Harris Nussbaum celebrates 20 years of giving
Harris Nussbaum will tell you he’s “small potatoes.”
“I’m not a wealthy man,” he says with a smile. “I’m not poor, but I don’t have millions.”
Anyone who meets him knows he has a heart that cares. This year, that caring heart marks a milestone: 20 years since Harris opened his Donor Advised Fund at NVCF. Over two decades, it has quietly helped Napa Valley high school students support one another and pursue their dreams.
Harris spent his early years in Burlington, North Carolina. When he was about 11, his dad came home from a Shriners convention in California with big news: “There’s gold on the streets in California!” Thanks to a weekly poker game with the owners of Burlington Mills, his father landed the West Coast as his hosiery sales territory, and the family headed to San Francisco.
Harris played soccer, football, and track at George Washington High School, then attended UC Berkeley to study business, finance, real estate, and psychology. By then he had a wife, a young child with special needs, and two jobs, so he left campus two units shy of graduating. He finished the last course by correspondence, turning in his final papers on the very last day possible to earn his Cal diploma.
In 1955, his father opened Brewster’s at the corner of Main and Pearl in downtown Napa, and Harris worked at the store. A few doors down sat the Napa County Office of Education, and Superintendent Percy Holliday was a regular at Brewster’s. Every visit, he said the same thing: “Harris, you should be a teacher.” Eventually, Harris listened.
Starting at Napa High School in 1966, he spent more than 40 years in Napa classrooms, including Redwood Middle School and Vintage High, where he moved when the school opened in the 1970s. At Napa High, Harris coached JV soccer. Over the years, he taught business, history, math, and business law, and at Vintage he opened a student store where teens learned retail and economics by selling school supplies, clothing, bagels, and more.
But his deepest legacy may be the peer counseling and community service programs he helped build. Today, hundreds of students each year volunteer through these programs, logging thousands of service hours annually.
“I told them, to give is to receive,” Harris says. “The more you do to help others, the more you get back. You can see the lives it changed. Many of them got jobs. Many were going through difficulties, and all of a sudden saw value in their own life.”
Philanthropy at every level
Harris may call himself “small potatoes,” but at NVCF, we believe anyone, at any level, can be a philanthropist. You don’t have to be a Rockefeller to make a difference here.
Giving runs in the family, and Harris comes by his generosity honestly. “My mother would pick up hitchhikers and bring them home for dinner,” he says. “My dad had a good heart to help people.”
That spirit runs through his own family, too. His wife, Joanna, taught special education for children. The two have been together for 50 years and just celebrated their 44th wedding anniversary.
Still dancing, still showing up
At 91, Harris has stepped back from many of the boards he once served on. “It’s time to let somebody younger do some of the leadership stuff,” he says. But he’s far from slowing down. Harris is an active member of Kiwanis and the American Legion. He helped start Pro-Inclusion Napa, an effort that has distributed 1,100 positive yard signs locally. He’s also finishing a book about his friend of more than 50 years, the late Rene di Rosa, whose legacy lives on at Di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art.
And around town, he’s known as quite the dancer. “I love the music and the dancing,” Harris says. “Despite some serious illnesses, I’m still here, and I try to be involved.”
Why Napa?
Ask Harris what he loves about the Valley, and his answer comes back to people. “A large percentage of the people in Napa really do care,” he says. “They volunteer. They contribute. They try to make this a better world. The good far outweighs the few.”