The Goodyears: Leadership From Campus Dances to Fast Forward
One of the MS movement’s founding families is helping lead an exciting National MS Society initiative — just as they have for decades.
When founder Sylvia Lawry and then-Chairman Palmer Brown recruited Mary Goodyear to the National Board of Directors in the 1960s, they launched a relationship that has grown and changed, but never lost energy over the years:
- Mary became an ambassador to youth, establishing college dances and other fundraisers to appeal to the young.
- Her son Charles W. Goodyear III (known as Charlie) helped found overseas MS societies, including several behind the Iron Curtain.
- Now Charlie’s son Charles W. Goodyear IV (called Chip) has made an important gift to Fast Forward, LLC, a National MS Society subsidiary that seeks to speed MS drugs’ journey from the lab to the medicine cabinet.
There’s no MS in the family — just an inherited sense of loyalty to a great cause.
“As far as I was concerned, this was my charity during all my working life,” Charlie said in the fall of 2008. “People in my family have had cancer and heart attacks and other kinds of problems, but I’ve never said, ‘I’m going to drop MS and work on some other charity,’ because that’s my thing.”
Charlie, a retired Exxon executive, served on the board of the former Houston, Texas chapter in the 1970s. He transferred to the company’s international division in 1982 and it didn’t take long for Sylvia Lawry to see the potential for one of her most cherished projects, the MS International Federation. Charlie combined business trips with MSIF organizing, helping to start and nurture societies in such places as Poland and Hungary.
Charlie was appalled by the conditions that people with MS endured in the Soviet bloc, but also cheered by their stoicism and good humor. Apartment dwellers with MS had to have people carry them up and down the stairs because elevators were rare, and Charlie remembers meeting a neurologist who earned only $100 a month and had no access to medications.
“By the time I got involved there were a lot of quack kind of treatments that were being given to people. There was physical therapy, but in terms of drugs, there were none,” he recalled.
Charlie — now an Honorary Life Director of the Society — got information about Fast Forward in his board packet in late 2007 and forwarded it to Chip, a living business legend who led the world’s biggest mining company, Australia-based BHP Billiton, during a time of fantastic growth.
The pitch went something like this, Charlie recalls:
“Now that you have been very successful, this is a program that could very well make the difference between someone finding a cure or not, finding a new drug or not. And also to honor your grandmother, who really got you and me interested in MS.”
Fast Forward benefits from Chip’s vote of confidence as much as from his money because other donors may need reassurance about this new model in charity fundraising: one that uses a portfolio investment approach inspired by venture capitalism. With donated funds, Fast Forward provides needed capital to biotech companies that have promising MS therapies in the works but that aren’t yet big enough to lure the world’s pharmaceutical giants to the negotiating table.
Other health charities have launched similar subsidiaries, but the concept is still new enough to require explanation. “It’s natural that prospective donors want a lot of information before committing,” said Dr. Timothy Coetzee, Fast Forward’s executive director.
“When you donate to the National MS Society, we promptly spend that money on programs, services and research. A donation to Fast Forward, on the other hand, goes into a portfolio of drug development projects. Not all of the projects will succeed, but just like any investment, there must be risk in order for there to be reward.”
As business guys, Charlie and Chip understand what it means to take a risk — and admire an organization that’s willing to do so.
“How do you identify people who have come up with good ideas, and find smaller companies that want to develop them further?” Charlie said. “If it really works well, the successes allow you to fund some other research opportunities that are not being gobbled up by the big companies — to be a kind of middle ground that we’ve never had before.”
Pictured above are Charles W. Goodyear III (Charlie), Charles W. Goodyear V (Charlie), the late Mrs. Charles W. Goodyear II (Mary) and Charles W. Goodyear IV (Chip) in a family photo taken around 1998. Charlie (Mary’s great-grandson) participated in MS Read-a-Thons in school in Australia along with his sister Adelaide (not pictured), meaning the family’s commitment stretches over four generations… so far.