Philanthropy Is An Act of Love

By Nancy Gary, Co-Founder, Gary Community Ventures

This piece launches Gary Community Ventures’ 50th anniversary series. Throughout fall 2026, the people doing the work will share where it goes next: on housing, early childhood, family wealth, and the tax credits and benefits that reach Colorado families.

Philanthropy is the active effort to promote the welfare of others and improve the quality of human life. The word comes from the Greek and means love of humanity, and in a lifetime of this work I have never found a better definition. 

Everything my husband Sam and I did began there. When Sam started out as a young oilman in Denver, it was love – of this community, of this place, of our family and of every child growing up around us – that moved him to start giving long before the giving was supposed to start.

Fifty years ago, in 1976, Sam and I founded The Piton Foundation. Sam simply decided that the company’s profits should start doing work in the community right away. Piton ran right alongside the Gary-Williams Company, and was funded by the company’s profits for nearly all of its life. 

People thought that was unusual. Sam never did. Piton was never intended to benefit the company; rather, Piton was created because this place had made room for a young man to build something, and he wanted Colorado to make that kind of room for everyone. For Sam, the love was for this place and its people. 

For me, it has always been the children. And in acting on that love, the path was never the one anyone expected.

I arrived in Denver in 1954, pregnant and knowing exactly one person in this city. Sam and I raised eight children here, and I spent my working life as a child psychologist caring for children who had been hurt and for families struggling to hold together. 

What I wanted was never complicated. I wanted all children to have what our children had. So I persuaded Sam that our philanthropy should focus on children and families, and he agreed the way he agreed to everything I ever cared about, completely. We used to talk about what Colorado could be for its children – a children’s state – and loving every child born in the place you call home became the work Sam and I tried to do, as best we could, for half a century.

That work took us into rooms where foundations did not usually go. We learned early that charity was not enough, because you cannot say you love children and then look away from the schools, the housing and the laws that shape their lives. So Piton worked to change them, and it did that alongside others, because nothing we accomplished was ours alone. 

With advocates, providers, teachers, business leaders and Denver voters, that work helped create the Denver Preschool Program, which has now helped some 78,000 Denver children get to preschool. It helped start institutions that were built to outlast us, like the Urban Land Conservancy and the Colorado Children’s Campaign, which today stand entirely on their own. That last part matters most to me, and I will come back to it.

When Sam sold the energy company, he carried those same values into what became Gary Community Ventures. And somewhere in all those years, Sam and I came to understand something else about love. Love can also mean letting go. 

We always imagined that our philanthropic project would end. It is hard to do. Institutions want to live forever, and the people inside them can come to believe the institution is what matters, when what matters was always the community it was built to serve. Letting go, we found, often creates something more beautiful and more lasting than the institution or the person ever was.

This year, Gary turns 50. Anniversaries like this one usually come with promises to last forever, but ours comes with a promise to finish. Gary Community Ventures will complete its work and close its doors by 2035, transferring everything, our dollars, our relationships, and what we have learned, to the community itself. 

So we commemorate 50 years of commitment as we begin this final decade. 

What these last years hold gives me more hope than almost anything in the years that came before, because Colorado has already begun to show that it does not need us to hold on. 

Every four-year-old in this state can now go to preschool. Colorado voters made a permanent commitment to affordable housing, so more children can grow up under a roof their family can afford. And advocates, lawmakers and voters built a child and family tax credit for working families that has put roughly $900 million annually back into family budgets and helped cut child poverty in our state by about 40%. Colorado now has the lowest child poverty rate in the nation. 

None of that belongs to us. It belongs to the people who did the work and the families themselves. Our partners come at this with different tools and different priorities, and we are all after the same thing: a Colorado where every family can build a good life, and all children get what our children had.

I know these are anxious times for families, and I know a vision like that can sound far away when the rent is due. But hope is something you practice. I have watched Coloradans patiently – and with deep hope – make progress during Gary’s first 50 years and that gives me hope for our last chapter.

What began as one family’s act of devotion has become something much larger than us, and it points toward the Colorado Sam and I always believed in: the children’s state, the best place in the country to be a kid, where families can flourish and children grow up full of wonder. 

That is the work Gary will give its whole heart to for the next nine years. And then we will do the most loving thing we know how to do. We will hand it all to you, and let go.

Nancy Gary is a founding director of The Piton Foundation and Gary Community Ventures, which she co-founded with her late husband, Sam Gary.