The last time we caught up with the Neubauer Family Foundation, my colleague Connie Matthiessen wrote about its work to increase graduation rates across Philadelphia schools, driven in part by the couple’s own positive experiences of education as a gateway to success.
But for Joseph Neubauer and Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer, improving education in Philadelphia is only one cause among many. Started in 1999, their Neubauer Family Foundation focuses on people and data-driven initiatives with the potential for transformative impact, particularly in education, the arts and Jewish causes, both in Israel and beyond. The foundation has stayed focused on these core issues through the years, even as it has expanded in scope. In the 2022 tax year, the foundation held nearly $420 million in assets and gave away around $20 million.
Born in 1941 in what is now Israel, Joe Neubauer traces his wealth to the global food and facility services company, Aramark, which he grew substantially during his long tenure as chairman and CEO. Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer, meanwhile, founded the marketing and communications firm J.P. Lerman & Co. And this month, after many decades of philanthropy, the couple stepped into the spotlight on May 7 to receive a 2025 Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy.
I recently connected with the couple to find out more about how their philanthropic values were forged from their Holocaust- and Great-Depression-surviving families, the gratitude they feel toward Philadelphia, and their firm belief in hands-on giving.
This article is the third and final in a series on this year’s Carnegie Medal honorees. The first piece looked at philanthropist Carol Grigor Colburn, while the second focused on Barbara and Amos Hostetter.
The couple’s journey from adversity to philanthropic impact
Philanthropy wasn’t a late-stage decision for the couple — it was a value that was baked in from the start, they said, forged in part through much past hardship. “Our parents are not only Holocaust survivors, but they also were Depression babies. The Depression was a time where the suffering was so broadly spread, the relief was nonexistent from an organizational needs [perspective], so communities had to look out for one another. In many ways, the whole philanthropic backbone had its genesis out of the crisis of the Depression,” Lerman-Neubauer said.
Their forebears didn’t give because they had great wealth — they gave out of necessity and to sustain family and community. Lerman-Neubauer spoke about her parents arriving in the country with very little, but also being among the first to organize fellow Jews to donate blood to the Red Cross. “The only add that they had was blood, and they wanted to give it as a group, as a demonstration of how grateful they were from the moment they got to America,” she said.
Joe Neubauer immigrated to the United States alone in 1956, living with his aunt and uncle and learning English on the go. He made it clear that education served as the basis for everything else he ended up achieving in life. At Tufts, Neubauer pursued engineering, and credits an economics professor for putting the idea of business school in his mind. “What’s that?” Neubauer, the first in his family to go to college, recalled saying at the time. That same economics professor was confident Neubauer would find a home at the University of Chicago, too, where he did later attend business school.
All these years later, Neubauer expressed gratitude for the mentorship he received. “Everything that I have in life, and everything that I’ve achieved in life is — first of all — due to the free enterprise system in America,” he said. “And number two, due to the education I got.”
The couple’s philanthropy, Neubauer said, started to get larger and more organized at the time he became CEO of Aramark in the early 1980s. Aramark was a public company that went private in 1984. Two decades later, Aramark made its second debut as a public company. It is around this time that Neubauer said he took some shares in the IPO and contributed them to launch the Neubauer Family Foundation with his wife.
The couple diversified their philanthropy, he explained, into three buckets. The first bucket was the family foundation. The second is a supporting organization, the Neubauer Family Charitable Trust at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. He said that they’ve also established a donor-advised fund with the Jewish Communal Fund in New York. “That’s when we got organized. And then when I retired from running a company in 2013, we set up a little family office, and then we started getting a little more curious about philanthropy all around,” Neubauer said.
Higher education as a cornerstone and scaling up
Even before the couple established their foundation, their first area of major giving was in higher education, particularly at their alma maters. Neubauer endowed the first chair in the economics department at Tufts. Lerman-Neubauer, meanwhile, has supported her school, Brandeis. And through the years, Neubauer has given over $125 million to the University of Chicago and chaired the board of trustees. The couple have supported a number of programs for UChicago faculty and students, including the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, the Neubauer Family Assistant Professorships, and the Oriental Institute’s Neubauer Expedition to Zincirli in Turkey.
Lerman-Neubauer calls colleges and universities “very large tech,” allowing for donors to really sink their teeth into a range of projects. “So if you’re omnivorous in your interests… within a university, you can find a business school to support or the same university might have a research medical practice, or the same university might have a humanities discipline,” she said.
Throughout our conversation, the couple made it clear that a fundamental part of their giving is finding the right institutional leaders with whom to partner and pursue a shared goal — even if, by and large, the couple are those ones who initiate the idea. Lerman-Neubauer calls her husband an “enterprise thinker” who aims to understand every aspect of a problem. When the couple approaches a philanthropic project, they want to put together the right team. Neubauer said that he really thinks of philanthropy as an investment and that they are looking for a strong investment manager to help lead.
As the years have gone by, Lerman-Neubauer said that even as the Neubauer Family Foundation continues to grow, it remains laser focused on its core issues. “We scaled up and began to refine the kind of project that scaling would allow us to get involved with,” she said.
A night at the opera: The Neubauers’ model for scalable change
This model — identify a problem, pilot a solution, scale what works and build for sustainability — forms the core of the Neubauers’ approach to philanthropy. This is true when it comes to the couple’s support of the 9th Grade On-Track (9GOT) program in Philadelphia schools, as well as their leadership training program for school principals — which Neubauer said has mentored more than 300 principals across public, charter and faith-based schools in Philadelphia.
But the couple’s philanthropic approach traces back to involvement with the Metropolitan Opera, where they first saw how the right leadership and creative thinking could transform institutions. They’re both fans of classical music, and Lerman-Neubauer recalled growing up with a plastic radio perched atop a refrigerator tuned into a weekly Saturday afternoon broadcast of the opera. Years later, Neubauer was recruited to join the board of the Met Opera, but ultimately decided that he didn’t have enough bandwidth. So instead, Lerman-Neubauer signed on.
Beginning her board tenure in 1999, Lerman-Neubauer has had to navigate post-9/11 waning attendance, rising ticket costs and the impact of the social media era, among other challenges. She recalls Peter Gelb, the Met Opera’s general manager since 2006, coming up with a range of ideas to reboot the opera for the current age, ultimately coming up with the idea of broadcasting performances via satellite around the world. (Other philanthropists, like theater donor couple Stewart Lane and Bonnie Comley, have also supported using digital streaming tools to keep live theater alive.)
Lerman-Neubauer said Gelb spoke of shooting the opera like a football game with more than a dozen cameras, zooming in on performers like football players, such that you didn’t have to know all about Wagner to understand what was going on. She went back to Neubauer with a firm belief that their philanthropy could help develop audiences, and together, the two decided to finance an initial initiative to modernize the Met Opera. “The Met: Live in HD,” launched in 2006, is now available in over 70 countries and was the largest new income stream for the Met, she said.
More recently, in 2023, the couple made a $10 million gift to bring contemporary works to the Met Opera, with the aim of bringing new composers to the fore. After the pandemic, the Met Opera reopened with a staging of Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” the first opera by a Black composer to be staged there.
In these turbulent times, Lerman-Neubauer believes that culture is essential to keep bridges and connectivity alive. “Just with the turn of events, I think that culture and humanistic enterprises are going to be essential going forward in the next five years, 10 years,” she said.
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Phones for Philadelphia police
The Neubauer Family Foundation doesn’t try to “boil the ocean,” as Joe Neubauer put it, when taking on projects, but rather focuses on specific things that will help the communities the couple care about. One newer effort he was excited to share builds on lessons he’s learned supporting the UChicago Crime Lab, a social science research lab based at the university’s public policy school.
At home in Philadelphia, he was shocked to find out that the Philadelphia Police Department did not issue cellphones to its officers because of what he called budget constraints. Funding yet another pilot program, the couple started with providing cellphones in a few high-crime police precincts. “They knew that if they had a cell phone, they could take pictures on the spot. They can take testimony on the spot. And again, we scaled it up, and that’s how we learned about the police department,” he said.
Since that time, the couple has also provided funding for commanders to receive master’s degrees in management from Penn’s criminology department.
The Neubauers on receiving a Carnegie Medal — and looking ahead
Speaking about their upcoming Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy a few weeks prior to the event, Neubauer expressed that they are fairly private people who have historically conducted philanthropy quietly. The Neubauer Family Foundation has always flown well under the radar, even eschewing a website — much to the chagrin of their executive directors, Neubauer said with a laugh.
“I’ve lived in Philadelphia for 40 years, so people know how to reach me,” he said.
One of the reasons the couple decided to embrace a higher profile with the Carnegie Medal now is because they identify with Andrew Carnegie’s immigrant story. As an octogenerian, Neubauer spoke about spending most of his life in business just to prepare for this current chapter of deep philanthropic work. He hopes that other older people, whether of great means or humble, will also be inspired to give.
“We’re trying to send messages to people to say, you can do it too. You can help your community. I think that there are many organizations that can benefit significantly from help from retired people, not just business people — retired heads of universities, retired heads of hospitals, retired heads of community groups can help, but they don’t know how to reach them, so we’re kind of brokers,” he said.
The couple’s two adult children, in their 50s, are trustees of the foundation and are in the “early stages of their own philanthropic story,” Lerman-Neubauer said. Neubauer added that their grandchildren are also being influenced by family giving, inspired in one instance to give back to young children in Tel Aviv to support bomb shelters. Their eldest grandchild is already walking in the footsteps of Neubauer, set to receive a JD/MBA from UChicago. The couple expects that she will be involved with the foundation in short order.
Of the next generations, Lerman-Neubauer had this to say: “Professionally, they are encouraged to pursue whatever makes their hearts beat faster. But they also understand that it’s part of family expectation to live beyond their own needs — that philanthropy is a family enterprise.”
As Neubauer put it, “The family business today is philanthropy, and everybody in the family is involved in philanthropy, and we’re very proud of them.”
