Stephen Robert
“The deepest meaning of life is how you help other people.”
Financier Stephen Robert ’58 has enjoyed a long and successful career on Wall Street. A graduate of Brown University, the London School of Economics and Columbia University’s School of Business, Robert started in investment banking with Oppenheimer & Co. in 1968 as a junior portfolio manager. He retired nearly 30 years later as the company’s CEO and largest stockholder.
But the 78-year-old’s greatest professional successes are far surpassed by the life-altering work he has done through his philanthropic missions. “Life is about empathy, it’s about hope,” he says. “That’s really what’s worth something. That’s what you leave behind.”
Building a foundation
While serving on numerous charitable boards, Robert felt a desire to become more involved, in a holistic way, with the projects he was helping to fund. So eight years ago, he and his wife, Pilar Crespi Robert, established the Source of Hope Foundation to provide sustainable aid around the world in the form of food, water, money, medical care and education. “We’re working in often inhospitable places that are experiencing civil war, famine or terrible governments,” he explains. “We try to work in areas where we can make a real difference.”
Robert — who has chaired Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies and Public Policy, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Brookings Foreign Policy Advisory Committee — applies his knowledge of international relations when establishing small-scale, tangible projects in places such as Ethiopia, Haiti, Columbia, Palestine and Israel.