An Altruistic Capitalist Trying To Change The World

By Patrick Sullivan | March 4, 2017

When you look at the vast list of projects that comprise Paul Sutherland’s life, they might at first appear to be all over the place, the product of a manic mind that can’t stay in one place.

There’s FIM Group, the Traverse City-based money managing firm Sutherland started decades ago that’s grown into a financial giant; there’s Yen Yoga, the upscale fitness studio on Front Street; there’s the Utopia Foundation, a nonprofit organization that looks for ways to help people who are struggling, particularly children in Africa; there’s Spirituality & Health magazine, a national publication about mind and body; and there’s TEDx Traverse City, an annual speakers series that Sutherland brought to northern Michigan.

This list doesn’t include the many other less notable happenings in Sutherland’s life – the speeches around the world, the children’s books he’s written for kids in Africa or his seat on the board of directors of Gaiam, the yoga products manufacturer.

But there really is a common theme among it all, said Sara Harding, who’s worked for Sutherland for a dozen years. Sutherland makes lots of money, and he uses it to do good in the world.

“He’s such an anomaly in such a good way. FIM Group, he’s been doing that for over 30 years. He started that on his own out in Suttons Bay and has grown it to manage over 800 million in assets,” Harding said. “That’s been a vehicle for him to do more good. He’s great and super talented at investment management, but he wanted to do more.”

7,563 Miles Away
What makes Sutherland’s accomplishments even more remarkable is that, for the past 18 months, he’s been doing it all from his home in Kampala, Uganda.

“When he speaks, he lives what he speaks. He’s not just helping somebody else. He’s living his values,” said Alison Arnold, a Utopia Foundation board member. “If you look at the values that drive him, it’s always going to be helping children and families.”

Harding agreed. “He’s down to earth. He’s definitely not your typical money manager or what Hollywood has portrayed in movies,” she said. “It’s just not his way. He’s got an amazing spirit and he always wants to do the right thing, even if that means taking the high road, always making sure that at the end of the day, we did the right thing.”

Sutherland and his family are in Uganda to adopt a child. It’s a lengthy process. He was involved in Africa before through nonprofits and micro-lending, but actually living on the continent has shown him the dilemma of charity there.

“I thought I knew a lot about development and poverty, but after being here for over a year, I really was full of it, the assumptions I made,” Sutherland said in a Skype interview with Northern Express. “Now you can see how such boneheaded, well-intentioned giving just absolutely causes dependency and has negative consequences; you can see it everywhere you look in the developing world.”

Being on the ground has given Sutherland a glimpse of what works and what doesn’t. He wants to create jobs, for example, because that’s a sustainable way to contribute to Ugandan society, but he doesn’t necessarily want to create jobs for men.

“In large swaths of the developing world, if a mother has a job, the children go to school and everything sort of works out,” he said. “If the man has a job, it doesn’t matter. He just gets drunk. But if a woman has a job, it can make a big difference.”

On the day of his interview with Express, Sutherland had just met with two Ugandans who want to start a toy company.

“We were looking at wood toys today, and I gave them 150,000 shillings (approximately $50). I had to fly to Los Angeles for a board meeting, and I said, ‘When I get back, let’s see what you got,’” he said.

The would-be entrepreneurs were going to cut a 20-foot eucalyptus tree into blocks to make into toys.

“Hopefully we can start a business and sell stuff in Uganda and throughout Africa and then maybe in the United States and Europe,” Sutherland said.

A History of Helping Children
Arnold believes Sutherland’s passion for working for the common good was instilled in him in his childhood – his mother is a feminist, and his father was a committed educator who was among the first to work for Head Start, the federal program that offers support for children under five from low-income families.

“They were brought up with these discussions at the dinner table about the importance of providing support for families,” Arnold said.

Indeed, Sutherland is one of a group of siblings notable around Traverse City for their accomplishments – brother Bob created and owns Cherry Republic, Matt and his wife Victoria publish Foreword Reviews magazine, Tim is a tennis guru and Mike owns The River recreation outfitter.

Paul Sutherland agreed that his parents inspired his worldview.

“My dad taught us that you do the right thing because it’s the right thing. You should just do the right thing, not because your dad tells you to do that,” he said. “That was embedded in me when we were young; that was how we were raised, my brothers and I.”

He said his upbringing caused him to lead what he considers a spiritual life marked by constantly trying to do things to improve the world. Sutherland graduated from Glen Lake Schools and then from Lake Superior State University in Sault Ste. Marie, and he took his values into the working world when he resolved to make a living in finance but didn’t want to move to New York or Chicago.

“I really don’t think it was an evolutionary process,” Sutherland said of how he’s strived to incorporate his values into his working life. “I really think that’s just the way I am. I never wanted to profit from companies that sell pornography or alcohol or tobacco products or do bad things. That’s probably a core value for my life.”

He said that, thankfully, he’s discovered it’s profitable to let his values guide his investment decisions. He believes companies that are trying to make the world a better place are good companies to invest in.

“The Bible says, as you sow, so shall you reap, and you know the law of karma, and every religion has the golden rule…I do think that having values makes sense from an investing point of view,” he said.

Memory from an Orphanage
Sutherland said he’s always been interested in child welfare. He thinks about it a lot, about all the children in Africa, for example, who don’t have parents.

“I was thinking about this the other day,” he said. “You know, there are 120 million orphans in the world. In Uganda, the adult to child ratio is bigger than in any other country. So you’ve got tons of children with nobody to parent them. You just have lots of orphans. Or you’ll meet a man who has 54 kids.”

His concern for orphans goes back to when he was a kid, before his family moved to Leelanau County, when his dad worked at the Methodist Children’s Village, an orphanage in metro Detroit.

One day, Sutherland and the other kids were playing basketball when Sutherland said, “Dad, can you throw me the ball?”

A young boy walked up to Sutherland’s dad and said, “You have children? Why can’t you take me? Can’t you put me in your house? You have him; why don’t you take me?”

Sutherland recalled, “He was an orphan, and my dad looked at him and said, ‘I have children, and your place is here.’ Thinking back, that must have been the toughest thing for my dad to say.”

The experienced forced Sutherland to consider what it would be like to be a child and not have a mother and father. 

Nyaka AIDS Orphan Project
You can draw a line between that experience and what Sutherland is doing in Africa today.

Just one example: Sutherland met a Ugandan named Jackson Kaguri years ago when Kaguri worked for Michigan State University.

That led to Utopia Foundation helping to facilitate Kaguri’s Nyaka AIDS Orphans Project, which seeks to solve a problem caused by the AIDs crisis – in Kaguri’s community, most of the adults have died of AIDs, leaving untold numbers of children parentless. It’s a community of young and old; the people in between are gone.

When Kaguri returned to Uganda, the elders of the town recruited him to build an orphanage. Kaguri refused.

“Since he had gone away and been educated, they begged him to come and build an orphanage,” Arnold said. “He said, ‘No, but I will build a school. And we will raise these children as a community.’ So he kind of raised this idea of foster grandmothers. Now there are 600 grannies in the community raising children.”

Sutherland said Kaguri would be a better subject for an article than he would. “In a very, very rural part of Uganda, he has built private schools where children can go and get a decent education by teachers who care about them, with a real curriculum and real buildings and a lot of pride,” Sutherland said. “What he’s done, which I think is really remarkable and in some ways it’s common sense, is enlisted these grandmothers to take these orphans, and nothing’s better than living with your grandmother.”

The grandmothers need money in order to live and feed the children, so Utopia Foundation helps them find ways to raise funds through making crafts. 

Spirituality and Health
It’s odd, when you think about it, that a magazine like Spirituality & Health is published in Traverse City. Just one more random and amazing thing, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with the town.

“We don’t publish anything local, and we don’t have a high concentration of subscribers here in Traverse City – most of our subscribers are in New York, California, the East and West Coasts and then we’ve got some pockets in Arizona and Colorado,” Harding said.

The magazine, which is published from offices on Front Street, landed here because Sutherland was a fan and learned it was in trouble.

“He was a subscriber, and he got a note that they weren’t going to be sending out subscriptions anymore, so he called,” Harding said. “He really loved the magazine. He was like, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ He got to the right people and went to New York and ended up purchasing it.”

Nowadays the publication has more Traverse City subscribers because the magazine is included with memberships to Yen.

Harding said Spirituality & Health might not seem related to the other pieces of Sutherland’s machine, but it’s in the same spirit.

“He wants to change people’s consciousness,” she said. “With the magazine, we can do that through content. With Yen Yoga, we can do that through people coming in and practicing and dedicating themselves to living healthier lives. With Utopia Foundation, we can do that with our projects, and then again with hosting TEDx on a yearly basis. That’s our goal – to help people change their consciousness and think a little differently. Hopefully that will start to trickle out into the world and make an impact.”

TED Comes to Traverse City
Sutherland hoped to change consciousness among people in his hometown when he and Harding approached Northwestern Michigan College (NMC) President Tim Nelson in 2010 about bringing TEDx to Traverse City.

It wasn’t hard to sell the idea to Nelson. He had attended the first TED Conference in 1984 when he worked in information technology for Michigan Tech and wanted to bring the TED spirit to NMC.

“For a couple of years, I held what I’d call non-meetings,” Nelson said. “I said, ‘You know, we don’t spend enough time just thinking.’ Everyone comes to meetings and we’re trying to solve a problem. There’s no homework. There are no pre-assignments.”

He’d get his staff together, feed them, show them a video of a TED talk, and they’d have a discussion.

Sutherland didn’t get very far into his pitch before Nelson agreed to involve NMC.

“It was serendipity,” Nelson said. “I don’t know how he ended up here [at NMC]. He could have come to me because of the facilities we have. Somebody he knows, I suppose, could have said, ‘Tim’s interested in this.’ But he didn’t get more than three or four minutes into his discussion before I said, ‘I’m in.’”

Sutherland wanted to bring TEDx to Traverse City because he’d attended the main TED conference and saw how it brought people together who otherwise wouldn’t connect. He saw value in that for his hometown.
“I look at Traverse City. We have a lot of creative people, but they’re living in silos, so we don’t really get to meet all those creative goofballs out there,” Sutherland said.

Now TEDx has become a hot ticket that sells out almost instantly and is simulcast at the State Theatre.

“I think it’s worked; we’ve gotten some pretty good feedback on it,” he said. “It sells out like crazy. Your brain tingles. It really is a re-charge.”

Sutherland has backed away from TEDx in recent years because he’s been away; he missed the last two and he’ll miss the next one.

“Now it’s got a life of its own. I make suggestions on speakers, and stuff like that, but, you know, I’ve been out of the country,” he said. “It’s working with Sara and her team and Tim. They’ve got a great team. They’ve got a great board that helps choreograph the speakers. And what’s nice is that every year, everyone always says this one was better than last year.”

Meanwhile, Sutherland plans to come back to Traverse City, hopefully by fall in time for the school year. Living in Uganda has given Sutherland a new appreciation of northern Michigan.

“I wish I could have every American come over here for a month and just see – they would think they’re on Mars. Nothing is the same,” he said.