Weingarten is a face-to-face philanthropist

http://www.usatoday.com/news/sharing/2010-11-22-explore22_ST_N.htm

By Oren Dorell, USA TODAY
For Charlie Annenberg Weingarten, giving away money is personal.

Explore, his branch of the $1.6 billion Annenberg Foundation, gives away millions of dollars every year, but Weingarten doesn't accept grant proposals or give money from a distance. He spends time with people whose causes he believes in and films the visits to call attention to what they do.

"I can't understand giving if it's impersonal," Weingarten says. "I don't give grants by somebody sending a 20-page docket."

Weingarten, 43, a vice president and director of the foundation created by his media tycoon grandfather, Walter Annenberg, prayed with coal miners in West Virginia's Coal River Valley after an explosion killed 29 miners last spring. He swam in Hawaii with a group that takes disabled people to the beach. He hiked in Greenland to highlight changes facing people of the Arctic in a warming climate.

Explore's mission, he says, is to champion the selfless acts of others and inspire lifelong learning. It's also to tell stories.

"If you listen to the media, you'd think everyone in the Middle East is a terrorist, everyone in China is greedy, everyone in Africa is starving," Weingarten says. Explore shows, he says, "wherever you go in the world, people are doing good things."

His team chooses places in the news, researches the issues and identifies non-profits doing interesting work there. The ideal crew for a fact-finding mission, he says, fits in a rental car. The trips are documented in thousands of photographs and hundreds of videos on the website.

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http://explore.org/

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