The Giving Spree

60 most-generous donors gave $10-billion in 2004

America’s 60 largest donors contributed a total of more than $10-billion to charity last year, a big increase from

2003, when the top 60 donors contributed $5.9-billion, a new Chronicle survey has found.

Fifteen of the most-generous donors made charitable gifts or pledges of $100-million or more last year, including two donations that exceeded $2-billion.

Bill and Melinda Gates ranked at the top of the list by pledging an estimated $3.35-billion to their own foundation, which will be worth more than $31.5-billion when all the money is received.

With that new infusion, the foundation will become nearly three times the size of the nation’s next-wealthiest philanthropy, the Ford Foundation, which has $11-billion in assets. The Gateses decided to put into their foundation all the money they received in dividends issued last year by Mr. Gates’s company, Microsoft.

Taking second place was Susan T. Buffett, wife of the investor Warren E. Buffett and a director of his investment company, Berkshire Hathaway, who left an estimated $2.4-billion to the Buffett Foundation,

in Omaha, when she died in July. The money from her estate, which is still being settled, will make the Buffett Foundation one of the 20 biggest foundations in the nation -- and it could eventually become one of the very largest, because Mr. Buffett, who is estimated to be worth at least $40-billion, has said he plans to leave most of his estate to the foundation.

Ms. Buffett also expanded the wealth of other foundations, leaving $50-million apiece to each of the foundations created by her three children.

The median amount the donors on the list gave in 2004, including pledges, was $40.8-million, meaning that half gave more and half gave less. In 2003, the median was $32.5-million.

The 60 biggest donors play an important role in U.S. philanthropy: The total amount donated by individuals in 2003, the last year for which data are available, was slightly more than $200-billion, according to Giving USA.

Paying Off Pledges

The recovery of the U.S. economy is one reason that charities are finding it easier to win multimillion-dollar gifts from wealthy Americans.

Randy L. Holgate, vice president for development and alumni relations at the University of Chicago, which is now engaged in a campaign to raise $2-billion, says it is far more difficult to persuade donors to make big gifts when the economy is turbulent.

“Even if you have all the money in the world you can still be anxious,” says Ms. Holgate. “We are an institution that is just beginning to break through the $25-million-and-up level and for us it has mattered to donors.”

In one sign that wealthy donors may be feeling more confident, William P. McGoldrick, a fund-raising consultant in Latham, N.Y., says some of his nonprofit clients have told him that their multimillion-dollar donors want to pay off their pledges faster than they said they would when they made the gifts. He says a donor told one college, “If you match a portion of my gift, I will accelerate my payments.”

But it is not just the economy that accounts for so many large donations in a single year.

Big donors “don’t do these gifts overnight,” says Jerry May, vice president for development at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor. “It’s not so much that they have great wealth and they are ready to dispose of it. It’s that their great wealth has matched a great idea.”

The university last year received the largest donation in its history from Stephen M. Ross (tied for No. 13), a real-estate developer in New York, who pledged $100-million to support Michigan’s business school. Mr. Ross, a 1962 graduate of the business school, is co-chair of the university’s $2.5-billion campaign.

In addition, the university’s medical center received a $44-million pledge from Bill and Dee Brehm (No. 22), to build a center for diabetes research. Michigan also received an $18-million pledge from Edwin E. and Rachel Meader (No. 57), for an array of projects, including a center on depression to be built at the university’s medical center. Mrs. Meader’s grandfather was a co-founder of the Upjohn Company and an alumnus of Michigan’s medical school.

Gifts to Foundations

Many of the biggest gifts made last year went to the donors’ own foundations, with 17 of the 60 top donors putting money into their own grant-making funds.

John M. Templeton placed No. 3 on the list by adding $550-million to his foundation, in West Conshohocken, Pa., bringing its total assets to $895.5-million. Mr. Templeton, 92, has long said that he plans to leave the bulk of his fortune to charity, mostly to support projects that focus on the intersection of spirituality and science (The Chronicle, June 12, 2003).

In addition to the bequest from Susan Buffett, many of the largest donations last year were made from donors’ estates.

Caroline Wiess Law (No. 4), an oil heiress and art collector who died in December 2003, left a total of $450-million to three charities in her hometown of Houston. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, received the lion’s share of the gift, an estimated $400-million, for its endowment. In addition, she left the museum 54 pieces of art, including paintings by Picasso and de Kooning, valued at a total of approximately $30-million.

Ms. Law’s parents helped found the museum, and she was a life trustee. “She always said that as she bought works of art, she wanted them to be good enough for the museum,” says Peter C. Marzio, the museum’s director.

Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center also received $25-million apiece from Ms. Law’s estate.

Rounding out the top five was the estate of George D. Cornell, a retired banker and heir to two fortunes who died in March 2003. He left $196-million to charity, nearly half of which went to his alma mater -- Rollins College, in Winter Park, Fla. The remainder of the bequest from Mr. Cornell, whose money came from his family’s ties to IBM and Haviland china, went to 61 other organizations.

Technology Wealth

No industry produced as many donors as the technology field. Eleven of the donors made their money in technology businesses, followed by 10 who made their money as investors.

Many of the 49 living donors are still in the early stages of their careers, and many are in their 30s or 40s. Among them: Pierre Omidyar, co-founder of eBay, and his wife, Pam, both 37 (No. 7); David Filo, 38, co-founder of Yahoo (tied for No. 36); Samuel Garvin, 40, founder of the Continental Promotion Group, and his wife, Rita, 36 (No. 21); Daniel M. Meyers, 41, chief executive officer of First Marblehead Corporation, which provides marketing and related services to private lenders of educational loans (tied for No. 48); Mark Stevens, 44, a managing partner at Sequoia Capital, and his wife, Mary, 42 (No. 46); Curtis Priem, 45, co-founder of the Nvidia Corporation, a California computer-graphics company (tied for No. 31); and David Tepper, 47, founder of Appaloosa Management, a New Jersey investment firm, and his wife, Marlene (No. 17).

The list of self-made millionaires who made major gifts last year includes two women:

• Oprah Winfrey (No. 24), the television-show host and chairman of Harpo Inc., a multimedia entertainment company, donated a total of $50-million last year to her two private foundations, both in Chicago. Among the grants the Oprah Winfrey Foundation made last year was $1-million of a $5-million pledge to Morehouse College, in Atlanta, for scholarships and $1-million to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, in Cincinnati.
• Darla Moore (tied for No. 25), executive vice president of Rainwater Inc., a private investment firm in Fort Worth, donated $45-million to the business school at her alma mater, the University of South Carolina at Columbia. The pledge follows a $25-million donation she made in 1998, when the school was renamed in her honor.

College Gifts

Over all, higher education received the largest number of gifts from the year’s top donors. Fifty-six institutions won donations or pledges in 2004 from donors on the Chronicle list.

Tulane University, in New Orleans, benefited from the ingenuity of a man who had a seemingly minor connection to the institution. Jim Clark, co-founder of Netscape, in Mountain View, Calif., took several classes at Tulane, despite the fact he didn’t have a high-school diploma. Mr. Clark credits the experience with enabling him to get into college -- he received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of New Orleans and a doctorate from the University of Utah. So when he was approached to make a gift, says Yvette M. Jones, Tulane’s senior vice president for external affairs, “he said, ‘I’ll give you $30-million, but I think David Filo should give it too.’”

Mr. Clark, who has been on Tulane’s board since 1999, had met Mr. Filo just once before, but he knew the Yahoo founder was a Tulane alumnus. Tulane’s president, Scott S. Cowen, met with Mr. Filo to discuss Mr. Clark’s “challenge,” says Ms. Jones.

The result: Mr. Filo pledged $30-million. A few weeks later, Mr. Clark sent Mr. Cowen an e-mail message confirming his gift. With their gifts, Mr. Filo and Mr. Clark tied for the 36th spot on the Chronicle list.

Scholarship Aid

Several donors demonstrated a strong interest in helping people who might not be able to afford a college education.

Sidney E. Frank (No. 9), who created the Grey Goose brand of vodka, and last year sold his company to Bacardi for $2-billion, donated $100-million to Brown University for scholarships for needy students, in addition to committing another $42-million to charitable causes. Mr. Frank had had to drop out of Brown after just one year because he could not afford tuition.

Mignon C. Smith (tied for No. 25), heiress to a textile fortune, has promised $40-million to help pay the college costs of students in Alabama, where she grew up. Unlike many other scholarships, which emphasize academic merit, Ms. Smith said she would give priority to students who would be the first in their families to attend college and to those who had spent time helping others.

William Newman, a real-estate executive in New York, said one reason he and his wife, Anita (tied for No. 42), pledged $25-million to his alma mater, City University of New York’s Bernard M. Baruch College, is that “most of our students are the first generation to go to college. They need a leg up.”

He added: “Money given to a public university goes a lot farther than it would at a Harvard.”

Popular Causes

After colleges and universities -- and donors’ own foundations -- hospitals and medical centers received the largest number of gifts from the 60 biggest donors. Eighteen hospitals and medical centers received donations, while 16 museums and libraries were beneficiaries of gifts from donors on the list.

Small charities were also the beneficiaries of the nation’s most generous donors. Louise Wheelock Wilson (No. 50) left $21-million from her estate to charity, the bulk of which went to support arts groups in Connecticut. Her largest gift, $5-million, went to the Nutmeg Ballet, in Torrington.

Not all the gifts were made in the form of cash.

Leo A. Drey, a St. Louis businessman, and his wife, Kay (No. 6), donated a 146,000-acre tract of forest land in the Missouri Ozarks, valued at $180-million, to their L-A-D Foundation, which intends to preserve the land, opening much of it to the public and pursuing an environmentally friendly approach to cutting down trees.

Twenty-two donors have made the list of top 60 donors at least once before -- counting appearances on the lists published jointly by The Chronicle and the online magazine Slate since 2000, as well as the lists that were compiled by Slate alone from 1996 to 1999.

Ted Turner, founder of CNN, is the only donor to appear on the list every year; this year he ranked No. 19 with gifts of $68.1-million in 2004. Paul G. Allen (No. 18), a co-founder of Microsoft, who is on the list for the sixth time, donated a total of $71.9-million to his foundations and other charities last year. Eli and Edythe L. Broad (tied for No. 13), who pledged $100-million to their three foundations, have also appeared on the list six times. Mr. Broad is the founding chairman of KB Home Corporation and SunAmerica.

Among the donors who made a second appearance: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who donated $138-million last year to more than 600 charities, including the financially beleaguered Dance Theatre of Harlem, in New York. While Mr. Bloomberg, who made his fortune in the publishing industry, has long been identified as a major donor, in his years as mayor he has typically waited to release his giving figures until he made his tax returns public.

Transfer of Wealth

As charity fund raisers look ahead, many believe that far more Americans can be persuaded to make multimillion-dollar gifts in coming years. Many fund raisers continue to be encouraged by estimates by Boston College researchers that at least $41-trillion is being passed from one generation to another from 1998 to 2052.

“There is an enormous amount of wealth creation in this country,” says Julie Tolan, a top fund raiser at Marquette University, in Milwaukee. Marquette last year received an $18-million bequest -- its largest gift ever -- from Helen Way Klingler (No. 56), who inherited money from her father, who chaired the Wisconsin Electric Power Company.

To help tap into that wealth, Marquette is already planning its next capital campaign for 2007, even as its current campaign, which has raised $325-million -- and exceeded its $250-million goal -- is set to conclude in June.

‘You Only Need So Much’

Some wealthy donors hope that a growing number of affluent people will give large sums to good causes.

Alfred E. Mann (No. 12), an inventor and businessman, last year pledged $100-million to the American Technion Society, in New York, to create and endow the Alfred E. Mann Institute for Biomedical Engineering at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa, Israel. Mr. Mann plans to eventually donate money to endow 12 such institutes in the United States.

“I don’t understand people who amass so much wealth and then don’t do anything with it except amass more,” he says. “You only need so much. In my case, I wanted to do something useful with it.”

Sharnell Bryan, Leah Kerkman, Cassie Moore, M.J. Prest, Caroline Preston, Elizabeth Schwinn, and Ian Wilhelm contributed to this article.

The Top Donors