Ruth Ann Harnisch

0:00One of your bosses was chasing you around the sofa. Literally chased me around the sofa to try and tackle me to the sofa. It's a cliche because it was so true.

0:16From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they're thinking about and working on. On this episode, a conversation with philanthropist Ruth Ann Harnish about breaking through barriers as a broadcast journalist. I don't let me down. I can count on me.

0:50Ruth Ann Harnish is an investor, philanthropist, social activist, and media producer with a long history in journalism and broadcast TV. The interview was presented by Creative Mornings in L 'Alliance, New York, and it took place in New York City in front of a live audience on December 5th, 2025. Welcome, Ruthann Harnish. What a delight to be here. Ruthann, I'd like to begin by going back to your beginnings in Buffalo. Is it true that when you were 15 years old, you worked as a DJ at the local radio station under the name Karen Kelly? Karen with an I. K-A-R-I-N. Karen Kelly. Karen Kelly. And I have long said that if anybody can find a photograph of me riding in a parade with WYSL's Karen Kelly welcomes the Blue Max, I was in a parade and photographed that way, but I have never been able to get a hold of the – I'll pay a reward.

2:02Okay, well, the gauntlet has been thrown. You know how much I love research. I will look for you. Find evidence of Karen Kelly. Well, I did in writing, but not quite in photography. So, as I said, the gauntlet has been thrown. Now, why the name Karen Kelly? It wasn't Ruthie Geisdorfer. And eventually, I was part of a teen DJ group. The old broadcaster, Gordon McLendon, wanted free help. So he let teenagers spin the records on his FM. He had a popular AM station in Buffalo. And so we worked as disc jockeys for free, enjoying playing the hits for the boys and girls with the names we chose for ourselves.

2:57And I chose that one because ethnically it was popular in Buffalo. There are a lot of Irish people. And it felt original and fun to me at that time. Have you ever used it again? Never. No, your job as a DJ wasn't actually your first job in media. I believe the first job you applied for was at the Buffalo Courier Express. And they wouldn't hire you as a paper girl. So instead, you were hired as the youngest girl in the newspaper office. What were you hired to do? We were hired to bill the root boys that we could not be. We would send them their bills every week, how many papers they sold, how much money they owed, and had to make the numbers work every week.

3:51So that's what I did. And women were not allowed to smoke on the main floor because there were ceiling to floor windows and the public should never see a woman smoking. So our ladies room was extremely crowded and hard to breathe in. It sounds like my junior high school bathroom. Yeah, in more ways than one. Exactly. So you became the youngest of a crew of girls, girls, most of whom were adult women. Yes. Who did the accounting for the paper boys instead of becoming a paper girl. They didn't have them. Right. And then when your shift was over, that's when you jumped on the Niagara Frontier transit bus and went to the Statler Hilton Hotel.

4:46And that is where you became Karen Kelly. Yes, it is. Teen DJ on WYSL FM 103.3. Where life begins at 103.

5:01The voice, the voice. You were 15 years old. Yeah. That's incredible to have two jobs in media at 15. Now, in addition to all of that, you described yourself as a stubborn, angry girl who grew up in a world that was clearly not fair. I knew that the minute I saw my younger brother allowed to do things I was not allowed to do, go places I was not allowed to go, dress ways I was not allowed to dress, say things I was not allowed to say. It just looked totally unfair from jump. Yeah, I remember. So I'm a child of the 60s. I was born in 1961. And when I was about five or so, my brother was turning three and we were having a birthday party for him and I wanted to wear pants.

6:13I wanted to wear pants to his birthday party. And my mother was horrified and would not let me wear pants. And I was despondent. I went outside to play and somehow I guess I was very emotional. I tripped on the sidewalk and fell on my face. My grandfather, who was watching me from the window in our house in Howard Beach, Queens, saw that I fell, ran down, came to get me. And to comfort me, they let me wear pants. I guess you showed them.

6:53One of the most powerful stories from your early life that I discovered is about Buffalo, New York, public school, 72 assistant principal, Dorothy Wolfe, who chose you to join a group of children who studied French, memorized poems and performed in musicals. You were also given elocution lessons as she believed you all stood a better chance of success outside if you could speak beautifully. Yes. How pronounced was your accent? Well, if you grew up in Buffalo, it sounds like that. You get in the car and you go places. and among our speech exercises, I had to laugh to see the calf run down the path and take a bath in a minute and a half, which became I had to laugh to see the calf run down the path and take a bath in a minute and a half.

7:55Wow. That deserves a round of applause. You've gone on to say this about that experience with Mrs. Wolfe. Every bit of success I have can be traced to my ability to use my voice as an instrument, capable of almost any accent, including none, to speak loudly enough to be heard without a microphone in rooms where no microphone is available, to speak in front of other people in small and large settings without as much fear as most people have. Ruthann, how was Mrs. Wolfe able to teach you all that? she was mean that was not what i was expecting she was incredibly strict her standards were incredibly high and you were going to meet them so i suspect that you like that no you would be wrong i like it when it's easy and nice and kind and pleasant that's what i like I had a teacher named Mrs.

9:04Langhauser who was strict. And I was glad that she was strict because she held us to standards that I didn't know if I would be able to maintain otherwise. And I suspect that you didn't need that. I had a tough enough go at home. My parents had very strict standards as well. So I was terrified not to be a straight-A student. terrified not to be getting extra credit. I got grounded once because I got a 94 in Latin. And I had to work the entire marking period, I think it's six weeks, to raise that grade. And when it came up to a 98, they said, see, we knew you could do better. So that was my academic career.

9:59I could not wait to drop out of school, which I did. I know. I am a proud college dropout. I couldn't find where you went to college. Syracuse University. Oh, okay. Where, you know, I should have been able to major in broadcasting. Right. But you couldn't major in broadcasting until your junior year, and I didn't stick around that long. Well, you didn't major. I had more experience live on the radio than the guy who was teaching me Radio 101. Right.

10:34Speaking of radios, I read that after you got your first little portable transistor radio, which I also had, by the way, it became so magical to you that you hid it under your pillow at night to listen for as long as you could. And my favorite quote of yours from this story is, I fell in love with the idea of voices and pictures flying through the air. Yeah, it's magic. It was magic. And I grew up during great radio times. WKBW was a powerhouse up and down the eastern seaboard. And you could hear it all over the country. And it pioneered a lot of music styles and disc jockeying and payola and all those things that was radio at the time.

11:28You also read your local newspapers and, quote, could find out the most amazing things that happened all over the world, unquote. And at that point in society, as well as being told what to wear and what not to smoke and so forth, girls were expected to become wives and mothers. But you wanted to do something with the magic of pictures and words or something printed and delivered to somebody's house. Were you conflicted at all about the direction your life could take? Did you feel like you were being rebellious or needed permission to do what you really wanted to do? Nobody was giving women permission to do what they wanted to do.

12:11And I was often the first through the barrier, whatever it was. And it says whoever goes through first gets hurt the most. Yeah. And makes it easier for everybody who comes after. So I hope I made it easier for some of the people who came after. But it hurt the most to go through the first. How supportive were your parents at this point in your life? Not. I want, if you can, to share with the audience how your talent and ambition moved you into a place where you could apply for a job working as a high school correspondent. I believe you left a sleepover party to race to the interview and aced it.

13:02What happened was I lied to my mother about what I was doing that night. I was at my friend's sister's apartment with my friend, and the sister had given us permission to raid the liquor cabinet. I read that it was adult drinks. I think I was 15, and we were definitely drunk. And my mother called saying, they called from the radio station. They want to interview you right now. And I said, well, give them the number. And I aced my interview on the phone drunk. And I always felt that qualified me for a career in broadcasting.

13:58Now, you then became a teen correspondent and recorded the news of the day at South Park High School. That's the truth. A real high school. South Park High School. Now, what kinds of stories did you cover? Oh, whatever the clubs were doing, you know, just like here, you tell what the clubs are doing. Okay. Whatever pep rally or whatever, football or baseball or whatever game was going on. You also got your first radio call-in show at that point. Mm-hmm. So talk about that. Tell us about the kinds of people that were calling in and the kinds of questions you were being asked and the kinds of answers you were offering.

14:41I have zero recollection of 1965. That's the year I fell on the floor. See the aforementioned drunk. Well, you went to Syracuse, you changed your mind, you left, and your next few jobs were as secretaries. You had a couple of jobs back to back. But at WSB TV in Atlanta, you became a volunteer producer of television programming in addition to your secretarial work. But they didn't want to pay you to do that work. You wanted to do it. And you volunteered. And they let you. Yes. They let you. They allowed me to work for free producing a program. And so what kind of programming were you doing at that point?

15:28It was a quiz show for young people. And you then moved to Nashville, Tennessee. I did. Where you auditioned and got hired for the first time as an on-air consumer reporter producing your own show. You were 23. Yes. Yes. And I believe that affirmative action had something to do with your ability to do this at that time. Yeah, they had to hire somebody to represent the female portion of the population. And it was only going to be one, of course. You only need one. It would have been better if I was black, but they already had their black man. So Bill Perkins was already there holding down the we have to hire a black person spot.

16:18And then I was hired to hold down the we have a woman spot. How were you treated at that time by your colleagues? Dismissively. Mary Tyler Moore Show was on at the time, and Betty White played a character called Sue Ann Nivens, the happy homemaker, and they called me Sue Ann Nivens, the happy homemaker. Hmm. Too bad. You know, Ruth Ann Leach, which was what my name was at the time. Ruth Ann Leach, dollars and cents, Sue Ann Nivens, the happy homemaker. But what I find interesting about that specific show was how pivotal the idea of thinking about and talking about money was to you even then. And I want to talk about that in a little bit.

17:05But I was really struck when I saw that the show was called Dollars and Cents with the S with the line through it. Yes. That that was something that you were thinking about even then. Well, it was the girl department of news. You manage the home. You save the money. You clip the coupons. You find a way to inflate your tires so that your tire tread doesn't wear down faster. All the things. But you were teaching people. Yes. And that has become really important over the course of your life. And I thought that that sort of defining moment there was really significant in terms of providing this foundation and this introduction to how you were seeing the world.

17:54I'd have done anything. If they had assigned me to do another beat, I'd have done it. And I did. I did the medical beat. I did the health beat. I did the movie review beat. I had so many different beats through the years. So it's whatever they tell you to do. That's the assignment. That's what I did. I didn't get to choose. You became the token female reporter. And the reporter after you was, I think, what was referred to at that time as two birds with one stone. So it was a woman of color. She was Miss Fire Prevention. Yeah. And who was that? Her name was messed up on her birth certificate. Do you know the biblical story of Ruth and her sister in Orpah, O-R-P-A-H, and Oprah is how it came out.

18:52So that's who showed up in our newsroom, Miss Fire Prevention, from I believe it was WVOD Radio, where she had a little gig and there she was. So she was your cubicle mate, I believe. She was behind me in the cubicle. We had back-to-back cubicles. Your first on-air camera job paid so little that you qualified for food stamps. True. When you told this to your boss, he gave you a raise that put you$1 over the threshold for public assistance. And I was wondering when I read that, did that actually make it tougher for you, actually forfeiting the food stamps for the one extra dollar? Well, I wouldn't have applied for them.

19:45That would not have been something I would have done. But I just wanted him to know, this is the level I'm being paid. And he wanted me to know, no, you're not. How generous of him. Um, I had just asked you, I talked to you about your frustration at growing up in a world when you were little, where there was so much inequity and unfairness. Did you have a sense of how unfair it was that you were entitled to so little? Yeah, I think we all did. There is a play on Broadway right now called Liberation that I'm not going to see. You're not? No, because everything I read about it is that was my trauma years.

20:34Why would I want to go and remember how awful it was to be a woman at that time, trying not to get grabbed? I mean, Me Too came from somewhere and it was then. Yeah. You were a piece of meat at the office, truly. Yeah. I read that when you were like 15 or 16, That one of your bosses was chasing you around the sofa. Literally chased me around the sofa to try and tackle me to the sofa. It's a cliche because it was so true. Yeah. At that point in your career, you had three full-time jobs and slept about three hours a night. What was driving you at that time? the insecurity of the kind of work that I did.

21:25Every two minutes, it seemed, the owners were selling to somebody new and slashing all the jobs and just stripping it for parts, so to speak. And it felt like that in every place I worked. Newspapers were going out of business and radio stations were consolidating and changing formats. And there was absolutely no security in the work I was doing. So when somebody offered me a new job, I just didn't quit the other one. I just kept adding jobs and it was okay with them because it was always cross promotion. I've got the anchor woman hosting my radio show. I got the radio host writing the newspaper column.

22:10So your on-air reporting for WTVF TV in Nashville resulted in your first Emmy nomination. Over the course of your 15 years with the station, you went on to become the first female anchor on WTVF TV. You hosted two radio shows. That's a lot of glass ceilings, Ruthann Harnish. Yeah, it was.

22:38Bravo. After 17 years at the Nashville Banner in 1998, the newspaper ceased publication. And you said this about that experience. The day I learned I was disemployed. Good word. I had planned to go to an at-home dinner with other members of the Women's Forum gathering that included talking and networking. And you go on to say that when it was your turn to introduce yourself, you confessed that as of that day, you were nobody and that you had no idea what was next. That moment really did change your life. Can you share with the audience what happened next? One of the other people at the dinner, whose name is Ruth Cowan, said, well, now, of course, you will become a philanthropist.

23:38What gave her the sense that that was your destiny? Because that was what seemed obvious to her, that I had married someone of means, that he had made it possible for me to have money to spare, and that now my job would be being a steward of that money and becoming an activist philanthropist. You said at the time, I believe, yes, now I must become a philanthropist. Well, that seemed logical. That's all it took. Yes. What motivated you to do that? What gave you the sense that, yes, this is it? When it resonates, it resonates. When it's true, it's true. It doesn't take me forever to recognize when something is true for me.

24:29The Harnish Foundation was founded in 1998. You've said your resources are intentionally invested in people and organizations working to break barriers that keep people from living with equality, freedom, dignity, and opportunity. Yeah. Just, that's all. Like, no biggie. Isn't that what anybody would do if they, I mean, really, I like to think that if anybody locked up on this kind of opportunity, that that's what they'd want to do too. Ruthann Harnish, there's about 15 people I can just list off the top of my head that have quite a lot of means and do not do that. I think that, wasn't it Joyce Carol Oates that just pointed that out about somebody that is maybe the richest person in the world?

25:29When you first started, your grant-making budget was tiny and you wrote all the checks by hand. I want to return to the people with the big money there. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Somebody said you can tell what God thinks of money by who he gave it to. Oh, wow. There's a T-shirt. And, you know, it's just another form of energy to be exchanged. Yeah. More money or less money makes you more or less of who you are at core. You don't become a different person. You become more of who you are when you have abundance. I want to return to that in a moment. And I usually in an interview, don't pause on a topic that I want to explore if my guest brings it up.

26:26I usually like to go with the flow. But I think it's really important to share some of what you've done before we go into the psychology and the anthropology of money. So your first grants went to nonprofits addressing social justice issues in Tennessee. In the years since, you've been named by Inside Philanthropy as one of the most powerful women in philanthropy. You're a founding funder of the TED Fellows Program, the Center for Sustainable Journalism, the Institute of Coaching at Harvard Medical School's McLean Hospital. You've founded programs including Awesome Without Borders, Funny Girls.

27:17You've supported the Sundance Women Filmmakers Initiative Fellows. You've gone on to produce over 60 films and theatrical productions. You have helped create a sense of abundance within creative mornings. You've been nominated for an Oscar, an Emmy, a Tony, a Grammy. Congratulations, Ruthann Harnish.

27:47It's really fun to be doing new things at 75. Yes, it is. You know, I am retiring. I have announced I'm retiring. And what that means is I'm not spending seven days a week, 10 hours a day in front of a computer looking at random asks and proposals. I am narrowing my focus and I will be doing more of what I've done here at Creative Mornings, give a more significant gift for a more significant result. I've been really proud to do a lot of little gifts. The donor activist Tracy Gary says there are four kinds of gifts. The first one is the social fun where you take a table at a big party and your friends and you go out and dress up and you have a big time.

28:40And incidentally, there's a charity involved. The second is the honored obligation. Your dad had a heart attack. You're going to raise money for the Heart Association. Your kid's school is having a PTA fund. You're going to do that because it's an obligation that you will honor. The third one is actually trying to solve some problems, coming up with solutions and funding the solutions. And the fourth one is the one that Tracy says, if you can do it, this is what you should do. Go upstream and find what are the sources of the suffering that you are alleviating and hit it farther upstream to prevent the problems from happening in the first place.

29:27I follow Tracy's advice to give as much as possible for systemic change, the fourth category of giving. So that's what I'm aiming at at this stage of my life. When I did the Awesome Without Borders, that was$1 ,000 a week. We gave over 600 of those grants at$1 ,000 a week. And that's a lot of magic. $1 ,000 can change somebody's perspective on the world. And they did. And all that's still online for people to see. I'm proud of that accomplishment in little bits. And now I'm moving to the bigger gifts. What's wonderful to look at on the Harnish Foundation website is the history. There's a timeline so you can see the impact that the foundation and you have had on hundreds, maybe thousands.

30:22And here I shout out Jenny Raymond, who is the executive director of the Harnish Foundation, who runs the Funny Girls program, which after 10 years has just announced an affiliation with Second City. Oh, that's so exciting. It is very exciting. We teach leadership skills to young girls and people who identify as gender. As female. Yes. or non-binary. Yeah, absolutely. And they learn leadership skills through improv training and learn to think on their feet and to hear what other people are saying and the responsive leadership skills that can take them far before young girls lose their confidence because there's an age at which the confidence of a young girl falls off And we aim to equip them with skills to retain themselves.

31:25Yes. So that's Jenny Raymond, who has accomplished all of that. And she's been with you for two decades, right? Longer. It's a partnership of the heart and of the head and truly of the spirit. I love her. She has made me possible. Well, I think you've done that for each other. Now I want to talk about money. Over the course of your life, you've been so broke you had to roll pennies to buy something to eat. You've said that you were so financially frightened most of your life. the ability you now have to not lie awake, fearful about money, is probably the biggest life-altering thing that has ever happened to you.

32:19As someone who has very similar fears, how were you able to arrive at this point after being so scared and insecure for so long? You know the dog chasing the car. What happens if you catch the car? Well, I caught the car. And only having abundance did I realize there is no security. There is no safe place. There is no day when it's all wrapped up and you're fine. There is just how am I right now? How are things right now? Is my cork floating? Can it float a little higher? Is there anything I can do to elevate my thinking in this moment? Because somebody could fly a plane into your building. Because somebody could declare tariffs, no tariffs, tariffs, no tariffs.

33:26And you don't know where the money is coming from or going. I corresponded with somebody who said, I have a shipment arriving from France today, and I don't know if I'll be able to afford to accept it. There's no security. There's no safety. There's just, who are you in here? What have you got to sustain yourself in here? How were you able to cultivate that mentality, that sense of self-reliance and security? By making a decision, by making a regret-free decision to change and sticking with that, that's keeping my promise to myself. My integrity to keep my own promises and believe me when I tell me something.

34:19I don't let me down. I can count on me. And if I have to renegotiate my agreement with myself, I will do so with integrity. I'm not rigid, but that's unassailable. Once you were freed of your fear, you learned that money and our attitudes toward it, as you said, are made up. Because money's made up. So talk a little bit about that. I found that really, really fascinating. as I was doing my research, this notion of it being just a construct. Well, it is. And I used to tell people this all the time, that we made up the idea of money. And if you believe in the money system as we have made it up, you will have feelings and ideas that are attached to those definitions.

35:18But if you recognize that through time, where we store value and how we exchange value, it's always been made up. It used to be a big rock. They would roll a rock from one place to another. And then just a certificate or a stone that says, you have a piece of this rock. It became easier to explain when money got made up right in front of everybody's face and they called it crypto. They made it up right in front of you out of nothing. Here is a thing now that has value because we say so. It's crypto. That's all money is. It's been made up by the people who needed a way to exchange value. Yeah, at one point salt was used as currency.

36:13Which is how we got the word salary, because you were paid in salt. And I believe, I might be wrong about this, but I believe that the word check actually comes from the word rock in some language evolution. We made it up. You started out in life struggling. Can I say something else? Please, say whatever you want, Ruth Ann Harnish. Can we disclose we are in business? Yes, we just started. Yes. We just engaged in a business transaction in which I promised a certain amount of money to your business enterprise. And the minute I said yes, what happened to you? A sense of relief, a sense of excitement, trepidation, wanting to make sure that I'm worthy.

37:12But nothing happened. Nothing happened. No money changed hands. Nope. But yet you had, you created a story around it. Yes. You had emotions about it. You felt things about that money being real, even though all I did was say, yes, I will. Yes. Absolutely. See, the power of just the belief system, just believing it's possible opens up your imagination to create all kinds of new possibilities. But there's a difference, I think, in the ways that we construct our ideas about money in that your investment is a belief in me, which also changes how I think about myself and what I'm capable of. Because I also have experienced so many similar fears over the course of my life about financial insecurity.

38:11I remember being in my 20s feeling like, I mean, when I graduated college, I was so broke. I had to think about every month what I was going to spend whatever money I was making on rent, my student loan, food. And I remember thinking at the time, and this is going to sound a little silly maybe to people, but it was the early 80s. I remember thinking, oh, if I only had$1 ,000 in the bank, I would feel so safe. I would feel so secure. And then when I scrimped and saved over the years and I had$1 ,000 in the bank, I was like, well, maybe if it was$2 ,000, I would feel better. And then when I scrimped and saved and had, and then I got a really good project.

39:08I got a freelance project. that paid me a good amount of money. And I thought, this is it. I am now set. And I wasn't because then I felt like I needed more. And I've spent my whole life, I am now in my 60s, feeling like anything could happen and I could end up homeless face down in the street. And I know that that is unlikely at this point. But what if it did? Where is your wealth? With my family and my chosen family and my wife. You will never be without a place to sleep. That's what my therapist says. Practically. You will never be without because you are surrounded by the life you have built.

40:05And strangers would come to your assistance if you said, I need assistance. Because that's the world you've built for yourself.

40:18It's true. You cannot sink in this life. You, Debbie Milken, cannot sink in this from jump and because we need not to be. And if I knew how to fix it, I would have fixed it. So I put it out there so that collectively we can begin thinking about how we teach all people. I don't even like to be in the feminist space anymore. I'm in the egalitarian space. I want all people, however they identify, to live lives of abundance and dignity. And I think that's possible in this life. And so that's what I'm striving for. And I look to others to help find those solutions. And, you know, that's part of this Creative Mornings investment.

41:14When I put money into this place, it's because this is the best possible investment in the future I want. You could offer our audience, if they feel ruled or trapped or confined or insecure about money. Just recognize if you're scared by the concept of money, you're buying into a story that is not necessarily true for you. See if you can come up with a better version of that story for yourself. I believe you can do it. Ruth Ann Harnish, thank you so much for making so much work that matters and helping other people make work that matters. And thank you for joining me today on this very, very special live episode of Design Matters for Creative Mornings.

42:13I would like to ask one little favor, and that is, if we show up having had an audience in Mali today, in Africa, where there is not a Creative Mornings chapter in that country, It is because yesterday I met an Uber driver whose name is Suleiman, who told me about the richest person who ever lived. And that person lived in Mali in the 1300s. And I discovered a whole new world. Tell us a little bit more about this. Well, this person who I'm going to get the name right. I love that you bought your bag with you on stage. Well, yeah, it's got all my stuff in it. Aretha Franklin used to do that. You're the only other person I know that does that.

43:20I think it's the coolest thing ever. I think I'm going to start doing that. Mansa Musa. Mansa Musa. This is a person who lived and who had so much wealth of every kind of asset that could be gained at the time, from precious metals to the silks and the spices and the slaves and the gold, gold, gold, gold, gold, that this person had. they were without question the richest person in history right up till modern times and i never heard of that until yesterday and this driver said he was going to tell everyone in molly to listen to this live stream today oh hello everyone in molly so if molly is listening hello Molly.

44:17Let's all say it together.

44:23One, two, three. Hello Molly. Ruthanne Harnish, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you everyone. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we could make a difference, or we can do both. I'm Debbie Millman, and I'd like to thank you for joining me today on this very special live episode of Design Matters at Creative Mornings with Ruthann Harnish.

44:56Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest running branding program in the world. The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.