A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:
Bowling Green State University and other state universities
Bob and Ellen Thompson gave three gifts totaling $52 million through their Thompson Foundation to support financial aid. Of the total, they directed $27 million to Bowling Green State University, their alma mater; $19 million to Grand Valley State University; and $6 million to Saginaw Valley State University.
All of the donations will support Thompson Working Families Scholarships, a program the couple started at the universities in 2011. Including their latest donations, the Thompsons have contributed $85 million toward the scholarships. The universities will match the couple’s latest donations.
The Thompsons earned teaching degrees from Bowling Green in the 1950s and started their careers as school teachers in Detroit. In 1959 they co-founded Thompson McCully Company, a road-paving business in Grand Rapids, Mich. They sold the company in 1999 for $422 million and then gave a total of $128 million of the proceeds to 550 employees of the company.
Connecticut College
Robert and Karen Hale donated $30 million to shore up areas that were significantly affected by the pandemic. The gift will be divided evenly among three areas, with $10 million each going to financial aid, athletics, and immediate improvements to campus infrastructure.
Robert Hale is president and CEO of Granite Telecommunications, a Quincy, Mass., telecommunications company that serves areas in the United States and Canada. He earned a bachelor’s degree in history from the college in 1988.
The couple have given large sums to an array of nonprofits in recent years and have landed on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors twice. They donated $20 million to the college in 2015 for scholarships, a career program, and the upgrading of athletics facilities. Their son Trevor graduated from Connecticut College in 2020.
University of California at San Francisco
Michael Moritz and Harriet Heyman gave $25 million through their Crankstart Foundation to create an endowment for the Sandler Program for Breakthrough Biomedical Research, which supports research efforts that are unlikely to land government grants.
Moritz is the chairman of Sequoia Capital, a venture-capital firm in Menlo Park, Calif., where he was an early investor in Google. He worked as a staff writer for Time magazine in the 1980s and wrote two well-received books during that time: The Little Kingdom: the Private Story of Apple Computer, and Going for Broke: Lee Iacocca’s Battle to Save Chrysler.
Heyman is a novelist and former editor at the New York Times and also worked at the now shuttered Life Magazine.
Unicef
Stewart Butterfield and Jennifer Rubio gave $25 million accelerate the charity’s global coronavirus vaccination program. The effort is aimed at providing 2 billion doses of the Covid-19 vaccine to people in more than 180 countries (about 80 percent of the world’s population) this year.
Butterfield is a Canadian American billionaire who co-founded the group-messaging application Slack and the photo-sharing website Flickr. He took to Twitter to announce the gift and to urge his fellow wealthy business peers to help Unicef raise $100 million for the effort.
Rubio co-founded and leads Away, a luggage manufacturer and retailer. She served as head of social media at Warby Parker, a retailer of prescription eyeglasses, from 2011 to 2013 and later as global director of innovation at AllSaints, a British fashion retailer.
University of California San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy
Irwin and Joan Jacobs pledged $14 million to endow the Center on Global Transformation. The center’s work is focused on the study of how global economic and political structures are changing, and how advances in science and technology affect policy and alter the distribution of wealth around the world.
Irwin Jacobs is an engineer who co-founded the wireless technology giant Qualcomm in 1985. He was a professor of computer science and engineering at the university from 1966 to 1972, and during that time he co-founded the Linkabit Corporation, which developed a satellite encryption device.
The Jacobs’ are billionaires and longtime donors to the university and other San Diego area nonprofits. They have appeared on the Chronicle‘s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors 15 times since 2002 and have given more than $1.3 billion to charity during that time period.
Mount Sinai Health System
Eric and Kimberly Waldman gave $10 million to create the Kimberly and Eric J. Waldman Melanoma and Skin Cancer Center at the May Center for Mount Sinai Doctors. The new center will work in partnership with the Tisch Cancer Institute at Mount Sinai to treat patients with skin cancers.
Eric Waldman is managing partner at High Mountain Capital Partners, a private investment company he founded in 2014 in New York. He previously served as a senior vice president at UBS Financial Services. He worked for 15 years in advertising at Ogilvy & Mather, Young and Rubicam, and Saatchi and Saatchi before entering the field of finance.
The Watershed Institute
Betty Wold Johnson left $10 million to create an endowment fund that will support the nonprofit’s programs in land conservation and stewardship, environmental education, watershed science, and its general operations.
Wold Johnson, who died last year, was the matriarch of a family whose ancestors founded the Johnson & Johnson medical-device and health care-products corporation. Her first husband was Robert Wood Johnson III, president of Johnson & Johnson and grandson of the multinational corporation’s founder.
During World War II, Wold Johnson served in the U.S. Navy as a WAVE, a naval-reserve squad for women, and was stationed in Corpus Christi, Tex. She also helped train fighter pilots in flight simulators at Rhode Island’s Naval Air Station. She was a longtime supporter of the Pennington, N.J., institute and served on its Advisory Board for more than 20 years.
Duke University
Matthew Andresen gave $6 million to support a wide range of athletics programs and daily operations that were affected by Covid-19, as well as ensure that student-athletes continue to receive the support they need regardless of whether they are competing or not.
A portion of his gift will establish an athletics endowment named for Claudius Barrett (C.B.) Claiborne, the first Black student-athlete to play men’s basketball at Duke. Claiborne is a retired professor who taught at Texas Southern University’s business school, where he also served as an interim dean.
Andresen founded and leads Headlands Technologies, a futures trading firm with offices in Chicago, Austin, San Francisco, and Amsterdam. He is a former world-class fencer and a candidate for the 1996 U.S. Olympic Team. He graduated from Duke in 1993 and was a member of the university’s men’s fencing team.
To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated regularly.
