The giving Back Awards: 15 People Who Make America Great

It's Connect 4 night at Target House in Memphis, and chaos reigns in the cafeteria. Squealing kids crowd around dinner tables in a pitched battle to slide red and blue discs into yellow grids. If there weren't so many little bald heads and surgical masks, you'd never know you were in a room full of seriously sick patients from St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital. Just outside the din of the dining hall, 11-year-old Camilla Stull swings quietly on a wooden bench and talks of becoming a movie star. "I want to be an actress like Drew Barrymore," she says, attired artistically in a tangerine top and white knit cap over her hairless head. "I'm a true Cali girl." Her mom, Rema Sadak, looks on, smiling at the child's optimism. It just might be the best medicine for a family uprooted from their California home to seek treatment at St. Jude's for Camilla's rare form of leukemia. Since early last year, they've called Target House home, thanks to the good will of the Minneapolis retailer. "If it weren't for this place," says Sadak, "we would be bankrupt."

When you think of Target, comforting children with cancer is probably not the first thing that comes to mind. More likely, you think "Tar-jaay," the cheap-chic big-box store with hip deIs like Isaac Mizrahi and those funky blue toasters by architect Michael Graves. But for Target, helping the needy is as important to its corporate character as its class-meets-mass marketing philosophy. And charity begins at the checkout, where you could, say, apply for a grant for your local arts council or contribute to your kids' school by using a Target charge card. In an era when corporate giving can be reduced to an exercise in PR, Target's devotion to donation stands out. In good years and bad, Target donates 5 percent of its pretax profits--more than twice the average of corporate America. That equals about $2 million a week, or $101 million last year. "Other companies wonder how Target does it," says Ian Wilhelm, who covers corporate giving for the Chronicle of Philanthropy. "They ask me to ask them how they get that much money out the door."

But Target's good deeds do not stop at giving cash. It built Target House in 1999 to offer free long-term housing to St. Jude's patients and their families. Last year Target employees and retirees volunteered more than 315,000 hours to more than 7,000 community projects like reading to schoolkids. Target is also among the first on the scene when disaster strikes. During Hurricane Katrina, it turned over a Baton Rouge store to the Red Cross to use as its command center. Even when it's doing good, though, Target never loses its sense of style. Besides contributing $5 million to help restore the Washington Monument, Target also deployed Michael Graves to design a fashionable blue wrap to shroud the spire while it was spiffed up. "What sets them apart," says Wilhelm, "is that they're not just providing funds, but also their expertise."

What does Target get out of all this? "Hopefully," says CEO Bob Ulrich, "having this positive halo of doing good things in the community will make [shoppers] tip in our favor." Plenty are tipping: Target earned $2.4 billion last year on $53 billion in sales. To make sure that its charity continues to generate good will, Target surveys its customers on where it should spread its largesse. That's why Target, ahem, targets causes like education, arts and social services that are close to the hearts of the 35- to 45-year-old moms who shop at its 1,418 stores. And unlike companies that discovered "cause marketing" just to fatten the bottom line, Target's been at this since before its first store opened in 1962. Sixty years ago Target's founder, George Dayton, began donating 5 percent of pretax profits from his Dayton's department stores in Minneapolis. Today Dayton's department stores are history, but the 5 percent tradition lives on. "This isn't the cause of the moment," says Laysha Ward, Target's VP of community relations. "It's part of who we are."

Target doesn't always wait for the needy to go to it. Just ask Betty Mohlenbrock, who took a surprise call from Target last year. It wanted to know how it could help her program, United Through Reading, which videotapes deployed military personnel reading children's books to their families back home. "Target just went searching on the Internet and discovered us," marvels Mohlenbrock. Soon Target cut a $200,000 check that allowed the program to expand beyond the Navy and Marines to serve all military branches. This year Mohlenbrock expects to connect 50,000 military families with bedtime-book videos. Kim Morton will never forget the first time her family watched the video of her husband, Craig, reading from his troop carrier in the Persian Gulf. "It was so good to hear his voice in the house," she says. "My 3-year-old ran up to the TV shouting 'Hi, Daddy, hi, Daddy,' and the tears were running down my face."

But when someone calls with an urgent need, Target doesn't hesitate. Last year CBS exec Martin Franks was desperate to line up funding to produce the "Shelter From the Storm" all-star telethon that aired 12 days after Katrina. His first call was to Target, hoping for one third of the show's $1.5 million in costs. "Ninety minutes later," says Franks, "they call back and say, 'We'll do the whole thing'." That donation allowed him to set up more phone banks for donors, which he believes added $10 million to the show's $32 million take.