A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:
Furman University
Congressman David Trone and his wife, June, gave $10 million through their David and June Trone Family Foundation to support mental-health services for students and Furman’s Hillel, the Jewish student association.
Of the total, $7.5 million will be used to establish the Trone Family Fund for Student Mental Health and Well-Being, hire a health and well-being coordinator, and endow a position that oversees mental health; and $1 million will go to expand and renovate the school’st counseling center, which will be named for the Trones. The remaining $1.5 million will create the Hillel Endowment Fund to provide permanent support to expand the Furman Hillel.
David Trone currently serves as the U.S. representative for Maryland’s 6th Congressional District. With his brother Robert, he co-founded Total Wine & More, a Bethesda, Md., chain of liquor stores. He served as the company’s president until December 2016. He graduated from Furman in 1977 and serves on its Board of Trustees. The couple gave the university $3.5 million in 2013 to renovate and name the Trone Student Center.
Junior Achievement USA
MacKenzie Scott gave $38.8 million to support the youth-development organization’s national office and 26 of its branches nationwide. The nonprofit offers students from kindergarten through high school programs in financial literacy, career skills, and business-ownership training.
Of the total, $10 million will go to the nonprofit’s headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colo., where some of it will be used to pay for updates to the organization’s IT infrastructure. The remaining $28.8 million will be split among the organization’s 26 affiliates and will help to expand programs in underserved neighborhoods.
Scott appears to have departed from the practice of announcing a big collection of gifts all at once as she has each summer and December since she started announcing her charitable giving in 2020. Her Junior Achievement donation is one of several large contributions she has awarded in recent months, all of which were announced by the charities themselves. Scott has not made any announcements since March.
Scott is a novelist who helped create Amazon with her former husband, Jeff Bezos. Her net worth is estimated at $42 billion, and she has given a total of more than $12 billion to at least 1,250 nonprofits in the last two years. Scott appeared on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors in 2020.
Salem State University School of Education
William and Joyce Cummings gave $10 million through their Cummings Foundation to support programs aimed at strengthening and diversifying the next generation of teachers. The money will be used to expand a variety of programs including the Educator-Scholars of Color initiative, establish a center for professional training, and back the development of antiracist and equity-focused instructional and leadership practices, and other efforts.
William Cummings founded Cummings Properties, a commercial real-estate firm in Woburn, Mass., in 1970. Salem State officials plan to name the school of education for James (Jamie) McKeown, who graduated from the university in 1977 and served as president of Cummings Properties and as managing trustee of the foundation. McKeown died in 1996 of a heart attack. He was 41.
University of Houston
Rusty and Tricia Penick pledged $5 million for the Athletics Department’s $150 million capital campaign to build the Football Operations Center, a new home for its football team; modernize the Athletics-Alumni Center, and upgrade the Guy V. Lewis Development Facility.
Rusty Penick, is a co-founder and the former CEO of Maintenance Supply Headquarters, a Houston distributor of maintenance, repair, and operations products for the housing industry. He helped create the company in 2006. The home-improvement company Lowes bought Maintenance Supply Headquarters in 2017 for $512 million. Penick graduated from the university in 1978.
To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated regularly.
