A few days before Christmas in 2013, Peter Buffett introduced himself to Kingston at a press conference held at the offices of Ulster County Cornell Cooperative Extension. Buffett’s NoVo Foundation had just paid $13 million in cash to acquire the 1,500-acre Gill Farm — a venerable family operation that was in danger of being sold off piecemeal to real estate interests.

That initial investment was the start of what would become a deluge of NoVo money pouring into long-established local institutions and new enterprises alike.

A decade later, one need only take a stroll down Broadway to see NoVo’s impact on city life. At the top of Broadway, the People’s Place food pantry has a new free café and space for health and wellness programming courtesy of NoVo funding. A few blocks down sits the Broadway Bubble, a low-cost laundry and community space owned and operated by the NoVo-funded Kingston Midtown Rising. Across the parking lot, a vacant storefront is in the process of being remodeled to serve as a NoVo-funded food co-op. Directly across Broadway, WKNY Radio Kingston maintains a state-of-the-art disaster-proofed studio where local talent broadcasts an array of programming in both English and Spanish, and live feeds from community events.

Next door to its station, Radio Kingston rents a studio and other space at the 721 Media Center to provide free technical support to community groups. Also along Broadway, Tilda’s Kitchen is headquarters for a NoVo-sponsored local currency, the Current. On Franklin Street, just off Broadway, the foundation paid for a new kitchen at the Everette Hodge Community Center. Millions in NoVo funding has also poured into the YMCA and the Boys and Girls Club. Soon, a NoVo funded low-cost health clinic will open on Pine Street.

And that’s just a sampling of the foundation’s operations in Kingston. By one estimate, NoVo has pumped at least $160 million and as much as $250 million into the city since 2013. Much of that spending has been concentrated in an eight-square-block stretch that is home to the city’s poorest census tracts and a large portion of its Black and Latino population.

The focus on Midtown reflects Buffett’s embrace of Mahatma Gandhi’s “lowest man” philosophy which emphasizes helping society as a whole by lifting up its most powerless members.

“We wanted to go to the place that has been historically, continually marginalized and understand what’s in place that could be dismantled, shifted what voices haven’t been heard, what issues have been seen as intractable,” said Buffet sitting at a conference table in NoVo’s headquarters, a stone house dating back to the 1700s on Crown Street.

Buffett, 64, is the youngest child of billionaire investor Warren Buffett. A onetime professional musician and composer, Peter Buffett was thrust into the role of philanthropist suddenly in 2004 when his mother Susan — manager of the family’s charitable efforts — died unexpectedly. Two years later, Buffett was living in Milwaukee with his wife and foundation co-head Jennifer when his father announced that he was giving away most of his personal wealth to charity. That year NoVo got off the ground with a billion dollars in Berkshire Hathaway stock. Since then, the foundation has received regular infusions of the blue chip stock, which fund its operations in Kingston and around the world.

As they began putting that money into action, Peter and Jennifer Buffett took a round the world trip visiting places like Bangladesh and Sierra Leone, or as he puts it “where our t-shirts are made.” The experience made a deep — and deeply pessimistic — impression.

“You see that essentially the apocalypse is here for billions of people,” said Buffett. “And there is very little we can do with our ultimately limited resources to change where we’re going. There are all these things at work that are way beyond anything we could possibly mitigate or slow down.”

Buffett thinks that collapse is coming sooner rather than later. While the foundation has funded city government’s effort to prepare for climate change, he thinks something else — an AI disaster, nuclear war, total collapse of the global economy or some other crisis — will throw the world into disarray before a warming climate gets the chance. NoVo’s focus on Kingston reflects a desire to make big changes in a small place and perhaps build durable institutions that can see a community through when global supply chains fail. Radio Kingston, for example, is designed to stay on the air during anything short of an extinction-level event. The old Gill Farm is now an incubator for fledgling farmers, and a center for agricultural research and experimentation. The foundation is making plans for a grain mill and a vegetable-processing facility to enable a self-sustaining local food economy.

While Buffett’s vision of impending apocalypse might make the foundation’s efforts look like a doomsday prepper’s dream, Buffett notes those same institutions can provide more mundane benefits. “The more you learn about the food system and supply chains and processing you realize the stranglehold that large corporate entities have on our food system,” he said. “But you can connect local processing with local outlets whether it be the bodegas or the kitchens. My dream in this is a single mom comes home and instead of popping in a frozen dinner that has things in it that you can’t pronounce, you’ve got a ready-to-eat meal made by someone in the neighborhood with local ingredients.”

Buffett points out that most of the institutions NoVo funds were around and doing work in the community long before the foundation showed up. Longstanding community pillars like the YMCA and Boys and Girls Club have benefited from tens of millions of dollars in NoVo money. Unlike most philanthropies which fund specific projects or programs, NoVo pumps money into general operating budgets, allowing beneficiaries to make payroll, add staff and capacity and keep the lights on.

Early on in the foundation’s Kingston initiative, the largess caused issues as institutions struggled to make use of the unexpected windfall without strategic plans in place. “The mistake we made was that we were coming in from a national and international place, so we funded at a scale that was new to many of the organizations here and that was a big miss on our part,” said Buffett.

It wasn’t Buffett’s only lesson on the perils of making big changes fast in a small place. In years past, the foundation kept a low profile. Major donations were often made anonymously passed through Community Foundations of the Hudson Valley or the Tides Foundation. Buffett himself was rarely seen at ribbon cuttings and public events for NoVo-funded programs. As the foundation’s footprint in the city grew, so did suspicions that some hidden agenda was driving NoVo’s big bet on Kingston. Critics worried about the influence of the foundation on city and county government, both of which have received significant funding from NoVo for high-profile initiatives, like the Universal Basic Income pilot program that earned then-county executive Pat Ryan a round of national media coverage. Others saw NoVo as a utopian doomsday project working stealthily to impose their vision on an unsuspecting city. In some circles Buffett was, and still is, spoken of as a local version of George Soros as portrayed in a far-right YouTube video.

Buffett chalks up the reticence to his natural inclination towards staying in the background. But as the climate of suspicion grew Buffett said he realized his style was having an impact on the foundation’s efforts, and not a good one. In response, starting in late 2021 and into 2022, Buffett hosted a series of online forums with small groups of Kingston residents where he sought to explain the foundation’s mission and vision.

“It was always my style to have it not be about me or what NoVo is doing, so when we came into Kingston that was who I was,” Buffett said. “What I realized of course was that, when this amount of resources is coming into a town people are going to think there’s a man behind the curtain, that there’s an agenda, there’s a power play because that naturally is where people go with money and power. I didn’t think of myself as either of those things but it’s pretty obvious there’s money and with money comes power. So I took that part of the critique very seriously and realized that I had to respond to it.”

Of all the criticisms and anxieties around NoVo’s expanding presence in the city this one stands out — what happens if Buffett and his billion-dollar philanthropic empire decide to move on? In the past, NoVo has changed its focus in ways that left at least some former funding recipients feeling burned; with decision-making power concentrated with Jennifer and Peter, there’s not much to stop them from putting the foundation’s billions into some other passion project and leaving the city behind. It’s a worry that resonates in Kingston where longtime residents still recall the economic devastation that followed IBM’s departure in the 1990s; a blow from which the city never fully recovered. It’s a concern that Buffett — who likens the impact of IBM’s departure to a sort of community-wide case of PTSD — is well aware of.

“I remember thinking early on, ‘Oh my God, we’re going to be perceived as the next IBM — how do we make sure that doesn’t happen?’ I didn’t have that lived history, but as I learned it, I could see the fundamental fear.”

In response, in 2021 NoVo developed a 10-year plan laying out its commitments to all of its funded organizations. Buffett insists that the plan in no way represents a countdown to the foundation’s departure from the city. Instead, it was meant to reassure organizations that there would be no sudden pullout. Buffett added that many of the organizations that received NoVo dollars used them on capital improvements that do not require an ongoing revenue stream.

“I wanted to do that so people could understand we have a commitment here and something we can work towards together,” said Buffett. “But we’re also building infrastructure that will be here long after we’re gone.”

For now, though, the foundation is looking ahead to 2023 which, Buffett said, would be “the year of housing.” NoVo’s been involved in affordable housing efforts since at least 2018 when it was the source of an anonymous donation that launched the Kingston City Land Bank, a nonprofit that acquires foreclosed properties, rehabs them and sells them at below market-rate to moderate-income first-time buyers. But as the city’s housing affordability crisis deepens, the foundation has taken heat for not doing more.

When Chiz’s Heart Street, a boarding house catering to people with serious mental illness, went on the market, activists called on NoVo to buy the property so it could continue as a refuge for some of the city’s most vulnerable residents. Buffett said that the foundation was ready to buy the boarding house, but was not equipped to operate it. When no qualified agency stepped forward to take on that job, the plan was abandoned.

Buffett said NoVo has explored getting more directly involved in housing by buying houses. But he said he was always put off by the idea of the foundation setting prices and acting as a landlord. Buffett added that he’s cognizant of concerns that NoVo’s efforts in the housing market could inadvertently contribute to gentrification.

“The challenge is how do you improve a place without making it appealing,” said Buffett. “It’s the inherent puzzle piece we are trying to figure out.”

But Buffett said he’s now convinced that the city’s housing crisis had reached a point where NoVo has no choice but to get more directly involved. The effort, he said, could involve the foundation directly buying and refurbishing some of Kingston’s ample supply of vacant residential properties held by banks and other absentee owners. Buffett added that “progress” on the issue would likely happen within the next six months.

Along with housing, NoVo is pushing ahead with “The Metro.” Housed in a former industrial site on South Prospect Street near the Boys and Girls Club, the project calls for the creation of a job-training center offering city youth a chance to explore a wide range of professions and trades. Across the street, adjacent to the Boys and Girls Club, the foundation has purchased another building that it plans to convert into a community center for young adults who have aged out of youth programming.

Like the food projects, the plans for Greenkill Avenue represent a kind of cycle of opportunity that Buffett said is at the heart of the foundation’s mission.

“[NoVo’s success will] be when the eight-year-old is a grandparent,” said Buffett. “That eight-year-old will grow up into a different experience over time with different aspects of their own agency and possibility in Kingston, and that will allow the next generations to have a different experience around belonging to a place, feeling purposeful in a place, feeling joy in a place. When people ask me what’s my metric, I say, kids playing in the street where they feel safe and connected.”