A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:
World Resources Institute
Billionaire real-estate developer Stephen Ross pledged $63.5 million to back the Ross Center for Sustainable Cities, which works to make cities around the world more resilient.
Ross founded the Related Companies, a New York real-estate firm in 1972 and currently serves as its chairman. He is majority owner of the Miami Dolphins professional football team.
A longtime donor to a number of causes, Ross has given more than $450 million to the University of Michigan, his alma mater, and has appeared on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors three times since 2004. Forbes recently pegged his wealth at more than $7 billion.
Ross gave the World Resources Institute $30.5 million in 2014 to launch the center and $6 million in later years to establish the WRI’s New Urban Mobility alliance, an effort to address rapid changes in urban transportation practices.
Shepherd Center
Bernie Marcus gave $80 million through his Marcus Foundation to expand the neurorehabilitation hospital, which helps patients with spinal-cord injury, brain injury, stroke, multiple sclerosis, spine and chronic pain, and other neuromuscular conditions.
He also pledged $10 million to American Friends of Magen David Adom to pay for the completion of a national blood services center, in Ramla, Israel.
Marcus co-founded the home-improvement giant Home Depot in 1979 after being fired from his job as CEO of Handy Dan Home Improvement, a Los Angeles chain of stores that closed in 1989. Marcus is a longtime donor to Jewish causes, medical research, and more.
Greenwich Country Day School
Donovan Mitchell and his family pledged $12 million to create the Mitchell Family Scholarship Fund, which will provide financial aid to students at all grad levels; and establish the Nicole Mitchell Faculty Support Fund, an annual monetary award that will be given to a teacher in each division of the school who has been at GCDS for at least three years. The gift will also back the construction of a new athletic center.
Mitchell is a professional athlete who plays for the Utah Jazz basketball team. He graduated from the school in 2012, and his mother, Nicole Mitchell, was a lower elementary school teacher there from 2007 until she retired last year. His sister, Jordan, graduated from the school in 2017.
Eisenhower Health
Jerry and Kathleen Grundhofer gave $7.5 million through their Jerry A. and Kathleen A. Grundhofer Family Foundation to renovate an outpatient surgery center located inside the Dolores Hope Outpatient Care Center.
Jerry Grundhofer is a retired chief executive and chairman of U.S. Bancorp. He was a vice president of Security Pacific Bank and Bank of America in the early 1990s and served as chairman of Citibank NA from 2009 to 2011.
University of California at Los Angeles
Lowell Milken donated nearly $6.8 million through his Lowell Milken Family Foundation to create and endow the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience, which will be housed in the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.
Milken is chairman of National Realty Trust, a property owner of early-childhood centers in the United States, and Heron International, a real-estate development firm in London. He earned a law degree from UCLA in 1973.
He established the university’s Milken Archive of Jewish Music in 1990 to record, preserve, and disseminate music inspired by more than 350 years of Jewish life in the United States.
University of Maryland
Phillip and Elizabeth Gross gave $6.8 million to expand the Incentive Awards Program, which provides four-year scholarships and mentoring to students from the state’s Montgomery County, Prince George’s County, and Baltimore.
Phillip Gross co-founded and is managing director of Adage Capital Management, a money-management firm in Boston.
The couple are not alumni of the university. They learned of the Incentive Awards Program through their relationship with a similar program at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Phillip Gross’s alma mater, which was started by the mother-in-law of IAP’s founding director.
To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated throughout the week.
