“It is about two things: what the MCA stands for, the legacy it gives to the people of Sydney and Australia and visitors; and it is about the inspiration they get from leaders like Elizabeth MacGregor, a leader with the vision and the passion who can enthuse and engage the people on her board to become the champions, advocate and donors.”
Community connection
Coe stood out as a philanthropist. Over a period of years, he donated more than $1 million to the Sydney Children’s Hospital as well as serving on its board for 12 years.
Wealthy Australians are not renowned for their generosity. A report by Research Australia into why people give money found that the biggest group of donors are middle- to lower-income Australians, not the wealthy, says research consultant Rebecca James, who led the project.
“Very wealthy people who already had some sort of profile in the community might be happy to lend their name, but your average donor wants to make a meaningful difference in an area, but is not looking for personal acknowledgement. In fact, privacy protection was a dominating factor.”
AbaF’s Haley says many donors are motivated by the opportunity to mix in circles that contrast with their own. “It brings them into a world that is quite unlike the world they operate in,” she says. “Someone recounted to me stories about the very senior businesspeople who go to the opera. Here are people who in their daily life control billions of dollars and thousands of people, and there they are, sitting for three hours to watch an opera because for them that is perfection: the stage, the voice, the music are sublimely beautiful. It gives them a connection to that perfect world.”
Addendum: Understand heart disease
Many might wonder how Coe, at just 58 and apparently fit, could die of a heart attack. Coe was reportedly skiing when he died and, like John Ilhan, the founder of Crazy John’s who died at 42 while out for a jog, such untimely deaths seem especially cruel in the circumstances.
Professor Garry Jennings, director at the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute, says there has been a paradigm shift in thinking about the causes of coronary heart disease in recent years. “We have tended to think of heart disease as a plumbing problem, with a build-up of fat in the arteries blocking them off and then the patient has a heart attack. But we now know that when heart attacks are associated with sudden death, there doesn’t have to be severe artery narrowing, it may not show up on an angiogram,” he says.
Jennings says recent research has discovered that in some cases, a narrowed artery gets inflamed, leading to sudden death.
However, fitness remains one of the best ways to prevent heart disease. “You have to be sensible, build up gradually, especially for middle-age men and women: warm up, cool down and so on. But fitness is not a universal panacea: it reduces the odds, but doesn’t eliminate it.” For an unlucky few fit people, dying of a heart attack is most likely during exercise when the heart is working hard.
The risk of sudden death by heart attack can be reduced by eliminating other risk factors, but even those who are told they are at risk, might not change. Jennings says: “Those at more risk are people with high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, overweight, and not physically active. We can do something about all of those things. All are simple to test for.”
Demographically speaking, people with low incomes are more prone to heart disease, however executives might be among those who are over-optimistic about their own prospects, says Jennings. “What we are finding now is that just because people know they have high blood pressure doesn’t mean they do something about it, especially high flyers who might think it isn’t going to touch me.”
