How two daughters turned a $50 million charitable foundation into a showcase for sustainable business—in Dad’s memory.
In September 2011, one month after Ray C. Anderson died, his two daughters—Mary Anne Lanier, now 60, and Harriet Langford, 57—were summoned to his lawyer’s Atlanta office. Anderson had founded Interface, the world’s largest commercial carpet-tile manufacturer, and he left his daughters a $50 million philanthropic trust. “We were absolutely shocked,” says Langford. Anderson had given no instructions about where the money should go or what the foundation should focus on. “We went around for the next six months like deer in the headlights,” she says.
