Name: Elizabeth Z. Chace
Position: Co-founder of Residential Properties Ltd.
Backround: Started working in real estate in 1972. Ten years later she and partner, Sally E. Lapides, founded Residential Properties Ltd., a real estate marketing company that has grown from six employees to nearly 90. Chace is a trustee of Brown University; director of the Brown Sports Foundation; co-chair of Trinity Repertory Co.’s $10 million fundraising campaign. She and husband, Malcolm G. Chace III, are noted philanthropists.
Education: Started as a pre-med student at Brown University in 1955, but left school after getting married in 1957. She later returned and earned an urban sociology degree.
Family: Married, four children, three stepchildren
Residence: Providence
PBN: How did the $1.5 million donation to the Brown University women’s basketball team come about?
Chace: I was asked to be on the Brown Sports Foundation about four years ago. The Brown Sports Foundation used to be, but is no longer, a separate entity of the Development Office. And it is specifically designed to raise money to help finance all of the athletics for the Brown campus. The university only partially funds all of the athletics; the rest is privately raised. I became a member of that foundation. At the time, about a year into that, the Brown women’s basketball team needed somebody to take over their fundraising and become their booster in the community and in the alumni community.
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I have never played basketball; I’m not tall enough. I never even knew any of the rules of basketball. But Jeanne Burr, the coach, was thrilled, and I really got along with her, and we designed a program to start raising money for their share of the budget that they have to raise every year. So that’s the way that started my interest in the basketball team, through the Sports Foundation.
So why give money to the basketball team?
Why did I fund the coach? It started with a summer job in our house at the Cape. I went to Jeanne Burr and I asked her to recommend a student, who would work well with me and so she recommended Liz Turner. And Liz Turner is an absolutely phenomenal young lady and she worked for us for two summers. We were trying to think of something that we could do, number one, to say thank you to her for having been a great employee, and, secondly, something that would be meaningful to Brown. Actually it was probably my husband who finally came up with ‘let’s do a scholarship for Liz,’ then it went into let’s do a chair for Liz, then it was, we’ll do the chair for the basketball coach.
It’s a very significant contribution, there’s only one other (women’s basketball) chair, at Stanford. Did you realize that?
No, at the time we didn’t. By endowing the coach, we free up that money for Brown to give out scholarships. So it was sort of a sexy way of giving out scholarship money.
You must have received some interesting reaction to this donation?
It was sort of fun. There was an article in Sports Illustrated, there were numerous things, there was one in the Wall Street Journal, there was one in the New York Times. You know (reporting) there’s this crazy lady in Rhode Island that’s giving money to a women’s basketball team.
Some women say sports contributed to their leadership abilities (on the job). What do you think?
This is true. I was into various sports in my life. I was a swimmer and I was a downhill ski racer, and I played lacrosse and soccer. When we were in college or high school, you only had intramural sports. Varsity sports as you know them today didn’t exist. And so you learn a lot, you learn about discipline, you learn how to be competitive, how to be aggressive. You learn about teams and how people work together to create something. So yes, you bring those skills, and you learn an awful lot about communicating with people. I brought those skills as a community organizer, I brought those skills when I started Residential Properties. There’s some things that come back, that you get back.
Are you a converted basketball fan?
I’m beginning to learn the rules.
With your involvement in Brown and other groups, you must place a priority on education. What do you think is the importance of education for kids?
Almost more important is lower schools, I’ve really been involved in that. I was on the board at John Hope and worked on that day care center. Now I’m on the board of Providence Country Day; that’s where my two boys went. I think education from nursery school on is incredibly important. The culmination is obviously college. They can get anything they want out of college, and obviously Brown offers an incredible amount of courses and an amazing experience of learning. If you can have that, that’s invaluable.
Do you think your philanthropic efforts have affected your business?
I’m sure it has. My name is always out there, and it’s always been linked to Residential Properties. Up until just recently we didn’t talk much about it, most people didn’t know what we were doing in the community, except that I was on a lot of boards. I suppose I would have to be fair and say yes, a lot of people came to me because of that. But they also came because we do a good job.
As a member of the business community, do you think there’s a responsibility to contribute to education and help kids who will be the employees of the future?
That’s always a personal question. I personally feel that we need to give towards the educational system of the whole city. I worked with Ira Magaziner on one of his earlier reports, and have stayed involved a lot in education, but not necessarily in any one specific area. I’ve done the PCD board, I’m a Brown trustee, earlier I worked on daycare in Providence. I’ve been involved in trying to change the curriculum in some of the middle and upper schools.
How did you decide upon donating $1.2 million to Trinity?
Trinity’s been a love of ours for a long time, on and off. It was great in ’80. Then they had some problems. Now Oskar Eustis is here (as artistic director) and he’s done such a wonderful job, and Trinity has really turned the corner. Trinity offers a ton of things to the community; it’s just huge, educationally, not just plays.
I think I expected that there might be a little more political motivation behind the Brown donation, but it doesn’t really seem that that’s the case. Would you have done this for a men’s team?
Well, I don’t know. Well, it’s always been women. It really developed out of the fact that the women’s teams needed it more than the men’s teams. You know to raise money from women is difficult, because usually their purse strings are controlled by men. Then to start raising money from women for sports, because most of them my age have never played any sport of any kind of significance, they just don’t really connect. We’ve had great success in raising money from women who graduated from the university beginning in the ’70s, because there were varsity sports they played. I could see a real need to start making the public aware that women’s athletics needed separate financing.
It must make fundraising difficult, do you have to come up with unique campaigns?
No I just have to make more calls. Embarrass the people by calling them 10 times instead of five times. Every sport at Brown has what they call the president of the sport, it’s the president of the Friends Association. It’s that person who’s trying to raise money. Now some of the men’s sports have been very successful in raising money, but that is also because of the fact that those teams have been competitive and in the public eye for a number of years. But for instance raising money for the men’s water polo team is not easy. Who do you know that has played water polo? It depends; there are men’s sports it’s equally difficult to raise money for, but across the board women’s athletics are hard.
Has it been getting easier over the past few years?
There is more and more publicity, and Title IX certainly made that part of many conversations. As you know Brown did not win that case, and we now have to keep more teams than we really can. We are going to keep them. You never know; things change, but right now we are not contemplating anything such as PC has done. (Providence College announced this fall it will cut men’s baseball, tennis and golf to create parity between men and women’s teams.) That’s their answer to Title IX; they have to comply with it, and they are cutting back men’s teams, which I think is a shame.
Does the judgment in the Title IX case (in which female students filed suit, seeking parity for women’s sports programs) make it any easier to raise funds, since it’s incumbent on the school now to do something?
Well it’s also brought out the fact, women’s athletics have to be important. Universities have to pay attention to it and do something about it. I would guess that’s one of the big reasons the case started. I think the outcome of it, who knows?
