Tom Parker, Philanthropist-Innovator, Dies
Longtime Public Face of Hutton Parker Foundation Created Sprawling Philanthropic Empire in Santa Barbara
Tom Parker, for years the most public face of the Hutton Parker Foundation, died last week after a four-year struggle with brain cancer. He was 77.
Parker, a butcher’s son who famously grew up on Santa Barbara’s Eastside and attended Franklin Elementary School, created a sprawling philanthropic empire by buying up hard-to-lease commercial properties and populating them with as many as 57 nonprofit agencies. By charging these agencies considerably lower-than-market rents, Parker afforded them a degree of financial security all but unheard of in Santa Barbara’s unforgiving real estate market. He estimated the savings — accrued cumulatively — totaled $2 million a year, an amount that could be plowed into operations rather than overhead.
Among the foundation’s many beneficiaries has been the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. “Tom Parker is having a love affair with this city. And we’re the recipients of that love,” gushed Film Festival Director Roger Durling at an event last year honoring Parker. “It would be a much better world if there were more people like him.”
In the 1980s, Parker, a onetime real estate mogul, leveraged the Orange County holdings of his first wife’s aunt — the entrepreneur and philanthropist Betty Hutton — to amass a small fortune. With that, he took the helm of what’s since become the Hutton Parker Foundation in 1997. Rather than investing the foundation’s considerable reserves — now said to be in the neighborhood of $130 million up from $50 million — in Wall Street, Parker and his first wife, Susan, invested instead in local real estate. At the time, this was unheard of.
“Everybody wins,” he explained, a phrase that would become his mantra.
Nonprofits got stable digs, the foundation got a reliable steady cash flow, and the community got better served. Over the years, the foundation has donated roughly $100 million. Among the beneficiaries of Parker’s vision are the Community Environmental Council, the Rescue Mission, Transition House, the Neighborhood Clinics, the Mental Wellness Center, the Environmental Defense Center, and many more.
Along the way, Parker enlisted heavy hitters of the philanthropic community, such as Cliff Lambert, Ernesto Paredes, Chuck Schlosser, and Paul Orfalea to name a few — to help guide the new ship. He would name one of his buildings after fundraiser and auctioneer extraordinaire Larry Crandell, who would famously quip after receiving any honorary award, “Well deserved and long overdue.”
Paredes, executive director of EZ Lift Transportation for 33 years, served on the Foundation’s Allocation Committee. He was much impressed, he said, that “C-Suiter” Parker would know of tiny, obscure, Latino-serving nonprofits that he’d never even heard of. “He grew up on the Eastside,” Paredes noted.
Parker and the foundation were nimble and could take risks, Paredes said; they could — and did — make decisions swiftly. Parker, he added, brought a keen — if sometimes impatient — synergistic approach to the milky way of Santa Barbara’s vast nonprofit universe. In Parker’s world view, Paredes said, “The right hand should know what the left hand was doing. Brothers and sisters in the nonprofit world needed to complement each other’s efforts, not duplicate them.”
In 2018, Parker married Karla Blackwell and stepped away from Foundation activities to travel, enjoy life, and otherwise smell the roses. Four years ago, he was diagnosed with brain cancer. Parker’s sons, Jess and Chris, have taken over his role on the board.
Correction: This story was corrected regarding Betty Hutton’s occupation. She was a philanthropist and entrepreneur, who founded the Hutton Companies in Orange County. The company developed and managed real estate throughout California.
