Leading a Legacy

“I was pretty good,” Jim Kennedy recalls. “I was a sponsored athlete and racing in the top class.” In the late 1960s interest in motocross took off when world champions came to America to race. Kennedy loved the thrill of racing and joined the competitive racing circuit. On the way home from a race one day, Kennedy had a hard talk with himself.

“I knew I was probably as good as I was ever going to get in motocross,” he says. “I thought, I’d better grow up and do something real.” Soon after, he loaded a couple of motorcycles on a trailer and, along with his two black Labrador retrievers, drove to Atlanta. “There was no path, really,” he admits. “No predetermined route I was moving towards.”

In Atlanta, his interest in motocross turned to cycling, and he is a past Masters National, Pan American, and World Champion in the 3,000-meter pursuit.

Kennedy went to work for Cox Newspapers, the family business. The company was founded by Kennedy’s grandfather, James M. Cox, a two-term Ohio governor, two-term US representative, and presidential candidate—with Franklin D. Roosevelt as his running mate—in the 1920 election won by Warren Harding.

Things quickly got about as real as one could imagine for Kennedy in Georgia. He moved from reporter to copy editor and then from advertising sales representative to general manager of Cox Communications in the Atlanta area. In 1979, Kennedy relocated to Grand Junction, Colorado, where he was named publisher of The Daily Sentinel. His career was on supercharge.

In 1986, he returned to Atlanta as executive vice president of Cox Enterprises, becoming chairman and CEO in 1988. He led a transformation of the company, taking it from $1.8 billion to $22 billion in revenues. Today, Cox Enterprises employs approximately 50,000 people in the communications and automotive fields. The company’s holdings include Cox Communications and Cox Automotive, whose properties include Autotrader and Kelley Blue Book. And at the age of 77, Kennedy now serves as chairman emeritus of Cox Enterprises and chairman of the James M. Cox Foundation.

On May 30, 2024, when Alex Taylor, chairman and CEO of Cox Enterprises, announced a $100 million gift to Wetlands America Trust (WAT) in honor of Kennedy’s philanthropic legacy, the size, scope, and focus of the gift was both audacious and fitting. The gift is matched only by the aspirations of the man whom it honored. Kennedy’s rise in the corporate world paralleled his growing commitments in philanthropy. His personal and foundation-affiliated giving has reached wide-ranging corners of society, in the arenas of health, early childhood education, conservation, and sustainability.

He’s given more than $44 million to support education initiatives at institutions of higher learning such as the University of Denver, University of Georgia, University of Colorado, Georgia Tech, and Georgia State University. He’s given more than $20 million in foundation grants supporting innovative teaching methods for early language and childhood literacy development; more than $100 million to Emory University and other institutions for Alzheimer’s disease, autism, and cancer research; and millions more for greenways and university endowments for wetlands and waterfowl conservation at Mississippi State University, Clemson University, University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point, and Colorado State University.

And over the past 50 years, Kennedy has become DU’s single-largest donor. Through personal and affiliated foundation giving, he has contributed almost $100 million to Ducks Unlimited. He was the founding president of WAT, and his vision of corporate philanthropy has helped reshape the landscape of what support of conservation can involve in high-priority areas across the continent.

But this latest gift was different. More personal. That the gift was announced by Taylor, whom Kennedy has mentored for decades both in business and in the field, underscored its deep meaning for Cox Enterprises and for Taylor, particularly. And its scale reflected both the accomplishments of Kennedy and the conservation ambitions of DU. The entire gift is earmarked for the Prairie Pothole Region, where it will move the needle on a landscape scale, conserving wetlands and prairie uplands across this vital portion of the northern plains; unlocking the breeding potential of tens of thousands of ducks, geese, shorebirds, and grassland birds; and securing the future of working landscapes on a vast swath of range, pasture, and other agricultural lands.

That kind of example-setting is no surprise to Alex Taylor. A great-grandson of James M. Cox, Taylor has known Kennedy, his older cousin, since he was a kid. And since he was a kid, Taylor has watched Kennedy with a mix of respect and unabashed awe.

For starters, who could help but look up to the cool cousin who rode motorcycles, shot side-by-sides, and cast a fly rod with incredible skill? And there was Kennedy’s commitment to DU. “As a young kid, I remember that there were DU logos on everything he had,” Taylor recalls. “On his belt, on his briefcase, on his hat. He’s been riding for the brand for 50 years, and I identified that logo with all things hunting and all things cool.”

Like Kennedy, Taylor has been enthralled with the outdoors since childhood. He grew up alongside Peachtree Battle Creek in Atlanta and laughs as he remembers teaching himself “how to mess around in the woods.” Along that creek is where his love of fly-fishing began. Later, when his mother moved to Long Island, he was introduced to saltwater fly-fishing. Learning how to catch striped bass on a fly, his mind was blown. The marsh in Long Island is also where he first went duck hunting by himself. His first duck in those marshes was a banded black duck—he was hooked. When Taylor was 14, Kennedy took him to Mexico on Taylor’s first bird-hunting trip. “That was a baptism by fire, for sure,” Taylor laughs. “But I’ve been hooked on hunting and fishing for a very long time, much of that due to Jim’s influence.”

And the influence wasn’t limited to time afield. After he graduated from Vanderbilt University, Taylor followed in Kennedy’s footsteps with his first job as a reporter for the The Daily Sentinel in Grand Junction. His rise through the company has similar parallels, including strategic growth positions with Cox Enterprises, Cox Communications, and Cox Media Group. He has served as Cox Enterprises CEO since 2018 and chairman since 2022.

“It would be hard to overstate how much influence Jim has had on my approach to all things business and conservation,” Taylor explains. Kennedy suggested that Taylor start as a newspaper reporter because the job teaches its practitioners to ask the right questions and think on their own—attributes that have marked Kennedy’s career. “Despite the influence he’s had on me,” Taylor says, “he’s never one time told, or instructed, or directed me to do something or make a decision. He doesn’t boss people around. Instead, he’s the kind of person that you want to watch. And if you watch him carefully, you will learn. Listen first and talk second. I picked that up from him.”

Do good was another Kennedy dictum. “As a private company, we can chart our own course,” Kennedy explains. “We want to make money, but we want to do good. We’re now investing in a strategy of disrupting normal ways of doing business for better ways of doing business in the environmental component. Instead of converting a few lift trucks to battery power, what difference could we make by converting all of our lift trucks to battery power? We are large enough that our impacts can be exponential. And Alex is leading the way in thinking about what they can look like.”

Taylor’s idea of honoring Kennedy with a $100 million gift is in keeping with this line of reasoning. “We think seriously about legacy at Cox Enterprises,” Taylor says. “It was extraordinary to consider how much money Jim has raised for DU. So, we wanted to think about a gift in a different way: Let’s shine a light bright enough that it will inspire others to think about how far they can stretch for the things they love.”

Kennedy’s love of the prairies combined with the transformational gift made in his honor will indeed stretch the boundaries of what is possible in conserving the highest-quality nesting habitat remaining in North America. The entire gift was earmarked for projects in the Prairie Pothole Region of the United States and Canada and is focused on delivering perpetual voluntary easements to working landowners on some of the best waterfowl habitat left on the continent. It will be used to pay farmers and ranchers who agree to keep wetlands and surrounding uplands in a natural state. The various programs that employ easements allow landowners to retain ownership and use their easement land for farming and ranching as long as wetlands are conserved.

“The Prairie Pothole Region is remarkable for its value to wildlife, but it has huge potential for carbon sequestration,” Kennedy says. “It might not be on the radar of a lot of people, but it truly is North America’s Amazon.”

In its first four months, the Cox funding that was announced last spring secured easements on some 16,000 acres. So far, nearly a quarter of the money has been spent. DU is working in high-priority areas—in North Dakota, where duck stamp funds aren’t allowed to be used for permanent grassland easements. Across the Canadian provinces, where up to 100 breeding pairs of ducks can be found on a single square mile of high-quality native habitat. And in Montana and South Dakota, where cattle ranchers are partnering with conservation groups to save vital habitats—and a way of life. “In many of the areas where laws and rules on funding can hamper this kind of work, we’ve been telling folks for years that we’d be in touch as soon as we have funding,” says Dr. Johann Walker, director of operations in DU’s Great Plains Region. “We have those strong relationships, and a lot of trust built up with landowners. To have this kind of funding coming in at once is like a time warp. It’s like grabbing an extra five years of conservation all at once. It’s unheard of.”

And it couldn’t come at a more critical time. Climate change and habitat loss are growing problems in the Prairie Pothole Region, Taylor says. “There are so many factors that affect waterfowl and the places they feed, rest, breed, and need for migration. But Jim has always been very clear—nesting habitat is the key. Our thinking with this gift was what could we do that’s not just another drop in the bucket? Jim’s approach was very simple: Protect habitat so birds can reproduce.”

While Kennedy’s 50-year legacy of conservation support has had significant impacts on the landscape, gifts such as this one can be transformational in other ways. They inspire a new concept of philanthropy and a new urgency for others to examine how they might give back to causes they find important. The philosophy is less about the size of the gift than the depth of the individual’s dedication. Kennedy rose through the DU structure as a rank-and-file volunteer, first connecting with the organization through a local chapter banquet. But at every step, he asked himself, what can I do? And after that, can I do a little more? It’s a mindset that values commitment, regardless of income and circumstance.

“This gift,” Taylor says, “was really a tribute to what Jim has done for more than half his life. Few people have had the sort of consistency and singleness of purpose that he has demonstrated.”

With a record-setting $100 million commitment, Cox Enterprises established a fund to support conservation in the Prairie Pothole Region to honor Jim Kennedy, chairman emeritus of Cox Enterprises, chairman of the James M. Cox Foundation, and a decades-long supporter of Ducks Unlimited. This transformational gift will support conservation of the region’s incredibly important and biodiverse wetlands and grasslands, helping hundreds of plant and animal species and improving the quality of life for people by increasing water quality and availability.