A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:
University of Richmond
Carole and Marcus Weinstein pledged $25 million to establish the Carole and Marcus Weinstein Learning Center to house expanded and new academic services for students. Those services will include tutoring, coaching in public speaking and writing, and other programs.
The Weinsteins founded Weinstein Properties, a real-estate development firm in Richmond, Va., in 1975. Marcus Weinstein earned a bachelor’s degree from the university in 1949 and several years later got his start building single-family homes. He then moved into the apartment and commercial real-estate markets before he and his wife started their company. Carole Weinstein earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in English from the university in 1975 and 1977, respectively, and taught English earlier in her career.
University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Diana and Douglas Berthiaume gave $20 million to support several faculty-related efforts in the Isenberg School of Management. Of the total, they’ve directed $11.5 million to endow doctoral fellowships and a new behavioral research lab, $7 million to establish endowed new professorships and chancellor posts, and $1.5 million to support faculty research at the Berthiaume Center for Entrepreneurship.
Douglas Berthiaume is a retired chairman, president, and CEO of Waters Corporation, a scientific-equipment supplier in Milford, Mass. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the university in 1971. The couple are longtime donors to the university. In 2006 they gave the business school $5 million, and in 2014 they gave $10 million to establish the Center for Entrepreneurship.
The Stevens Initiative
Jacklyn and Miguel Bezos gave $14.6 million through their Bezos Family Foundation to expand virtual international student-exchange programs. The Stevens Initiative currently connects students in the United States and the Middle East and North African region. The Bezoses’ pledge will support the program in additional regions around the world, including pilot virtual exchange programs for youths in Mexico and Ukraine.
Jacklyn is the mother of Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon. Miguel Bezos, Jeff Bezos’s stepfather, spent 32 years working as an engineer and manager with the oil and gas giant Exxon Mobil. The couple have given extensively to nonprofits in recent years and appeared on the Chronicle’s most recent Philanthropy 50, a list of the biggest donors of the year.
The Stevens Initiative was established at the Aspen Institute think tank in 2015 and named for Christopher Stevens, the former U.S. ambassador to Libya who was killed in 2012 in an attack on two U.S. government facilities in Benghazi, Libya, by an Islamic terrorist group.
Tufts University
Steve Tisch gave $10 million to establish the Steve Tisch Family Endowed Scholarship for Arts, Sciences and Engineering, which will provide scholarships to undergraduates who would not otherwise be able to afford to attend.
Tisch is chairman, co-owner, and executive vice president of the New York Giants, a professional football team; and a partner in Escape Artists Entertainment, a film- and television-production company. He founded the Steve This Company, a film-production business in the 1980s, and it later merged with Escape Artists. He has produced a number of critically acclaimed films including the 1994 blockbuster Forrest Gump. Tisch, who graduated from Tufts in 1971, is an heir to the Loews Corporation fortune.
University of Rhode Island
Hope Hill van Beuren gave $3 million through her van Beuren Charitable Foundation to support the development of a new ocean engineering complex on the university’s Narragansett Bay Campus. The complex will include an ocean engineering education and research center with offices, laboratories, and classrooms, and a wave and acoustics laboratory.
She is a Campbell’s Soup heiress whose grandfather John T. Dorrance invented the condensed-soup process. She and her late husband, John van Beuren, started the foundation in 1986 to support nonprofits throughout their home state of Rhode Island. John van Beuren was a private-equity investor and a historic-architecture buff. He died in 2013.
Dickinson College
Sam Rose gave $2 million to establish the Sam Rose ’58 International Scholarship, which will be directed to students from war-torn Ukraine. The scholarship will cover the costs of textbooks, dining and living expenses, travel, health insurance, and other basic needs through the academic year in addition to support during the college’s summer and winter breaks. It will also back mentoring and internships for these students.
Rose is a real-estate developer and an attorney. His maternal grandfather was born in Kyiv. A first-generation college student who grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Baltimore, Rose earned a bachelor’s degree from Dickinson in 1958 with financial assistance through a 50/50 scholarship-loan and went on to earn a law degree. He co-founded Greenbaum and Rose Associates, a Baltimore-area commercial real-estate firm, in 1981.
A longtime supporter of financial aid for Dickinson students, Rose established the Samuel G. Rose ’58 Scholarship at Dickinson for economically disadvantaged students in 2001.
To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated regularly.
