A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:
Community Foundation of Greater Greensboro
Charles (Buddy) Weill Jr. left $50 million to create an endowment that will pay to expand and renovate elder-care and health-care centers in the Greensboro, N.C., area.
Weill grew up in Greensboro and served in the U.S. Army during World War II. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge, a five-week battle that took place near the end of the war in the densely forested region of Ardennes in Belgium and Luxembourg.
He went on to become an insurance and real-estate executive. He owned Weill Investment Company and served as president and CEO of Robins & Weill, a property and casualty insurance agency in Greensboro that his father had founded in 1911.
Johns Hopkins University
Ralph O’Connor left $20 million to establish the Ralph S. O’Connor Sustainable Energy Institute, the university’s new home for research and education aimed at creating clean, renewable, and sustainable energy technologies.
O’Connor graduated from the university in 1951 and became a prominent Texas oilman; in the 1960s, he rose to become president of Highland Oil and later became chairman, president, and CEO of Highland’s successor, Highland Resources, a holding company. He started his own investment company, the Ralph S. O’Connor & Associates investment firm, in 1987.
He was among the four original partners who acquired the National Basketball Association’s San Diego Rockets and brought them to Texas as the Houston Rockets in the late 1960s. He died in 2018 at 92.
Hamilton College
Keith Wellin left $19 million to create and endow a scholarship fund. He also bequeathed an art collection to the college.
Wellin was a financier who worked for two large investment firms that were prominent in the 20th century. He was president of E.F. Hutton, then vice chairman of Dean Whitter Reynolds Securities, where he worked from 1971 into the 1980s.
He served as an officer in the U.S. Army in the final months of World War II and enrolled in Hamilton College in 1947. He graduated in 1950 and went to business school before starting his career as a stockbroker. Wellin died in 2014.
Children’s Hospital of Orange County
Sandy Segerstrom Daniels gave $5 million to help establish CHOC Children’s Mental Health Inpatient Center, which will provide care to children ages 3 to 18 who are struggling with mental-health conditions. It will also provide specialty programming for children younger than 12.
Daniels is a managing partner of C.J. Segerstrom & Sons, her family’s real-estate development company that has deep roots in Orange County, Calif.
It was founded in 1900 when Carl Segerstrom, a Swedish immigrate, bought a large lima bean farm. He and his heirs bought more properties over time and built a large fortune. Among many other properties, the Segerstrom family owns South Coast Plaza, a famous shopping center that is one of the highest grossing in the country.
Rand Corporation
Daniel and Phyllis Epstein gave the think tank $10 million through their Epstein Family Foundation to launch the Rand Epstein Family Veterans Policy Research Institute. The core research agenda of the new institute will include analysis to better understand how military service and postservice experiences affect the short- and long-term needs of veterans and their families.
Daniel Epstein founded the ConAm Group, a real-estate development and investment company in San Diego. The couple previously gave Rand $1 million to back a joint research project with the University of Southern California to research homeless veterans and how to place them in permanent housing.
Bucknell University
Glen Tullman donated $6 million, of which $3 million will endow the Douglas K. Candland Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, and $500,000 will endow the Animal Behavior Program. Candland is a retired psychology and animal behavior professor who was Tullman’s mentor when he was student at Bucknell.
Tullman has directed $2.5 million of the gift to be used to establish the Douglas K. Candland Fund for Civic Action, where the money will support the university’s efforts to better engage students in local and global issues and earn a Carnegie Community Engagement Classification, a program of the Carnegie Foundation.
Tullman graduated from Bucknell in 1981 and went on to found several health care service companies, including Living, which went public in 2019. He sold his first company 10 years after graduating and returned to Bucknell to speak about entrepreneurship. Afterward, he says, Candland approached him.
Said Tullman in a news release: “He said, ‘How do you think you’re doing?’ I said, ‘I think I’m doing really well.’ Doug said, ‘I don’t think you’re doing so well.’ I was kind of in shock. I asked, ‘Why not?,’ and he said, ‘Well, we didn’t educate you to make money; we educated you to make a difference. I don’t think you’re doing that.’”
Tullman most recently started Transcarent, a new digital health care company for employees of self-insured employers and their families that aims to offer people more choices by providing its members with virtual health care services and bundled providers in one consumer-directed health care platform.
University of North Carolina at Pembroke
Mary Ann Elliott pledged $6 million to establish the McKenzie-Elliot School of Nursing, named for the donor and her late mother, Mary McKenzie Edwards, who overcame obstacles in the 1930s to become a registered nurse.
Elliot is a retired CEO of a global aerospace company and one of the nation’s top satellite-communications experts. She founded Arrowhead Global Solutions, a satellite communications firm in Fairfax, Va., that works with the U.S. military, security, and intelligence agencies.
Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration
Kristin Holloway donated $2 million to create the Holloway Family Fund, which will back research into and treatment of frontotemporal degeneration, a form of dementia usually seen in people under 60 that is different from Alzheimer’s disease.
After experiencing a sequence of unexplained behavioral and personality changes, Holloway’s husband, Lee Holloway, was diagnosed with behavioral variant FTD in 2017 at age 36. Lee Holloway co-founded Cloudflare, a web infrastructure and website security company in San Francisco.
To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated regularly.
