Aaron Gertler 🔸 comments on Can I have impact if I’m average?

[Aaron Gertler 🔸]

I really appreciate your sharing a story that I probably wouldn’t have seen in my other reading. Regardless of the details of where he donated, interesting case studies of philanthropic success can be valuable to the EA movement in many ways.

[jared_m]

Thanks so much for the kind feedback, Aaron! Here’s one involving a cataloguer at a library in the “unexpectedly significant financial impact from a person with average income, in a U.S. context, category” — in case anyone finds it interesting: Librarian Quietly Saved $4 Million, Left It to School Where He Worked. Some might see it as a cautionary tale, since Morin’s alma mater was then criticized for spending $1M on a video scoreboard for its college football team. Of course I think many of us would’ve wished he’d encountered EA and saved >1,000 lives in expectation from the gift (by offering it to AMF or an EA charity of your choice) instead.

A brief synopsis of his humble life and outsized impact comes from this CNBC report:

New Hampshire resident and librarian Robert Morin led a simple life.

He lived alone, drove a 1992 Plymouth and never went out.

“He would have some Fritos and a Coke for breakfast, a quick cheese sandwich at the library, and at home would have a frozen dinner because the only thing he had to work with was a microwave,” Morin’s longtime financial advisor Edward Mullen told the Boston Globe.

You wouldn’t know it from his lifestyle, but Morin — who graduated from the University of New Hampshire before working in the school’s library for nearly 50 years — was a multimillionaire. In fact, very few people did know, until he died in March 2015 at age 77 and bequeathed his entire $4 million fortune to his alma mater.

It was a complete “surprise to the university community,” Erika Mantz, director of media relations at UNH, told CNBC. ”People were honored and excited to learn of his generous bequest.”