Impact Series: Inspiring impact with philanthropist Mitzi Perdue, Part 2

In Part 2 of our conversation with Mitzi Perdue, we dive deeper into her strategies for impactful giving and the motivations behind her generosity. Hosted by Kim Ledger and Sarah Rhodes, this episode continues to uncover the art of philanthropy through Mitzi's remarkable journey and contributions. Don't miss this inspiring and informative discussion.  

Be sure to check out Part 1 of this episode to learn more about Mitzi Perdue and her inspiring philanthropic story! 

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Until next time, keep giving wisely.

Transcript

Kim Ledger:

Welcome back to Ren's Philanthropic Insights video podcast series made to help financial advisors make the most of their client's charitable giving. In this special season, we delve into the stories of generous philanthropists shaping our world, and how financial advisors and family offices can help them maximize the impact of their charitable giving. I'm your host, Kim Ledger, Ren's SVP of complex assets. With me today is my co-host and charitable giving expert, Sarah Rhodes, Ren's family office, charitable services director. This is a continuation of our earlier conversation with Mitzi Perdue, who is an accomplished speaker, author, and war correspondent, in addition to being an inspiring and impactful philanthropist. Welcome, Sarah.

Sarah Rhodes:

Thank you for having me.

Kim Ledger:

Yeah. So in our last episode, just to recap for everybody, Mitzi talked about making the gift of that amazing emerald ring that came out of the Atocha. Now, how many people in our line of work get to talk about having their favorite gift be that of sunken treasure?

Sarah Rhodes:

That's incredible.

Kim Ledger:

Right?

Sarah Rhodes:

Yeah.

Kim Ledger:

It's a fun story in how she made that gift.

Sarah Rhodes:

And I love that you have the opportunity to work with these very interesting assets and help people fund their donor-advised funds.

Kim Ledger:

Yes.

Sarah Rhodes:

What I love doing is then turning around and helping these donors actually grant the funds out to make an impact in the world.

Kim Ledger:

I think you're going to be really inspired with our conversation today with Mitzi. She is amazing and she has an incredible passion. So let's join her now. Mitzi, I'm so glad you're joining us again today. Thank you so much. Loved our conversation. In the last episode, we talked about the giving the Emerald ring to the donor-advised fund, selling it at Sotheby's, and that was a great experience, and now the DAF has cash to grant, and that's what I'm excited to hear from you today and to learn about what happened with the cash from in the DAF.

Mitzi Perdue:

Well, the initial purpose of it was I wanted to help the police because you've all heard of Chernobyl in the terrible accident. Well, Chernobyl has an exclusion-free zone where nobody can come in. I think it's roughly like a thousand square miles, give or take. The police have the function of trying to keep poachers out because the reason people are excluded from the area is there's high, even lethal, levels of radiation. The Chernobyl police, they had the job of keeping poachers out because there's a huge trade, how about millions of dollars for scrap metal that people would take from Chernobyl, but the police prevent that. The penalty for poaching was pretty big. However, the Russians, when they invaded, they went to the police station at Chernobyl and they either stole or destroyed all the police cars, which meant that for almost a year after the invasion, when the police didn't have the police cars, that the poachers could just run rampant because if you have no cars and you're a policeman or a policewoman and you can't intercept the poachers, the poachers just went crazy.

There's millions and millions of pounds of scrap metal in these thousand square miles because there were towns and cities they'd just go in and take this irradiated scrap metal. And what's wrong with that is say you're a scrap metal poacher. You take it and sell the irradiated metal on the international market, and I'm making this up as an example, but it is an example of a hypothetical one that they gave me, supposing there's a guy in Japan who has a doorknob that was made from the scrap metal. The harm doesn't happen immediately, but say over a course of five years when inside his house there's this constant radiation, that guy, and I picked on Japan, but maybe it's China or Thailand or wherever, we'll find things like he's getting tumors or cancers where his teeth are falling out.

The horror of not being able to prevent the scrap metal from leaving Ukraine. I talked with police in Chernobyl and not being able to do your job and knowing that your job's really important. Well, so how do you replace 18 police cars. Enter my DAF. I bought on their behalf, or they bought on my behalf the 18 police cars.

And the same thing happened with police boats. Ukraine has a lot of rivers and a lot of crime happens on rivers, whether it's human trafficking or smuggling or military things and not being able to have the police boats that you need. Again, there's a lot of suffering that comes about when you can't enforce the law. Well, I did something that was so... This again got global publicity, but since using the DAF, I was able to replace the five missing police boats. And what's really cool is they got top of the line, powerful ones better than what they had before. And my impression is Ukraine costs an awful lot than the same thing would cost here. So the money's gone a real long way.

Well, because I had paid for the boats, I got to name them, they invited me to name them, and they thought that I was going to name them after my late husband or my children, and I said, no. I wanted to do what... There's a Ukrainian expression, it's a little bit naughty, but we're all grownups and it's not too naughty, there's a Ukrainian expression that I learned where you stick a porcupine down somebody's trousers. In other words, you're causing a lot of problems. I wanted to stick a porcupine down Putin's trousers in the following way. Well, here's what I did.

Kim Ledger:

Yeah, I was going to say I think it worked.

Mitzi Perdue:

Well, let me tell you what I did. I found out from the military that there's a part of the Ukrainian military that consists of foreign fighters who have come to fight for freedom and democracy in Ukraine, and I got the names of five soldiers from other countries who had come to give their lives. A guy from Japan, a guy from the Netherlands, a guy from Brazil, actually, it was even a woman from Brazil, and I named the boats after foreign fighters. And then because I'm a writer by trade, I interviewed the families of why this child was, probably somebody in their twenties, was willing to risk their lives and in the end, give their lives for Ukraine. And as a writer, I wrote tribute books for each of them. And then there was a great big ceremony outside of Kyiv on the river where the boats, there was members of the global press.

I had a guess, eyeballing it, I think somewhere between 50 and 75 members of the global press were covering this, including the stories of why people gave their lives. And it did make global press. For example, the guy from Japan, the local newspapers in Japan were telling his story, and that's sort of a way of really making Putin look bad. If people think what he was doing was so terrible that they'd risk their lives or give their lives to stop him. It's powerful. However, it did lead to something that when I describe it, it's... What I'm about to describe, at the beginning, it's going to sound like something really terrible. I regard it as fabulous. And here goes, you ready?

Kim Ledger:

Ready.

Mitzi Perdue:

The third time I went to Ukraine, and this was after the boat ceremony and after the global publicity of the foreign fighters who had given their lives for Ukraine, I was told that because of that one thing that I was on the murder list of Putin's murder list and that I shouldn't go back. And people from three different areas who were really knowledgeable said, "Seriously, don't go. You're on the murder list." And I made a guess, wrong, it turns out, that there could be half a million people on Putin's murder list and that I was probably at the very bottom. I might be number 499,000 or something. I didn't really consider it terribly risky.

However, when I was in Ukraine the third time, the General Nebytov, who's head of the Kyiv region police provided me at every moment with four special forces guys with their AK-47s. And wherever I went, it was with the police guard. Nothing happened. But at the end of the six days where we had agreed that I would be writing stories, and by the way, the Kyiv police is responsible for documenting war crimes, so the amount of stories that I got, I've written 110 published stories now, but at the end of the six days, I wanted to stay a little longer. And General Nebytov said, "Don't, because if you stay longer, I'm going to have to continue the police guards." And I said, "But I'll just stay in my hotel room and write." And he said, "No, they know you're here and they know where you're staying and they'll be able to get you at the hotel." And since I didn't want to drain the police resources at the time of war, I said, okay, I'll get on the train to Warsaw, 19 hours, and I'll do my writing there.

Just what I did. I went to Warsaw, Poland and I checked in at the airport Marriott. And after I've checked in, I'm walking towards the elevator, and at the elevator I see a man and a woman and something about them, it sort of gave me goosebumps or something. My Spider-Man Sense said, don't get on the elevator with them. And so I've listened to that. I've listened to that little ender voice, and I looked at my watch as if I'd forgotten something and walked away from the elevator. I came back half an hour later, they weren't there. Coast is clear. I get on. On the second floor, they get on.

I have learned since, what I'm going to describe, I don't remember it happening to me, although I have an injection mark to prove it, that assassination squads from Russia, they're usually five of them. There's like a spotter. There's somebody coordinating it all, and there'll be two people in an elevator. This is a typical MO, method of operation. One will bump into you real hard. And the other, that exact second is injecting you with Novichok, which is a nerve agent. And Novichok, the Russians love to use it because with anything that's available at a normal hospital, you can't detect it. It just looked as if maybe you had a heart attack and died in your sleep.

Well, I'm unaware of that happening. However, for a couple of months, I still had the injection mark to prove what had happened. I get off the elevator and I'm feeling kind of foolish that I've been so spooked by these people because as far as I knew nothing had happened, walked to my hotel room, I get in and suddenly I have the worst trouble breathing you can imagine. I mean, just wheezing. And it felt like a bow constrictor was just making me have shallower and shallower breaths. And I'm sitting in the edge of my bed in the hotel, and it was real clear that this was real serious and that I should roll over on the bed to reach the house phone and call for help. I couldn't do it. I couldn't make my whole body roll across the bed to the house phone to call for help, and I'm sinking rapidly.

But at this point, I had my laptop with me. Actually, it was my iPad, and I could still text. My fingers, I could still control my fingers. And I texted a Polish friend of mine the following message, "Help can't breathe. Airport Marriott, room 407." And by huge good luck for me, he got it, and he called the front desk. And I learned this afterwards, but the front desk, they take it seriously when somebody can't breathe.

And at that moment, the front desk guy looked out the plate glass window of the lobby, and something happened that I don't think I'd be here if it weren't the case. The airport ambulance was in the driveway of the hotel. And it felt like about three minutes, I don't know how long it really was, but I'm in my room, unable to breathe, the door bursts open, somebody from the hotel had opened the door for them, and two emergency medical technicians. You expect people to say, "How are you?" Or "Are you Mrs. Perdue or something?" No, not a word. They just leapt across the room. One of them just smashed an oxygen mask over my face, and the other grabbed my hand and injected me. And I think that what they were injecting me with was an antidote to, if I had anaphylactic shock. Didn't do any good. They gave me another injection. Nothing happened, and the room is going black at this point from my point of view, but I could still see their faces even though the whole room was going black.

And I could see from their faces that it changed from routine to how about life and death? They dug in their medical bag and pulled out the antidote for Novichok, which is atropine, and they injected me. And in what felt like maybe 90 seconds, I could take a deep breath again. I mean, it worked really fast, and that meant that my life was saved. But for the next five days, I couldn't leave the hotel room 'cause I was just too sick. I couldn't go home. When I was finally able to go home, I arrived home and I have a niece who's a pulmonologist, and she said, your breathing is not good. Let's take an X-ray.

And one portion of my lung had ceased to function, and then I had heart issues. Almost the worst was when you bite it down like this, you feel something solid. When I'd bite, I'd feel something squishy. I mean, there's just hard to describe, but not normal. So I go to the dentist and the dentist said, your gums are so inflamed that you're in danger of losing all your teeth. If this doesn't resolve rapidly, we're making an appointment for you right now, but you can't get there before a week with a specialist in Washington DC who can deal with this kind of thing. But from my point of view, by divine good luck, the inflammation went down. The heart issues lasted a couple of months. The lung resolved itself. And as of this day, I consider myself perfectly totally recovered, but I've heard from people who understand these things that the chances of my surviving that were minuscule.

Kim Ledger:

Wow.

Mitzi Perdue:

And I started out my story saying, this sounds terrible. Actually. I regard it as the adventure of a lifetime, as long as there's no lasting impact for it. And okay, a pro-tip for any of the grandparents here, you really want your grandkids to think that you're a badass grandma, survive an assassination attempt.

Kim Ledger:

Wow. Well, and I know that is a dramatic story, and I know you've worked with the police and I believe now you're also working on mental health for, you and I talked about this a while ago, that for a country that's been invaded and the toll that takes mentally on people, that is another area that you've been working on with the Ukrainians as well.

Mitzi Perdue:

Okay. That's where the majority of the 1.2 million and some others that people have donated since to my DAF. I mean, one guy wrote a $60,000 check to my DAF. Wow. But here's what it's going for. The largest portion of the donations that I have from the DAF are the following. Because I got to interview a whole lot of war crime victims, and I wrote about them, and I do invite everybody to go to mitzipurdue.com and read 110 stories that I've written on Ukraine, but by visiting war crime victims, I write for psychology today, and I have some sensitivity when people are having problems and in one case, there was a 14-year-old girl who saw her parents and her godmother just wantonly, a Russian soldier just machine-gunned them. And there are more details, which are terrible. But the end of the story is this girl told me what happened.

But I was noticing as she was speaking that she was talking in a completely monochromatic, just as if she wasn't completely there. She was disassociating. She was telling the story, but in a voice like this. And after she left, I asked Irina, the policewoman who was translating for me and who was keeping me company, I asked her, "Is this young woman going to get mental health counseling of some sort?" And Irina, who's a very polite woman, didn't laugh at me, but she could have, because she said, there are literally millions of people who've had trauma that bad. And at time of war, we don't have the possibility of providing counseling. She's on her own. Well, Irina and I were both kind of upset by the fact that this young girl, I mean, she's probably going to have insomnia, she's going to have panic attacks. Just the whole realm of stuff when you've had a trauma that big and you don't have counseling.

So we began brainstorming. Is there some way that we could provide some kind of emergency first aid for people like her or for all the people who, well, when I say all the people, let me give you a quote, a statistic from the World Health Organization. I don't know where they get this, but I trust that it's true because I believe I've seen it. They say that of the somewhere between 30 and 40 million people who are still in Ukraine, that 15 million have mental health issues that are strong enough to interfere with their relationships with others or their ability to hold a job. I mean, maybe they have anger, sleeplessness is very, very common, panic attacks. What can be done at scale?

And Irina and I came up with an idea, what if we had on YouTube and what I'm about to describe we're working on right now, what if Irina would interview, say, a war crime victim or anybody who's just suffering from psychological symptoms, and I would put them together with a group of 65 psychologists, psychiatrists, mental health professionals whom I know, and a part of a group of them in New York. So the way it works is say a woman, she's suffering from sleeplessness, she tells her story, quite short, like maybe three or four or five minutes, and then the sleep expert will talk with her and he'll tell her, "I can't make your problem go away, but I can tell you in my 30 years of treating sleeplessness that here's some techniques that help people. They've helped my client. They might help you."

And then when this thing is on YouTube, there'll be a whole channel devoted to the Hidden Wounds project, that's hidden wounds as in injury, the Hidden Wounds Injury project. It'll be available globally, but it will be particularly available to Ukrainians who they can just check. We have a list of 37 different psychological problems people might have, and they can just go to get advice, which will be translated into Ukrainian from an American or a Western psychologist who we stipulate we're not going to cure the problem, but here's some just techniques that have helped some of my patients. And I think that it has the possibility of alleviating an awful lot of suffering, and on a huge scale, if they're 15 million people who need help, here's the place they can go to.

Kim Ledger:

That's amazing.

Sarah Rhodes:

Yeah.

Kim Ledger:

Do you feel inspired?

Sarah Rhodes:

Absolutely. Well, and it's so incredible-

Mitzi Perdue:

It's just a small part of it, but the DAF money has gone to provide cameras, editing. And one part of it is every person that Irina interviews, they're going to get a hundred dollars or in Ukrainian money. And that happens to mean an extraordinary amount that might be a month's pay for them. So here, they've undergone something terrible and they're reliving it. Although they tell me since I've interviewed, I bet I've interviewed a couple of hundred people so far at least, and here's what I learned over and over again, I am a journalist by trade, that talking with somebody who's sympathetic and who's going to tell their story to the world, that there's an element of healing to it. And so I regard it as a privilege beyond measure, the stories are painful, but I get this satisfying feeling that just by listening and validating what they've been through, that it helps.

Sarah Rhodes:

That's amazing. I know so many donors right now feel like there's so much happening around the world that they want to make a direct impact like you have, but in different parts of the world. How did you come up with these very creative solutions, and how did you find these contacts actually in the country helping you implement the changes you'd like to help make?

Mitzi Perdue:

In my case, I had a stroke of good luck. I got in contact with the police to begin with because I had written a story for Psychology Today on human trafficking in Ukraine. And that came to the attention of General Nebytov who had written his master's thesis on human trafficking. I mean, he's Ukrainian and aware of the problem. And he invited me to come to Ukraine to see for myself what I had written about. And he said, you'll be our guest for a week. Well, when your guest at the police, and they're the ones who document all the bad things that are going on, like kidnapping children or mine laying or snipers, I mean, there's just so much that the police... The police are there to serve and protect. And that means they have close relationships with so many parts of society. And whatever I wanted to learn more about, they would put me in touch with, whether it was mental health.

A story that I'm really so fond of that the police arranged, facilitated me getting was I wanted to know what it's like to be a student in a time of war. And well, one of the people associated with the police had a kid in school and he got the school to invite me to interview the kids. And that was a day in Kyiv where we knew that there were 40 rockets heading towards where we were. And so here I am in a school, in a bomb shelter interviewing kids.

And just a quick story about it. The teacher told me that she, knowing that the kids, they might go home to their homes and rubble or their parents might not even be alive, it's stress that's not easily guessed at even. And she told me that she had entered the classroom, it's in the bunker, it's in the bomb shelter underneath the school. She had entered the classroom, these are 12-year-old kids studying math and physics, and she entered the room carrying, I'm holding my arms up as if I'm carrying a whole lot of board games, because she reasoned that with this much stress, that distraction would be a good thing. The kids told her, put away the board games. We're here to study math and physics because we know when the war is over that it's going to be us, the young people who will help rebuild our country. Bring on the math and physics.

Kim Ledger:

Wow, that's exciting. That's some resilience. I feel like we could keep going for another 30 minutes, but I know we are at time today and gosh, thank you so much, Mitzi. You are, and I've told you this before, you are an inspiration, and we are just so happy to have met you and to be on this journey with you together.

Mitzi Perdue:

Well, the journey would not have been possible without the sale of the ring, and the ring wouldn't have been sold without Ren. So thanks guys.

Kim Ledger:

Thank you.

Sarah Rhodes:

Thank you.

Kim Ledger:

Thanks everyone for watching or if you turned in via podcast, thanks for listening. If you want to learn more about Ren and how we might be able to help with your philanthropic program needs, visit reninc.com or email us at consultin@rentinc.com. We'd also love to hear if you have questions or topics about planned giving you want us to talk about. And of course, don't miss the great information we have in our advisor's Philanthropic Insights newsletter. Sign up at rentinc.com/advisorinsights. Find all the links mentioned in the show in the description. And you'll find expert tips daily on our social channels. Check it out. Until next time, I'm Kim Ledger. Give wisely.