A Banner Year for Big Gifts in 2019, With Jim Walton and Eric and Wendy Schmidt Leading the Way

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It was a banner year for big gifts in 2019, according to a Chronicle tally, with two hitting or exceeding the $1 billion mark and the money going into the donors’ private foundations to benefit a variety of causes.

Topping the list is Jim Walton, who gave a $1.2 billion donation.

Walton, whose net worth Forbes pegs at $53.8 billion, has not said what his 2019 gift will support. In recent years, he has contributed to the Walton Family Foundation, which his parents, Sam and Helen Walton created in 1987. He has channeled some of the grants he has given through the foundation to the fund’s Building Equity Initiative, a program to help charter school’s grow.

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Eric and Wendy Schmidt came in second with a $1 billion pledge to their Schmidt Family Foundation and three other Schmidt giving organizations. The money will support efforts to identify and develop the next generation of leaders in a variety of fields.

A portion of the new commitment will back Rise, a new program the couple are creating with the Rhodes Trust, aimed at identifying and connecting young people ages 15 to 17 who want to dedicate their careers to public service. The money will go toward helping youths who lack educational opportunities and to networks of like-minded people.

Eric Schmidt is the former head of Google and its parent company, Alphabet. The Schmidts’ wealth stands at about $15.5 billion, according to Forbes.

Universities Benefit

The Chronicle’s annual top-10 list of the largest gifts announced by individuals or their foundations totaled more than $6.2 billion in 2019, an 8 percent increase from 2018’s $5.8 billion total. The 2019 list actually includes 15 gifts because of ties.

The contributions on the 2019 list went primarily to well-established institutions, half of them universities, to support a variety of causes. Two-thirds of the donors on the list are multibillionaires.

Walton’s and the Schmidt’s gifts were followed by an $825.5 million commitment from the financier George Soros to his Open Society Foundations to create the Open Society University Network at Central European University. The network focuses on shoring up academic freedom in Budapest, where Soros was born. He started Central European University in 1991 with an $880 million gift.

Soros’s donation is followed by a $750 million gift to the California Institute of Technology from the food and beverage entrepreneurs Stewart and Lynda Resnick. The gift will support several programs, one aimed at developing ways to build better electricity infrastructure and the use of solar energy and another to measure the effects of climate change. They’re also directing their money toward programs that are mapping and monitoring surface and subsurface water and improving water treatment and reuse techniques and programs in global ecology and biosphere engineering.

The North Dakota banker Denny Sanford’s $350 million gift to National University was given to beef up work-force development and help adult working students get the education they need to further their careers or start new ones.

The Chronicle’s annual rankings are based on the 10 biggest publicly announced gifts. The tally does not include contributions of artwork or gifts from anonymous donors.

In February, the Chronicle will unveil its annual ranking of the 50 biggest donors, a list based on individuals’ total contributions in 2019, not single gifts.

Maria Di Mento directs the annual Philanthropy 50 , a comprehensive report on America’s top donors. She covers wealthy philanthropists, arts organizations, and key trends, among other topics. She recently wrote about Michael Bloomberg’s philanthropy. Email Maria or follow her on Twitter.

Correction: A previous version of this article said Jim Walton made a $1.2 billion donation to the Walton Family Foundation. We should have been more precise in how we characterized that gift. As we noted in July, when we first reported the donation, Walton filed a Securities and Exchange Commission form disclosing that he gave nearly 11.2 million shares of Walmart stock valued at a total of more than $1.2 billion to charity.

We believed the money likely went into the Walton Family Foundation based on the donor’s history of regularly giving large amounts of Walmart stock to his family foundation in previous years. But we should have noted that neither he nor his spokeswoman would confirm that speculation about where the donation went. We have removed the name of the recipient from the article and the accompanying table and will update this article when we learn where the money went.