How 2 Wealthy Latino Donors Are Pushing Their Peers to Give More and Speak Out

At a time when new U.S. immigration policies are instilling fear in the country’s newcomers and causing concern among U.S. Latinos, two philanthropists are flexing their giving muscles to support first generation or undocumented Latino students. They’re also encouraging high net-worth Latino donors to step up their philanthropy.

The Florida financier Miguel (Mike) Fernandez is one of them. Fernandez made headlines this summer when, in response to Florida’s repeal of in-state tuition for undocumented students, he rescinded the unpaid portions (roughly $4 million) of the $11 million he had previously pledged to Miami Dade College and Florida International University.

Fernandez is also speaking out against federal attacks on immigrant populations and organizing groups of affluent Latino donors to support nonprofits that help immigrant and Latino families.

More than 1,300 miles away, in Austin, Tex., Sergio Rodriguez, who leads the Hector and Gloria Lopez Foundation, is working in a similar vein. His family foundation’s mission is to support Texas’s first generation Latino college students, and lately he’s been spearheading an effort to bring together some of the country’s wealthiest Latinos to give more money to charity, to give it sooner, and to draw attention to the philanthropic potential of today’s high net-worth Latinos.

Rodriguez and Fernandez are from different generations and backgrounds, and their approaches to giving are not the same. But they share a common goal: to increase the charitable giving of rich Latinos and increase their visibility and advocacy during this politically charged era.

The Agitator

Fernandez is the founder of MBF Healthcare Partners, a private equity firm in Coral Gables, Fla., that invests in health-care services companies. A Republican turned Independent, he was a major backer of a 2015 Florida law that allowed undocumented college students who came to the country illegally with their parents to qualify for in-state tuition. But in March, Florida lawmakers passed a bill that ended the policy, causing education costs for the students to skyrocket and angering students and their families, immigration advocates, and Fernandez, who lobbied for years to get the law passed.

In a July letter to Miami Dade College’s president, Madeline Pumariega, Fernandez wrote that he was ending payment toward his $10 million pledge to the college because he could not “remain silent as thousands of Florida’s students are pushed further from the dream of higher education. Many are on the cusp of graduating; others now face a future without access to the education they’ve worked so hard to pursue.”

It wasn’t his first such move. In June, he suspended a $1 million donation to Florida International University to support first generation scholarships for the same reason.

“As a former Republican, I wanted these students to get a higher education because that meant they would earn more money, they would have mortgages and loans, and education is key to exiting poverty,” Fernandez told the Chronicle.

Fernandez has since given $1 million to TheDream.US, a nonprofit that provides scholarships to undocumented students who can’t afford college and lack access to government grants, and he is giving similar scholarships through his family foundation.

The 73-year-old is an immigrant himself. His family was forced to leave Cuba in 1964, when he was 12. Unable to take anything with them, the family ended up penniless and lived in Mexico City — first in a convent and then with other Cuban exiles, for about six months — before receiving visas and settling in New York City and later Miami. Fernandez attended the University of New Mexico but was drafted into the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War and never graduated. He started his career selling health and life insurance and went on to start and then sell several health insurance companies before launching his investment firm.

He said he has given about $30 million to back Republicans over the years, but that changed when Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential primary. Alarmed by Trump’s increasingly harsh moves against immigrants, Fernandez has now turned his considerable fortune toward efforts to oust Republicans from office in Florida and speak out against the Trump administration’s immigration policies, which he said are cruel and un-American.

“There is no greater thank you that I owe than my debt to the United States of America,” Fernandez said. “When I came here in 1964, I was not sponsored by the Republican Party. I wasn’t sponsored by the Democratic party. I was sponsored by the United States of America. I am so worried about the future of our country that I felt I could no longer be quiet about it.”

For Fernandez, speaking up has meant spending millions on billboards and advertisements denouncing the Cuban American Republicans in Congress who have either backed the administration’s deportation policies or kept silent about them.

It has also meant getting other wealthy Latino business leaders in Florida to support nonprofits that are helping those suffering under the new policies. At a recent fundraising event at his home, Fernandez raised at least $1 million in about 30 minutes from Latino donors for legal services helping immigrants, and he is building a website where people can donate to nonprofits and political action committees fighting such policies.

“I will spend whatever I need to spend to help people in this community wake up and see what’s happening,” he said. “I urge people throughout the county to put their money to work and do the same.”

The Organizer

Sergio Rodriguez believes greater attention must be paid to Latino giving, especially as the ethnic group comes under attack by the president and his administration. The perception in the philanthropy world that Latinos give primarily to help their families and churches is inaccurate, he said, and stems in part from Latino donors wanting to avoid calling attention to themselves.

“We’re doing ourselves a disservice by not organizing, by not calling attention to the good work that we’re doing, because it ends up leaving an impression in the philanthropic community that Latinos are not big givers,” Rodriguez said.

Rodriguez’s effort to bring together wealthy Latinos is a new focus of his family foundation, which is one of the largest private Latino-funded and -focused grant makers in the country, with assets of about $270 million. Rodriguez launched the foundation in 2021 at the direction of his late uncle and aunt, Hector and Gloria Lopez, wealthy South Texas ranchers who tasked him with giving away their fortune.

Rodriguez, who is 56, was like a surrogate son to the Lopezes, who had no children. Growing up, he spent his summers with his aunt and uncle and credits them with instilling a respect for education and hard work. Rodriguez spent two decades working in consulting and technology before managing Hector and Gloria’s ranching business and, at their request, helping them firm up their estate and giving plans.

The couple ended up leaving nearly $300 million to create the foundation and provide scholarships and other financial support to South Texas area Latino students who are the first in their families to attend college. They left the design of the scholarship program to Rodriguez, who has taken an equity-based approach to giving out the money. The foundation awards grants to community foundations, fiscal sponsors, university foundations, and university system foundations to choose Lopez Scholars. While the students must be the first in their family to attend a four-year university and have financial need, they do not need to have the highest grades.

The foundation’s giving approach is also holistic. It pays for tuition, room and board, student enrichment programs, and other student needs. For example, it provides students with cash stipends and pays for private health insurance, child care for students who are parents, study abroad programs, and support so they can take unpaid internships.

Since creating the foundation four years ago, Rodriguez and his team have given out about $36.4 million for nearly 274 first generation Latino students at a dozen universities. He said some people in the philanthropy world have let him know they consider the foundation’s scholarships boring and quaint grant making, but Rodriguez takes a different view.

“With the way that the politics of today have turned, our scholarship giving has really become a social justice cause,” Rodriguez said. “That just trying to help the largest, fastest growing community in Texas has become controversial is a strange place to be.”

Rodriguez said he’s realized lately he needed to do more than stay in the background and write checks. Thus his effort to get wealthy U.S. Latinos to harness their giving power.

“We’re not a political organization, and we don’t have a political agenda,” he said. “But I do think a lot of people I talk to right now are seeing and feeling like our community is being targeted at multiple levels and they’re feeling a need to rise to the occasion.”

The foundation held its first gathering, a dinner of high-net-worth Latinos, in April, and Rodriguez is commissioning a study of the current state of Latino giving. He plans to present the findings at the next gathering later this year so that his fellow Latino philanthropists will have a better idea of who is giving to Latino causes and where there might be funding gaps.

Because the philanthropists at the inaugural event were primarily from Texas and California, Rodriguez plans to hold gatherings in New York, Chicago, and Miami. He plans to hold two events a year going forward and would like to host a multiday retreat next year that would include networking and talks by guest speakers about Latino philanthropy.

“Five years from now I hope we’ll be in a different administration,” Rodriguez said. “There’s going to have to be some rebuilding in our community, and I think philanthropy could be a big part of that.”