By Riya Chinni
“Million-Dollar Moments and the Amazing Professionals Who Helped Make Them Possible,” written by Rick Markoff during the course of 22 months, is a collection of the professionals, organizations and donors behind 19 $1 million gifts to benefit the community.
Markoff, a Carmel resident who has had a fascination with $1 million gifts since the early 1980s, has worked with multiple nonprofit organizations throughout his career, helping to generate four $1 million gifts for the nonprofits during the course of five decades.
During that time, he met many individuals who contributed to his book.
“I was able to either work with or make friends with many wonderful resource development officers and nonprofit executives, and these individuals agreed to work with me on a book which highlighted not only the million dollar gifts, but who these professionals were, how they got their start, the organizations that they were with,” Markoff said.
The book highlights $1 million gifts given to several organizations, ranging from the Toledo Symphony Orchestra to the St. Vincent Medical Center Foundation.
“A lot of people are under the misconception that only major universities and big hospitals and major museums get million dollar gifts, but I also wrote about a dozen smaller entities and their million dollar gifts,” Markoff said.
Markoff said he wrote the book to emphasize how the gifts make a difference.
“The impact of a gift like this serves hundreds, maybe thousands of people, and how great is it to do something that makes the lives of so many others better?” he said.
