Babson College Receives $50 Million, Penn Gets $25 Million (Gifts Roundup)

A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:

Rady Children’s Hospital San Diego

Ernest and Evelyn Rady gave $200 million to redevelop and expand the hospital, which was named for them in 2006 after they donated $60 million that year.

Ernest Rady founded American Assets in 1967, which later became a publicly traded real-estate investment trust, and Insurance Company of the West in 1971. He also led Westcorp, a financial-services firm that merged with Wachovia Corporation in 2006 and is now a part of banking giant Wells Fargo.

Babson College

Arthur Blank donated $50 million through his Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation to create the Arthur M. Blank School for Entrepreneurial Leadership and pay for needs-based scholarships, endow professorships, and back research and other programs.

Blank co-founded the Home Depot chain of home-improvement stores. He also owns the Atlanta Falcons professional football team. Blank graduated from Babson in 1963.

University of Pennsylvania

Harlan Stone gave $25 million to the School of Engineering and Applied Science to support the construction of a new data-science building.

Stone is the CEO of HMTX Industries, a flooring manufacturer in Norwalk, Conn. He graduated from the university in 1980. He serves on the Penn Engineering Board of Overseers and is currently chairman of its Academic Life Committee.

University of California at Los Angeles

The late Kirk Kerkorian left $20 million to launch the Promise Armenian Institute, establish a world-class research center and platform to educate the public about Armenia, and expand the university’s existing Armenian-studies programs.

Kerkorian, who died in 2015, was an Armenian American businessman who founded the Tracinda Corporation, a holding company in Beverly Hills, Calif. In 1969 he bought the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie studio and has been credited with helping to develop Las Vegas, where he built the MGM Grand hotel.

He financed and served as executive producer of the 2017 film The Promise, a personal project raising awareness of the 1915 Armenian genocide, and donated to charities that helped Armenians.

Community Foundation for Monterey County

Charles de Guigné bequeathed a 9-acre estate in Pebble Beach, Calif., to the community foundation and directed it to sell the property, which it did this month. The $18 million in proceeds from the sale will be used to set up an endowed fund the late donor stipulated should be used to support the SPCA for Monterey County, an animal welfare group, and Montage Health Foundation, a health charity.

Community foundation officials estimated the fund will make grants totaling more than $800,000 annually to start, and more over time. De Guigné, who did in 2017, was an heir to a family fortune created in large part by his great-grandfather, Christian de Guigné, a French count who co-founded the Stauffer Chemical Company in San Francisco in 1885.

Charles de Guigné working for Stauffer in the early 1970s, then moved to France in 1976 and spent years modernizing the vineyard at Château Sénéjac, an estate in the Le Pian-Medoc region of Bordeaux, which his family had owned for nearly 150 years. He sold the vineyard in 1999 and returned to California to retire.

West Virginia University

Maurice (Moe) Wadsworth gave $6 million for financial aid, faculty support, research, and other programs in the Benjamin M. Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources.

Before retiring in 1996, Wadsworth spent his career at Gannett Fleming, a construction-management firm in Harrisburg, Pa. Early in his career there, he worked as a bridge-design engineer, the chief computer engineer for the transportation division, director of transportation, and eventually senior vice president for administration, and president and chairman of the board.

Wadsworth earned a degree in civil engineering from the university in 1951 and met his late wife, JoAnn, there at their freshman mixer in 1947.

AltaSea

Richard and Melanie Lundquist donated $5 million to back ocean-sustainability programs and efforts to bring together scientists and business leaders. The couple said they gave the donation to honor their friend Leonard Aube, the late executive director of the Annenberg Foundation, who died in 2015 and was instrumental in creating the science organization.

“When he showed me the plans on paper for AltaSea, he made them jump off the page,” said Richard Lundquist in a news release. “He had an inexplicable passion for what AltaSea could be for our young people, for entrepreneurs interested in the blue economy, and most importantly for helping find solutions to combat climate change.”

Richard Lundquist leads Continental Development Corporation, a commercial real-estate and management company in El Segundo, Calif., and Melanie Lundquist is a former speech pathologist. The couple have given extensively to public-school efforts in Los Angeles, as well as to health-care organizations, and they have appeared on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors three times over the years.

National 4-H Council

Facebook executive Andrew Bosworth, and his wife, April, pledged $1 million to back the nonprofit’s efforts to provide STEM programs to youths across the country.

Andrew Bosworth is vice president of augmented and virtual reality at Facebook. The couple were members of 4-H in their youths, and Andrew Bosworth co-founded the California 4-H Technology Corps and helped start several other technology teams in other states.

While the nonprofit is primarily known for its agriculture and animal-husbandry programs, Andrew Bosworth credits the charity with driving his interest in science and technology.

“Most people don’t associate 4-H with STEM learning, but it shaped my future career in technology,” he said in a news release. “Project work with plants and animals immersed me in biology and forced me to use critical-thinking skills. As I look back at my personal 4-H experience, whether I was coding or speaking in public, I was doing things I loved while building the social and leadership skills that still serve me in my professional career today.”

To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated throughout the week.

Maria Di Mento directs the annual Philanthropy 50, a comprehensive report on America’s top donors. She covers wealthy philanthropists, arts organizations, and key trends, among other topics. She recently wrote about Michael Bloomberg’s philanthropy as he considers becoming a presidential candidate. Email Maria or follow her on Twitter.