Snapshot: The couple shares a love for health plant growth and healthy Democratic Party growth, both giving regularly to the party and its candidates each election cycle.
Location: Rhinebeck, NY
Giving Focus: Environmental issues, women’s health, Democratic Party power
Top Recipients: Planned Parenthood Votes, DSCC
Background: Coming from a successful real estate family in New York, Amy Goldman Fowler dedicated her career to agriculture. Known for growing heirloom vegetables, Goldman Fowler has written several books and is vice chairman of the New York Botanical Garden’s board of directors. She also advises the board of Seed Savers Exchange, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving seed variety in agriculture. She shares this passion with her husband, Cary Fowler, who launched the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which preserves seeds in case disaster hits a particular region and devastates crop diversity. Fowler’s career in agriculture includes conducting the United Nations’ first global crop diversity assessment.
The couple serve on multiple charitable boards, but their most influential gifts are political. Goldman Fowler consistently writes six-figure checks to Planned Parenthood Votes, the political arm of the women’s health organization. The pair have exclusively given to Democrats over the past couple decades, favoring a wide variety of candidates around the country each election cycle, along with making large gifts to party funds both at the state level and nationally. Amy’s donor record, notably longer than Cary’s, includes a rare billionaire donation to progressive Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018—in fairness, Goldman Fowler also donated to incumbent Joe Crowley, likely indicative of her wide-net approach to candidate donations. So far this cycle, they’ve given about $1.1 million to Joe Biden’s campaign PACs and cut more modest checks to DSCC, the DNC, and other funds like Strategic Victory Fund Super PAC and Unite the Country. The couple have not stated many political goals publicly, and considering they don’t have much history trying to influence policy outside of elections, it’s unclear how they’ll wield their wealth moving forward. Expect them at least to keep giving to Democrats and their PACs.
Takeaways: Both dedicated to agriculture through their work, Fowler and Goldman Fowler appear somewhat surprisingly more consistent as political donors than traditional philanthropists. Their regular support of Democrats resembles the giving of many top-level liberal donors: steady donations to a wide array of candidates, with much larger checks to national Super PACs and other campaign orgs. This kind of party-ally relationship can be achieved by BT readers with enough resources.