A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:
Bowling Green State University
Allen and Carol Schmidthorst gave $15 million to endow education programs, scholarships, fellowships, and professorships in the College of Business, which will be named for them.
The couple founded AWS Properties, a hotel-property acquisition, site-development, and management firm in Lima, Ohio. Allen Schmidthorst attended the university for one year in the 1950s and went on to own several McDonald’s franchises. He held management positions at the Holiday Inn hotel company before he and his wife started their own firm.
Accion Opportunity Fund
MacKenzie Scott gave $15 million to provide microloans and other types of support to small businesses owned by people of color, women, and immigrants. Scott is a novelist who helped her former husband, Jeff Bezos, start the online retailing behemoth Amazon.
Formerly fairly quiet about her giving, Scott announced late last month that she had recently donated $1.7 billion primarily to nonprofits devoted to racial and gender equity. Scott is currently among the top five wealthiest women in the world, with a net worth pegged at $61 billion, according to Forbes.
University of South Dakota
The South Dakota billionaire Denny Sanford donated $12.5 million to endow the law school, which will be named David Knudson, a friend and colleague of Sanford’s who served as in the South Dakota Senate from 2003 to 2011.
The gift more than doubles the size of the law school’s current endowment, a university official said in a news release.
Sanford founded First Premier Bank and is chairman of United National Corporation, its holding company, in Sioux Falls, S.D. Knudson is Sanford’s lawyer and also serves as senior vice president of Sanford’s holding company.
Sanford divides his time between homes in Sioux Falls and San Diego and has given extensively to nonprofits in both locales. He has appeared on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 report of the biggest donors 10 times since 2005 and has given more than $1.9 billion to charity since then, according to a Chronicle tally.
Spark SF Public Schools
Evan and Sara Williams gave $10 million to provide low-income students in San Francisco’s public-school system with access to a computer, the internet, and the technology support they will need to access the district’s distance-learning programs while the city’s schools remain closed because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
When the schools closed in March, the couple gave the school district $1.1 million through their Someland Foundation to help feed students whose families were struggling financially after the economic fallout from the pandemic.
Evan Williams co-founded Twitter and also created the blogging website Medium. The couple appeared on the Philanthropy 50 in 2018 when they donated a large sum to their foundation.
Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University
Rodger and Paula Riney donated $7.8 million through their Paula and Rodger Riney Foundation to support the Riney Family Multiple Myeloma Research Program Fund.
The two-year project will back fast-tracked research projects aimed at multiple myeloma, a blood cancer caused by malignant plasma cells that accumulate in the bone marrow.
Rodger Riney founded the brokerage firm Scottrade Financial Services. He was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 2015, and since then, the couple have given to multiple institutions to back research into the disease.
Hampden-Sydney College
Rob and Cindy Citrone gave $6 million to expand Compass, the college’s experiential-learning program. Rob Citrone founded Discovery Capital Management, a hedge fund in Norwalk, Conn. He graduated from the college in 1987 and serves on its Board of Trustees.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Adrienne Arsht pledged $5 million to back the museum’s internship program and support its MetLiveArts performance series. The donation will ensure that all the museum’s undergraduate and graduate internships will be fully paid, starting in spring 2021.
The internship program has been named for Arsht, who said in a news release that “paid internships are an important step towards increasing opportunities and supporting equity in the art field.”
A former banker and longtime donor to nonprofits in Miami, Washington, and New York, Arsht gave the museum $5 million in 2014 for MetLiveArts, and she helped the museum purchase “Studies of Indian Chiefs Made at Fort Laramie,” a circa-1859 painting by the artist Albert Bierstadt.
To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated throughout the week.
