Librarian's Retirement Gift

Below pictures of celebrity women strutting in their low-cut, expensive dresses, all showing cleavage, a pout that is supposed to convey sexiness, or some such, sits this story of a woman, a person, who realizes that what matters is life isn't what can be bought, or doesn't have to be expensive.

Leslie Ogan never made more than $65,000 a year working for the Brooklyn Public Library and lived simply: She eschewed a television in favor of music and replaced shopping with volunteering. Now, she's retiring and giving $30,000 to the World Music Institute, a nonprofit that brings music and dance performances from around the world to New York.

Ms. Ogan, 67 years old, began volunteering for the World Music Institute 15 years ago after deciding she didn't have the $25 to $40 for tickets to see the shows. Since then she's seen more than 1,500 performances, filled her apartment with hundreds of CDs and spends 40 hours a week running the nonprofit's volunteer program and providing hospitality for visiting artists before and after shows. "Sometimes I spent more time volunteering at WMI than in my paid job…That's why I never bought a television," says Ms. Ogan, a soft-spoken woman who also spent some of her retirement money to get braces.

The organization plans to use Ms. Ogan's donation as a matching grant to raise $100,000 and keep its programs going, which range from its annual New York Flamenco Festival to globalFEST, a festival for emerging world music artists. Funding at the organization is down 30% over the past two years and ticket sales have sunk by a third. The organization lost $125,000 in foundation funding and $75,000 from a grant funded by Mayor Michael Bloomberg through the Carnegie Corp. of New York, a philanthropic trust.

In response, the nonprofit cut its programs from 60 to 40, canceled a touring component of its music program and instituted a 20% pay cut for staff. "It's a difficult time in the economy, particularly for arts organizations. Hopefully my donation can help carry WMI through the next year or so and ensure the future of the organization," Ms. Ogan says. An amateur flute player, Ms. Ogan says her near-obsession with the music institute started when she moved to New York from Holyoke, Mass. and saw the organization's fall show lineup, which included acts from as far away as Iran, Mali and Japan. She says she had never seen that kind of breadth and global reach of a music program before and immediately began penciling show times into her calendar.

The nonprofit gave her a chance to experience the world through music, including percussionist Zakir Hussain, an Indian tabla player, and Frankie Kennedy, an Irish flute and tin whistle player, who she counts among her favorites. "Librarians are poorly paid so I'm well read, but not well traveled," she says. "Music is really a gateway to culture."

NEW YORK MAY 4, 2010: Librarian's Retirement Gift

By SHELLY BANJO - Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A27