The Los Angeles entrepreneurs Stewart and Lynda Resnick have been known to give big, but not as big as the $750 million donation they announced Thursday to the California Institute of Technology to back environmental-sustainability research.
They gave Caltech $21 million in 2009 to create the Resnick Sustainability Institute for clean-energy programs and sustainability science. They poured another $15 million into the institute in 2014 for endowment.
The couple have given extensively to a number of other organizations including Stewart Resnick’s alma mater, the University of California at Los Angeles, and the Aspen Institute, a think tank. They have also backed arts and culture groups, health and wellness organizations, and youth charities, primarily in California.
Including this latest gift, they have donated about $924.4 million since 2008, and they appeared on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors three times.
$9 Billion Couple
About $100 million of their latest gift will be used to build the Resnick Sustainability Resource Center, and roughly $250 million will finance the center’s research programs right now. The remaining $400 million will endow future research programs.
The gift will support four main areas, including finding ways to build better electricity infrastructure and use of solar energy, efforts to measure and monitor the effects of climate change, programs aimed at mapping and monitoring surface and subsurface water and improving water treatment and reuse techniques, and programs in global ecology and biosphere engineering.
The Resnicks founded the Wonderful Company, which owns the food and beverage brands Fiji Water, POM Wonderful, Wonderful Pistachios, and others. Forbes pegs their net worth at $9 billion.
Environmental activists have criticized their businesses over the years because of their use of plastics in packaging and the large amounts of water it takes to grow some of their crops, like almonds and pistachios.
Stewart Resnick told the New York Times in response to such criticisms that it’s impossible to raise crops without water and that there is currently no better alternative to plastic for packaging liquids.
The Resnicks cited the accelerating effects of climate change as the impetus for this latest gift.
“In order to comprehensively manage the climate crisis, we need breakthrough innovations, the kind that will only be possible through significant investment in university research,” said Stewart Resnick in a news release.
Maria Di Mento directs the annual Philanthropy 50 , a comprehensive report on America’s top donors. She writes about wealthy philanthropists, arts organizations, key trends, and insights related to ultra-high-net-worth donors, among other topics.