A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:
All In Washington Fund
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos pledged $25 million to match gifts of under $1 million apiece from other donors who give to the fund’s efforts to provide immediate support for people who have been affected by the coronavirus pandemic across Washington State.
Bezos, the richest person in the world, with a net worth currently pegged at $146 billion, according to Forbes, has announced a number of large gifts in the last two years, including a $10 billion pledge in February to fight climate change. He announced a $100 million gift to Feeding America’s Covid-19 Response Fund in April.
He appeared on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the most generous donors for the $2 billion donation he and his former wife, MacKenzie Bezos, gave to launch Day One Fund, an umbrella organization that houses a grant-making foundation and an operating foundation.
Vanderbilt University
Ross Perot Jr. and his wife, Sarah, pledged $8 million through their Sarah and Ross Perot Jr. Foundation to establish the Nicholas S. Zeppos Scholarship, which is named for the university’s eighth chancellor.
Ross Perot Jr., a 1981 Vanderbilt graduate, is a real-estate developer in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and serves as chairman of the Perot Group, which manages the Perot family’s holdings in real estate, oil and gas, and other investments. He is the oldest child of the late billionaire Ross Perot.
Perot Jr. is famous in flight circles for co-piloting the first flight by helicopter around the world in 1982.
University of the Pacific
Jie Du gave $5 million to create the Jie Du Center for Innovation and Excellence for Drug Development at the university’s Thomas J. Long School of Pharmacy. Du founded JDP Therapeutics, a biopharmaceutical company that she led for 10 years. She sold the company last year.
Originally from China, she moved to the United States as a youth and earned a Ph.D. in pharmaceutics from the University of the Pacific in 1993. She went on to work for a number of large and specialty pharmaceutical companies before starting JDP. Du created JDP-205, a drug that helps patients suffering from acute allergic reactions.
Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation
Gerald Jaquith left a roughly $2 million bequest, the bulk of his estate, and did not say in his will how the gift should be used or what specific research programs he wanted to support.
Jaquith worked as a high-school math teacher and ran his family’s farm in Waynoka, Okla., after retiring from teaching. He gave the foundation a total of about $7,500 during his lifetime.
Foundation officials said they had no idea he planned to leave his estate to the organization or that it was worth more than $2 million. Jaquith died last summer.
University of California at Los Angeles
Kay Curci donated $1 million through the Shurl and Kay Curci Foundation to back the UCLA Covid-19 Rapid Response Initiative, a research partnership of the university’s Fielding School of Public Health and the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. Curci is the widow of Shurl Curci, a real-estate executive who died in 2013. The couple stated their foundation in 2007 to support medical research.
To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated throughout the week.
