Roxanne Downer – My Articles

Seeing Eye to Eye: Morgan Stanley’s Peter Crnkovich takes up his firm’s charitable legacy.

In 1997, Morgan Stanley’s Peter Crnkovich was faced with a question many parents dread: “Dad, can I have a puppy?” Little did he know the answer to his then-11-year-old daughter’s prayers would lead him to a longstanding role on the board of The Seeing Eye, a Morristown, New Jersey–based nonprofit that trains canine companions for the blind.
Read the rest of this entry »

Bringing Home the Bacon: Michael Gordon helps Share Our Strength fight childhood hunger at home.

For Merrill Lynch media/telecom banker Michael Gordon, working with Share Our Strength, a respected charity that tackles world hunger, came almost as naturally as cooking up a deal. As with most of his business transactions, Gordon’s involvement with Share Our Strength stemmed from relationships: A client, veteran entertainment executive Neil Braun (NBC, Viacom, Starz Media), recognized both his pragmatic skill set and interest in the issue and recruited Gordon to join him on the charity’s board two years ago. Read the rest of this entry »

Angel Investors: Boston’s LBO kingpins team up against cystic fibrosis

Days after Joseph O’Donnell Jr. was delivered at Massachusetts’s Melrose-Wakefield Hospital on May 1, 1974, his parents learned that their son had been born with cystic fibrosis, a disabling hereditary disease of the lungs. Every breath he took for the rest of his short life would be a triumph. That’s when Joey’s dad, the senior Joseph O’Donnell — a graduate of Harvard Business School and the founder of a local food-and-beverage company — got involved with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, attempting to learn as much as he could about the disease in the hopes of saving his first child’s life. The panacea never came. Read the rest of this entry »

Read Capital: Don Valentine talks about his favorite start-up

Don Valentine is the founding partner of venture-capital powerhouse Sequoia Capital, the original source of seed capital for Apple, Cisco, Google and YouTube. One of the ventures he is proudest of, though, isn’t an iPod maker, a networking conglomerate or a trailblazing dot-com. It’s Room to Read, a non-profit organization that partners with local communities to build schools and libraries all across the developing world. Read the rest of this entry »

Middle Man: Robert Niehaus helps kids on the cusp

AS CHAIRMAN OF the $1.3 billion Manhattan private-equity group Greenhill Capital Partners, Robert Niehaus has made a specialty out of betting on meat-and-potatoes mid-market firms. So it should come as no surprise that Niehaus, 51, has cultivated a two-decade relationship with Student Sponsor Partners. Founded by Dillon Read (now UBS) investment banker Peter Flanigan, SSP isn’t a particularly glamorous charity. Most of the kids it works with are C students who don’t qualify for magnet or specialty high schools. The colleges they attend (90 percent go on to get undergraduate degrees) tend to be good rather than great. Read the rest of this entry »