The Family That Helped Start It All

DONOR SPOTLIGHT

David Meyerhofer has given to United Way since graduate school. He didn't realize his great-great-grandfather helped found the movement until decades later.

David Meyerhofer, United Way Donor and Volunteer

David Meyerhofer first gave to United Way as a graduate student in Princeton, New Jersey.  He wasn't thinking about legacy or lineage. He wasn't honoring a family name. He and his wife simply looked at the organization and liked what it stood for.

“My wife and I chose United Way because we liked their approach,” he says. “It wasn’t more complicated than that.”

That was the beginning of a giving habit that has lasted over four decades. What David didn’t know — what no one in his family knew until his uncle happened to watch a United Way video at work one afternoon — was that they had always been connected to this organization. Not as donors, but as founders.

“I was already a donor before I knew of our family connection. Don’t think of it as giving back – it’s our duty to help those who are in a less fortunate situation.”

A Discovery Hiding in Plain Sight

The story begins with a video. David’s uncle — his father’s first cousin, though the family called him uncle — worked at IBM as a United Way Campaign Coordinator. Watching the organization’s history on screen one day, he recognized a name: Dean H. Martyn Hart, cited as one of the founding members of the United Way movement.

That was David’s great-great-grandfather.

 St. John’s Cathedral in Denver

Dean Hart served as the Dean of St. John’s Cathedral in Denver — the Episcopal church he helped build and lead at the turn of the twentieth century. About ten years ago, David and roughly ten members of his family attended the cathedral’s 150th anniversary, where they discovered that Dean Hart is still remembered as a foundational figure. They were welcomed almost as VIPs, recognized as his descendants.

“The church is still very connected to the work of the Dean,” David says. “It was remarkable to learn he is still remembered today.”

The discovery didn’t change David’s giving. He was already a donor. But it added something — a sense that his instinct toward United Way wasn’t incidental. It was, in some way, inherited.

“It’s what we do.”

Ten Years in Northern New Mexico

David Meyerhofer and wife Joan

David came to Los Alamos ten years ago to work at Los Alamos National Laboratory, arriving from the Northeast — Princeton, Ithaca, and a long stretch in Rochester — after his first fifty-five years on the other coast. What he found here was different from anything he’d known: 300 days of sunshine, mountains worth hiking, and a community that raised questions he hadn’t thought to ask before.

When he joined the United Way Northern New Mexico Grants Committee, reviewing applications for the Community Action Fund, those questions came into focus.

“How limited the funds are and how great the need — it can be difficult for people to understand what the need really is,” he says. “Most of the need isn’t in our town, and so people don’t see it. Some say the need isn’t great here, so why should I give to the United Way?”

He saw the answer in the applications themselves. One that stayed with him came from Free Flow New Mexico, a UWNNM-funded partner whose director had seen a community need and built a program from scratch to meet it. “I had never thought about that kind of need before,” David says. “I appreciated a director who saw something missing and created something to address it.”

That’s the vetting process he values — the rigor United Way brings to identifying where a dollar will matter most. He also participates in 100 Men Who Care, a giving circle where he votes on which organizations receive group funding. “More often than not, I don’t vote for the organization that ends up receiving the funds,” he says, with a directness that suggests he has made peace with this. The process matters. The collective judgment is part of the point.

Seeing What Others Don’t

Drive through Española and the economic reality of Northern New Mexico comes into view quickly: fewer businesses, fewer anchors, fewer of the visible signs of investment that Los Alamos residents take for granted. David doesn’t look away from this.

“It’s more than poverty,” he says. “It’s tied to economic development. If an area can grow economically, the community improves with it.”

He has lived here long enough to understand that change in places like this is slow, and that a decade of paying attention doesn’t make you an expert — it makes you patient. “I’m still learning,” he says.

One thread of hope he tracks: the new employees arriving at LANL don’t all live in Los Alamos or Santa Fe. Some of them live in Española. That matters — because if those employees get connected to the community around them, to the organizations doing the work, the philanthropy can follow.

It’s a systems-level instinct that comes from decades of thinking about how business, community, and civic life reinforce each other. “Businesses and community are interdependent,” he says. “The state of one impacts the other.” He has seen this play out on the LANL Scholarship Fund, where he served on the Advisory committee for six years. Last year, the fund distributed $1.4 million in scholarships. He watches the giving trend among newer employees with interest.

“It’s in their own self-interest for businesses to connect to their community. The state of businesses impacts the community – and the state of the community impacts businesses. ”

What Gets Passed Down

David grew up in a family where charitable giving wasn’t called “giving back.” It wasn’t named at all. His mother and father modeled it. Both of his grandfathers practiced it — one by founding a local aid program in Rochester, the other by supporting young artists. No one gave a speech about it. It was simply what the family did.

He uses the same framing today. Not obligation. Not generosity. Duty.

“I don’t think of it as giving back,” he says. “I feel it is our duty to help those who are in a less fortunate situation.”

He has been married for forty-two years. He spends his free time in the mountains. He is still learning, ten years in, what it means to be part of this particular community — its geography, its history, the distance between what Los Alamos sees and what the surrounding region carries.

And somewhere in a cathedral in Denver, a dean who helped start all of this is still remembered. His great-grandson is still giving.

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