Couple Donate $1 Million for Schools

Ann Nickoll had some unusual news recently for the woman who called seeking an annual donation for a local nonprofit educational foundation in Beverly Hills.

Nickoll and her husband, John, wouldn’t be giving their standard $2,500 gift of past years. Rather, Nickoll offered a little advice.

“I told her to give John a call at the office and talk to him personally,” the Beverly Hills resident recalls. “I thought there might be more substantial in it for her.”

Substantial, indeed.

Within days, the Beverly Hills Educational Foundation learned that it was to receive a $1-million contribution from the Nickolls, owners of a nationwide finance company.

The gift is the largest private donation in the group’s 20-year history and more than doubles its previous $900,000 endowment, used to supplement public school budgets in Beverly Hills.

On Monday night, in a special meeting at Beverly Hills High School, foundation members learned for the first time the true extent of the couple’s philanthropy.

“By more than 10 times, this is the biggest single donation we’ve every received,” said Lili Bosse, president of the Beverly Hills Educational Foundation, who made the most recent fund-raising call to Nickolls. “It just goes well beyond the stretch of anyone’s imagination.”

To sustained applause at a presentation ceremony broadcast on cable television in Beverly Hills, Ann Nickoll told a gathering of school board memebrs and others how she and her husband had struggled to survive on their arrival in Beverly Hills in the early 1960s--how they had even rented out their garage to make ends meet.

For John and Ann Nickoll, lifelong community activists, the most recent donation is an attempt to make a meaningful contribution to education in the community where they have lived for 35 years and where their three children attended public school.

“Hopefully, one large gift will spur others in the community to follow suit, to look hard to see what kind of contribution they can come up with,” John Nickoll said at his home Monday. “It’s just nice to give something back. You can’t spend it all.”

This was the second substantial personal donation to a charity in as many years for the couple. Last fall, at Ann’s bidding, the Nickolls donated a $1-million unrestricted endowment to Planned Parenthood in Los Angeles.

Ann Nickoll, a member of the Republican State Party Central Committee who is also a member of Planned Parenthood’s board of directors, wanted her donation to make a political statement.

“Everyone has this idea that all Republicans are anti-choice and that couldn’t be farther from the truth,” she said.

A delegate to the past two Republican national conventions, Nickoll spent her time at the 1996 convention unsuccessfully trying to soften the language of the party’s antiabortion platform.

Her subsequent donation to Planned Parenthood, she said, was a message that the fight will go on.

But there was also a decidedly personal reason for her singular act of charity--offering the largest private donation ever received by the local office of Planned Parenthood.

In the fall of 1996, Nickoll was suffering through the worst of a three-year-long bout with lung cancer that had included three operations. She feared her cancer was fatal, and she decided to act.

“Being so ill clarifies a lot,” she recalled. “It focuses you on what’s important and what lasting thing you might want to leave that says something about yourself. I wanted to make a contribution that could be used while I was still alive.”

Nickoll has survived. And this year she urged her husband--a former trustee at Brown University, his alma mater--to consider a like contribution to a cause close to his heart: Public education.

Richard Stone, president of the Board of Education for the Beverly Hills Unified School District, which comprises five schools and 5,500 students, said the unique feature of the Nickolls’ gift was that it was an open contribution to public education.

“A lot of people give money to their private alma maters, with specific requests on how they want the money used,” he said. “But this gift is to the community and has been left to the district. The couple just wanted to share some of what they have with children of future and we think that’s just extraordinary.”

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As a Brown trustee, Nickoll said he saw a lot of wasted gifts, “from people who wanted to open a Egyptology department at the school, even though we’ve got only three students to attend it.

“You can’t hold on to your money after you donate it. You have to have confidence in the organization that they’ll do the right things with it.”

Years ago, as a foundation board member and fund-raiser, Ann Nickoll had the idea that big money would inspire more big money. So she went to the office of financier Michael Milken, who was operating out of Beverly Hills at the time.

She met with Milken and asked for $50,000. She didn’t get it. But a Milken associate did offer her $500. “I was disappointed but, hey, I’m tenacious. I kept truckin’ ”

Along with the emotional satisfaction brought by their recent gift, the playing field at Beverly Hills High School will be named Nickoll Field.

John Nickoll said his donation was inspired by fellow Brown University graduation and friend Ted Turner, who recently announced a donation of $1 billion to the United Nations.

“The difference between our gifts is that Ted’s amount has a nice ‘B’ in front of it,” he joked. “I figured if he could do something so big, I could manage something small.”

Small, indeed.