Spanish Teacher to $86 Billion

At 20 she was teaching high school Spanish. Today Jennifer Chandler is Bank of America's North Texas president and leads the national team managing roughly $86 billion for foundations and endowments across the country.

She holds two jobs most banks split between two executives: North Texas and its 14,000 colleagues, and the largest outsourced chief investment office in the world. She finished the University of Texas in two and a half years and graduated at 20. Too young, by her own account, for a big institution, so she taught high school Spanish instead. Then Dean Witter took a bet on her, put her through an interview where a room of psychiatrists made her sell a pen over the phone, and sent her to the Twin Towers.

The through-line is a claim most philanthropy executives soften, and she does not: capitalism and giving are one flywheel, not opposing forces. "I'm a big capitalist," she says in the first ten seconds. She is blunt about the rest of it too. Giving money away well is harder than making it, she says no roughly 90 percent of the time, giving is up while the number of givers falls, and sometimes the honest advice to a nonprofit is to merge or close. Her practical warning to founders: set up the family foundation before the liquidity event, not two months before closing.