hospital in one district in one country,” he says. “We are shipping into 130 countries now and hundreds of hospitals in those places.”
Jackson sits back and smiles.
One of the most rewarding lessons Project C.U.R.E. has taught him, he says, is that once an effort like this is up and going, people actually want to be a part of it — suppliers, donors and volunteers. All have grown exponentially.
“Everybody wants to help you,” he says. “I go to sleep at night and I really don’t care about the stock market anymore.
“You stand back and say, what happened? I’m just a lucky duck to be able to hang out with what’s happening. You can push this as far as you’ve got guts to push it.”
And it does take guts, Jackson adds.
“There are obstacles and there is danger. I’ve been in all the real bad places — Afghanistan, Iraq, Cuba, North Korea. In the Bosnia mess I was right on the front lines. I’ve been in India with guns at my head and in Africa.”
On a trip to Africa a few years ago, Jackson contacted a strain of the deadly e-coli virus that came very close to killing him. It left him physically vulnerable to infection and led to doctor’s orders not to travel to Third World locations anymore.
Partially as a result of that, Jackson’s son, Dr. Douglas Jackson, became president & CEO of Project C.U.R.E., and now handles many of the difficult travel assignments.
His son’s leadership of the non-profit is a source of tremendous pride to Jackson.
Also challenging is the effort to ensure that donated supplies get to where they’re supposed to go, Jackson says.
The project has a list of firm “distinctives” it uses as donation criteria. It never enters a nation unless it is invited in to begin with, and it never sends anything anywhere unless the organization has put “boots on the ground,” with volunteers actually visiting the hospitals and clinics and meeting the leaders of these clinics.
Commonly, Project C.U.R.E. insists on meeting a nation’s ministers of health, foreign affairs and finance — and quite possibly the head of state — to preserve the integrity of the supply line.
“I’m not sending something hoping it’s going to go in,” Jackson says. “It’s going to go in.”
While overcoming graft, corruption and the black market in the Third World is difficult, he says — noting that only 40% of most US and other foreign aids actually ends up helping its intended recipients — “it is possible to do.”
“We follow up. We take medical teams to see where it went and what else they need and see whether they’re actually using this stuff.”
It can also be difficult to convince suppliers that donating their overstock is in their own best interest, but Jackson — still a sharp businessman and entrepreneur — has learned a lot of effective techniques.
“You can’t stand with you hat in your hand and beg somebody, or shame them, or put guilt on them, because they need to fill your bag. They don’t do that. It goes back to my dad’s old thing. Even your donors have to be better off. Your volunteers have to be better off. They have to be the ones walking away and thinking, ‘I’m a winner in this thing.’”
Under Jackson and now his son, Project C.U.R.E.’s approach is to stress that suppliers will save substantial money on warehouse costs or efforts to sell overstock, that they will gain significant tax breaks and earn considerable goodwill.
“You can make more money on your bottom line by giving it to me than you can by leaving it in a warehouse, and you’ll have all the warehouse space you’ll need. You’ve got to do it with a business sense. It is economics.”
Overseas, meanwhile, Project C.U.R.E. works with many American and other international businesses that have set up in enterprises in the countries the non-profit serves. These firms often have agreements with host governments to “put stuff back into” those countries.
Project C.U.R.E. helps these firms by jointly setting up clinics and other health care facilities, thereby fulfilling the firms’ contractual obligations and saving them money, while receiving its own financial reward.
It is yet another example of Jackson’s pragmatic approach to cultural economics.
“I’m interested in getting these people healthy,” he says, paraphrasing what he typically offers to a firm doing business in the Third World: “You can’t build a strong economy on sick people. If you want to be the partner and get all the fame and fortune off of this, and fulfill what you were going to do anyway, why don’t you give me $20,000 and I’ll give you $450,000 worth of facilities? Can you beat that anyplace?”
Once upon a time, that sort of skillful deal-making made Jackson a very rich man.
Today, it is employed for quite a different purpose.
“Everything I would have accumulated and beat everybody else up for, everything I would have grabbed and horded, I would have spent to buy what I have today,” he says.
In talking with Jackson, he does appear to be “the happiest man in the world.”
But he admits that the decades he spent in close proximity to human misery does affect him.
“I’ve seen awful, awful stuff,” he says. “I’m not a tough guy. I get overwhelmed.”
It hurts him to see people suffer and die, Jackson says, and to see how greed and ignorance work together to keep people from rising above dire circumstances.
It hurts him to see how vast the needs are today, and the prospect of some of them — such as the AIDS epidemic in Africa — only growing worse in the future.
He doesn’t have a magic bullet, he says, just Project C.U.R.E.
“What’s the answer? I don’t know. I would settle for just that one little hospital in Ethiopia. Two or three thousands kids a year, on that one machine, who would have died. That’s quantifiable. I can get my hands around that.
“When I consider the fact that there are untold numbers of people in untold numbers of countries and hospitals that are alive because of volunteers of Project C.U.R.E., then I can take a deep breath and say, ‘Okay.’”
His faith in G-d sustains him through the darker moments, Jackson says.
He looks to the Bible, to such things as Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, for spiritual sustenance, and also to Jewish Scripture, and such Jewish ideas as tzedakah and tikkun olam, both of which he is familiar with.
Jackson, a longtime friend of former Denver shaliach Shaul Amir (now associated with Assaf Harofeh medical center in Israel), is a frequent visitor to Israel where he likes to physically track Biblical stories and archaeological sites.
Project C.U.R.E. has a number of active partnerships in the Jewish state, including the Jerusalem-based Yad Sarah, which provides medical services and equipment to the needy.
When the IJN visited Yad Sarah’s Jerusalem facility early last year, its chairman, Meir Meyer, wanted to convey to Denver readers how grateful he is for Project C.U.R.E.’s support.
By the same token, Project C.U.R.E. is also active in areas under the control of the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank, to which he was also a frequent traveler and in which he also has close friends, including Mohammed Jodeh, a Palestinian and former Denverite who served as a Muslim voice of moderation during his years here.
Jackson counts Amir and Jodeh — and many other Jews and Muslims — among his closest of friends.
“I have found spiritual Muslims who really love G-d,” Jackson says, “and Jews who are totally, head-over-heels in love with G-d. They are a good example for me.
“I’m a Christian, but I am intrigued with G-d and how this whole thing goes together,” he says of the differences and interplay between faith traditions.
He strives to approach the Alm-ghty from both sectarian and universal perspectives.
“I am the only guy who can sit in the Imax theater and watch the Hubble space movie and cry,” he says with a chuckle.
But he’s pretty convinced of one thing: that G-d, in whatever religious or dogmatic context He might be regarded, wants him to be doing precisely what he is doing.
“I’ve decided to give the rest of my life helping other people be better off,” he says.
“And I’m a happy guy. The happiest man in the world.”
Copyright © 2014 by the Intermountain Jewish News
