A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:
Boston University School of Medicine
Edward Avedisian gave $100 million to back financial aid and several other programs. Of the total, Avedisian directed $50 million toward scholarships for medical students, $25 million to endow professorships, and $25 million to establish the Avedisian Fund for Excellence, which will support research.
University officials plan to rename the medical school the Aram V. Chobanian & Edward Avedisian School of Medicine. Chobanian is a cardiologist and a former Boston University president, as well as former dean of the medical school.
Avedisian is a retired clarinetist who played with the Boston Pops Orchestra and Boston Ballet Orchestra for nearly four decades. He is also a self-taught investor and grew his wealth by investing in the stock market over many years. Avedisian and Chobanian grew up together in Pawtucket, R.I., where their parents met and settled after emigrating to the United States from Armenia. The men reconnected in Boston about 20 years ago and have been close friends ever since.
An anonymous donor who wanted to honor Avedisian for his big gift has donated $1 million to the university’s College of Fine Arts to endow scholarships for music students and those studying visual arts. The anonymous donor directed university officials to name the music scholarships after Avedisian’s wife, Pamela, a former pianist, and the visual-arts scholarships after Chobanian’s late wife, Jasmine, who was a painter. Jasmine Chobanian died in 2014.
Buffalo Bayou Partnership
Richard and Nancy Kinder gave $100 million through their Kinder Foundation to support the Buffalo Bayou East Master Plan, a 10-year effort to renovate existing parks and build new ones; improve and build trails, bridges, boat landings, and cultural and other public spaces in and around Houston’s Greater East End and Fifth Ward neighborhoods; and connect Houston’s network of regional trails.
Richard Kinder co-founded Kinder Morgan, an energy company in Houston. The Kinders have directed significant sums to support parks and green spaces in the Houston area, including a $70 million grant in 2018 to back the restoration of Memorial Park, a 1,500-acre public park in the city. This latest grant is the second one they have awarded to the Buffalo Bayou Partnership. In 2010, they gave a $30 million grant to improve the existing 2.3-mile stretch of Buffalo Bayou Park.
They have also given extensively over the years to a variety of other causes aimed at improving the lives of residents in the greater Houston area. The Kinders have appeared five times on the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s annual Philanthropy 50 report of the biggest donors.
Rice University
The Kinders also gave $50 million through their foundation to the university’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research to support the institute’s endowment and its work to bolster the prosperity of all Houston residents. The institute provides government agencies and local nonprofits in the Houston area with research, data, and policy analysis. Its research is focused on the intersecting issues of housing, education, economic mobility, and health and population affairs. In 2010, the Kinders endowed the institute with a $15 million donation.
Bard College
Becky and David Gochman gave $25 million through their Gochman Family Foundation to establish a Center for Indigenous Studies and to support faculty appointments and student scholarships in the college’s American Studies Program. The program will be renamed American and Indigenous Studies in an effort to better reflect continental history. The money will also be used to support an Indigenous Curatorial Fellow at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies and efforts to increase enrollment of students from historically underrepresented populations. These efforts also received $25 million from the financier George Soros through his Open Society Foundations.
David Gochman is a lawyer and a former chairman, president, and CEO of Academy Sports and Outdoors, a chain of sporting-goods stores in Harris County, Tex. His grandfather Max Gochman founded the business that became Academy Sports in 1938 as a tire store. It later sold military surplus and became a sporting-goods retailer in the 1980s. David Gochman joined the company in 1996 as vice president of store operations and general counsel. In 2011, he sold the family business to the private-equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts for more than $2.1 billion.
Becky Gochman is an equestrian who founded the Forge Project, a Native-led nonprofit that operates a variety of education and cultural programs. It also purchases artworks by Indigenous artists and then lends and donates the works to institutions that provide scholars access to study the artworks. Forge Project’s executive director, Candice Hopkins, whose ancestry is Carcross/Tagish First Nation, is working with Bard College on the Center for Indigenous Studies programs.
Episcopal Health Foundation
MacKenzie Scott gave $20 million to support the Houston nonprofit’s grant-making, research, and community-engagement programs. The foundation’s work addresses the underlying, nonmedical factors that affect people’s health. It provides funding and other support to help organizations find preventive solutions that address the root causes of poor health.
Scott is a novelist who helped start the online retail giant Amazon with her former husband, Jeff Bezos. She has given more than $12.8 billion in mostly unrestricted gifts to charity since 2020 and has devoted much of that money to nonprofits that usually do not receive multimillion-dollar gifts and to charities that help underserved or overlooked populations. She appeared on the Chronicle’s Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors of 2020.
Southern Methodist University Athletics
Bill and Liz Martin Armstrong pledged $15 million to support the Garry Weber End Zone Complex, an expansion and renovation project at the university’s Gerald J. Ford Stadium. Construction on the stadium, home to the university’s football team, is scheduled to begin later this year.
The Armstrongs founded Armstrong Oil and Gas, an energy-exploration company, in Denver, and Epoch Estate Wines, a winery, in Templeton, Calif. They met as geology students at the university and graduated in 1982. They later paid for the construction of Casita Armstrong, a student-housing facility at the geology field camp at SMU-in-Taos, which the Armstrongs attended as students.
Virginia Commonwealth University School of Nursing
William and Joanne Conway gave $13 million through their Bedford Falls Foundation to support scholarships for more than 1,000 undergraduate and doctoral students over the next five years. More than 70 percent of undergraduate nursing students at the university qualify for a need-based scholarship. With the Conways’ gift, the school can double the total amount of scholarship support for students and increase the number of scholarships awarded by 37 percent over the next five years.
William Conway is a co-founder and interim CEO of the Carlyle Group, a private-equity firm in Washington. Including their latest donation, the Conways have devoted about $165 million over the last decade to shoring up and expanding nursing programs at universities in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. They appeared on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors in 2020.
To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated regularly.
