A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
Lynne and Richard Pasculano pledged $20 million to support the reopening of four groups housed at the New York performing-arts center: Jazz at Lincoln Center, Lincoln Center Theater, the Metropolitan Opera, and New York City Ballet. The donation kicks off the center’s Comeback Fund, a drive to raise money to return to operations after the pandemic forced the closing of performing-arts venues.
“Love of Lincoln Center is in our blood,” Lynne Pasculano said in a news release about the gift. “My father, Harry Lebensfeld, was an original supporter of Lincoln Center, and I believe deeply in its enduring cultural power as our city comes back socially and economically from this generational crisis.”
Lynne Pasculano is a private investor and an heiress to a manufacturing fortune created by her late father, who founded United Industrial Syndicate in 1945. Richard Pasculano is a former executive vice president of the company, now known as UIS. The couple plan to pay off the pledge over the next five years.
Twin Cities Public Broadcasting System
William Wells left more than $9 million to the public-television organization. The gift will be used to establish the William D. Wells Fund for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Education. The fund will support media content and projects related to STEM and will be invested, allowing it to be distributed in perpetuity.
Wells, who died last year, was a WWII veteran who built a career as one of the advertising industry’s foremost market and research authorities. He was director of corporate research at the advertising firm Needham, Harper, Chicago. Wells also served as a professor of psychology and marketing at the University of Chicago and as a professor of advertising at the University of Minnesota’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Rothko Chapel
Matt Mullenweg donated $3 million toward the Opening Spaces capital campaign, an effort to restore the chapel — a contemplative space that was designed by the 20th-century painter Mark Rothko and which houses paintings he created for the space — and to expand programs and the campus that surrounds the chapel.
The gift will help to pay for the construction and development of a grove of birch trees, a meditation garden, and the chapel’s foyer. The grove is being named for Mullenweg’s sister Charlene Mullenweg, and the meditation garden will be named in honor of his parents, Chuck and Kathleen Mullenweg.
Matt Mullenweg is a web developer who founded WordPress, a free, open-source software platform that is now managed by the WordPress Foundation. He grew up in Houston, where the Rothko Chapel is located.
University Hospitals Cleveland
Michael and Danielle Weiner gave $2 million to pay for a new maternity suite within the Ahuja Medical Center’s new Steve and Loree Potash Women & Newborn Center. Michael Weiner founded and is managing partner of Ninth Street Capital Partners, an investment firm in Cleveland.
Danielle Weiner serves as president-elect of University Hospitals’ Rainbow Babies & Children’s Foundation. She has been a long-time donor to the health system, going back to when she was 13 and gave money she received for her bat mitzvah to pay for a playroom at UH Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital.
Glaucoma Research Foundation
Steve and Michele Kirsch donated $1.5 million to back the Catalyst for a Cure Vision Restoration Initiative, a new research program that brings together a team of four investigators from different institutions to discover new ways to restore vision lost because of glaucoma.
Steve Kirsch is a Silicon Valley-area technology entrepreneur who founded a publishing software company that was acquired by Adobe Systems and the web portal Infoseek, which was acquired by the Walt Disney Company.
Chapman University
Daniele Struppa, the university’s president, pledged $1 million to endow the Bernardino Telesio Professorship in Italian Studies, within the Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences’ Italian Studies program.
A mathematician, Struppa previously served as Chapman’s chancellor from 2007 to 2016 and was provost in 2006. He designated the university as the beneficiary of a life insurance policy that upon his passing will endow the professorship.
He previously held academic and administrative posts at George Mason University, in Fairfax, Va., and at three universities in Italy: the University of Milano, the Scuola Normale Superiore, and the University of Calabria.
To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated regularly.
