Record-Breaking Giving

More than 20 Americans contributed at least $100-million to charity last year, a Chronicle survey finds

Twenty-one Americans gave at least $100-million to charitable causes last year, breaking a new record in philanthropic giving, according

to The Chronicle‘s annual ranking of the 60 most-generous Americans. In 2005, 11 people gave that much.

Warren E. Buffett’s $43.5-billion donation to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and several other organizations was the biggest charitable commitment, but even without that money, 2006 was a blockbuster year. Not counting Mr. Buffett’s gifts, wealthy Americans committed $7-billion, compared with $4.3-billion in 2005.

Donors on the list contributed at least $30-million to charities last year — $10-million more than the smallest amount donated by people on the 2005 list and the highest threshold in the 10-year history of the survey.

Excluding Mr. Buffett’s donation, the median amount the donors on the list committed in 2006 was $60-million, meaning that half gave more and half gave less. In 2005, the median was $32.5-million.

Colleges and universities received 34 gifts from the top donors — more than any other type of institution — followed by foundations, which received 28. While such organizations have always been popular with wealthy donors, last year’s big contributors demonstrated an interest in causes that have not typically received so much attention from affluent Americans.

For example:

• Shortly before he died, Gary C. Comer (No. 27) gave $25-million to the Comer Science and Education Foundation, in Chicago, that hopes to find ways to fight global warming and will support the Paul Revere Elementary School, in Chicago, which Mr. Comer attended, and its surrounding neighborhood. Mr. Comer, who contributed a total of $67-million to charities last year with his wife, Frances, founded the Lands’ End retail clothing company.

• Thomas M. Siebel (No. 37), who founded Siebel Systems, a software company in San Mateo, Calif., that merged with the Oracle Corporation last year, donated $5-million of his $55.8-million in gifts to the Meth Project Foundation, in Missoula, Mont., to support an organization to fight methamphetamine use.

• Jon L. Stryker (No. 24), who, according to Forbes magazine, is worth $1.7-billion after inheriting the fortune of a medical company started by his grandfather, poured $68.6-million into his Arcus Foundation, in Kalamazoo, Mich., and New York last year. The foundation supports programs that advance human rights for gay people and conservation of great apes worldwide.

Government Officials

Half the donors on the list were among the 400 wealthiest Americans, according to Forbes magazine’s most recent list.

Most of the people on the list made their money through investments or finance or other business activities. Two of those donors are now high-ranking officials in government.

Henry M. Paulson (tied for No. 18), the secretary of the treasury and former chairman of Goldman Sachs, and his wife, Wendy, provided $80-million for their foundation, which supports the environment, and $20-million for a donor-advised fund at Goldman Sachs.

Michael R. Bloomberg (No. 9), mayor of New York and founder of the financial-data and news-service business that bears his name, donated $165-million to 1,000 charities that he declined to identify by name. Some of the money went to fulfill a $125-million pledge he made last year to fight smoking around the world.

Two people who made their money in the entertainment industry appeared on the list: Oprah Winfrey (No. 35), the television host, and Jack Lord (No. 48), the actor who starred in the television crime drama Hawaii Five-0.

Ms. Winfrey donated the bulk of her gift to the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy Foundation, in Chicago, which supports a girls’ school in South Africa. Mr. Lord, who died in 1998 at age 77, and his wife, Marie, who died in 2005, left their entire estate to the Hawaii Community Foundation, in Honolulu.

The Top Five Donors

The sheer magnitude of the gift made by Mr. Buffett, who is chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, an Omaha insurance and investment company, sets it apart from the handful of gifts of $1-billion or more that have appeared on the list in the past.

Mr. Buffett, who announced that he was gradually turning over the bulk of his fortune to charity, is making gifts of stock in his company. The shares he committed to charity were worth a total of $37-billion in June, when he made the announcement. Last week their value was $43.5-billion, meaning that the increase was almost as large as the total committed to charity last year by the 59 other most-generous donors.

The ripple effect of his gift is already being felt. His three children each will receive more than $1-billion for their foundations. Mr. Buffett’s eldest son, Howard G. Buffett, gave nearly $24-million through his Decatur, Ill., foundation last year, more than three times the amount it had distributed the previous year. By 2008, the foundation expects to increase its grant making to more than $60-million annually as a result of the gift.

The foundation is expanding its activities overseas to include agriculture and irrigation projects, including training farmers in Mozambique to produce greater yields from their maize and peanut crops.

“The first thing I said to my dad was, ‘I’ll be out of money before I’m out of ideas,’” says Howard Buffett. “Most of this stuff you can’t do on a small scale. It takes large-scale dollars, and it’s large-scale problems.”

Siblings Expand Foundations

A set of siblings, Marion O. Sandler and Bernard A. Osher, placed second and third on the list.

Ms. Sandler and her husband, Herbert M. Sandler, donated $1.3-billion to the Sandler Family Supporting Foundation, in San Francisco.

The foundation gave nearly $40-million in 2004, the most recent year for which figures are available; its largest grantee was the University of California at San Francisco, to support medical research.

The Sandlers are former co-chief executives of the Golden West Financial Corporation, a savings-and-loan company that merged with the Wachovia Corporation in October.

Mr. Osher, a founding director of Golden West, with his wife, Barbro, donated $723.2-million to his eponymous foundation, in San Francisco.

While the gift will more than quintuple the foundation’s assets, the priorities set out by Mr. Osher — supporting cultural organizations and providing scholarships — will not shift, says Mary G.F. Bitterman, the foundation’s president.

“Thirty years ago, he wanted to assist people to be able to complete college, and he wanted to make the arts more available to a larger number of people,” she says. “This focus has not changed. You’ll just see us doing more.”

A pair of bequests from donors who lived in California round out the top five gifts.

Jim Joseph (No. 4), a real-estate mogul who fled his native Austria in 1938, directed $500-million to a San Francisco foundation he started in 1987 to assist Jewish children and improve education in the religion’s traditions and history. Mr. Joseph died in 2003, and his foundation will be among the largest to focus on Jewish causes.

Taking the fifth spot are Hector Guy and Doris Di Stefano, who left $264-million to eight charities, two of them in Santa Barbara, near where the couple lived.

The Di Stefanos, who took pains not to show off their wealth, gained their affluence primarily from Mrs. Di Stefano’s father, who was a top executive in the early days of UPS and was able to leave her shares in the company, which rose sharply in value. A lawsuit has erupted over their gifts, however.

While Mr. Buffett’s gift put the spotlight on Bill and Melinda Gates, they do not appear on the latest list.

The Chronicle decided this year not to count payments that donors made on pledges announced in previous years to avoid double counting when the donor first made the pledge and when the donor made a payment on that pledge. The Gateses paid $316-million on a pledge of more than $3-billion but say they have not made any additional commitments from their fortune in the past year.

All signs indicate that 2006 will mark the beginning of major giving by several donors. For example, T. Boone Pickens (No. 8), who contributed $171.5-million last year to start a foundation and support other causes, has said he hopes to give away 80 percent of his fortune, estimated at $2.7-billion, while he is still alive. Mr. Pickens, 78, founded Mesa Petroleum and BP Capital Management, in Dallas.

And competition for next year’s list has already gotten off to an unusually fast start. T. Denny Sanford (No. 26), chief executive of the United National Corporation, a holding company in Sioux Falls, S.D., announced a $400-million commitment last month to a hospital in that city. Mr. Sanford donated $70.5-million in 2006, mainly to the South Dakota Science and Technology Authority, in Lead.

Fund raisers are raising their ambitions as they recognize how quickly the number of affluent Americans is growing. The United States had more than eight million millionaires in 2005, a record high and an 11-percent jump from the previous year, according to an April 2006 survey conducted by the Spectrem Group, in Chicago, a consulting group that tracks patterns of the wealthy.

“There is greater competition, but there is also greater capacity,” says Marilyn F. Kohn, associate dean for external relations and development at Columbia Business School, in New York, which, as part of Columbia University, is in the midst of a $4-billion campaign.

H.F. (Gerry) Lenfest (No. 38) and his wife, Marguerite, pledged $48-million to Columbia University last year for its Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and its law school.

Bob Carter, president of Ketchum, a Pittsburgh fund-raising consulting company, says that because of the growth in the number of wealthy Americans, a quarter of his 45 or so charity clients increased their long-term campaign goals by at least 25 percent last year.

Other gifts on the list also helped lift major fund-raising campaigns.

A donation of $50-million from the DeVos family (tied for No. 43) will probably enable the Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital, in Grand Rapids, Mich., to end its $100-million fund-raising drive a year ahead of schedule, says Vicki Weaver, president of the hospital’s foundation. The donors are the four children of Mrs. DeVos and her husband, Richard, the co-founder of the Amway Corporation.

And the American Technion Society, in New York, which raises money for the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, in Israel, increased its campaign goal from $750-million to $1-billion last year, says Melvyn H. Bloom, the group’s executive vice president.

Two of the nation’s top donors supported Technion. Irwin M. Jacobs, founder of Qualcomm, a wireless-communications company in San Diego, and his wife, Joan (No. 29), pledged $30-million to establish graduate fellowships. And Lorry I. Lokey (No. 10), founder of Business Wire, a San Francisco company that distributes news releases, pledged $25-million for a life-sciences and engineering program.

“I’m doing it because I earn far out of proportion to what I am worth to this world,” says Mr. Lokey, who recalls his mother distributing food to out-of-work men during the Depression.

Institutions on the West Coast, where nearly half of this year’s list of donors live, reaped a substantial windfall last year. Seven of the top 10 donors on the list supported West Coast groups, and a California institution, Stanford University, claimed seven gifts — more than any other beneficiary on the list. Stanford announced a $4.3-billion campaign in October, a more ambitious drive than any institution has yet attempted.

Among the Stanford gifts was a $30-million pledge from Ward W. Woods, an investment adviser (tied for No. 56 with four other donors), and his wife, Priscilla, for its institute on environmental research, which will be renamed to honor them.

“It’s a grand experiment where you get intellectual capacity from across the university combining to solve real-world problems,” says Mr. Woods, the former president of Bessemer Securities, a private investment company in New York. A 1964 graduate of the university and a former trustee, he says he will make another comparable donation to the Wildlife Conservation Society, in New York, this year.

Stanford, as well as other colleges and other research institutions, also benefited as donors contributed money to support stem-cell research.

Mr. Lokey donated $50-million to a donor-advised fund at Stanford, with $25-million earmarked for the university’s new stem-cell research laboratory, which will be named for him.

John P. and Tashia F. Morgridge (tied for No. 31) pledged $50-million to the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, in Madison, to pay for construction of a building that will provide space for two science centers. One of the buildings will operate primarily on private support so researchers do not have to comply with government restrictions on stem-cell research. Mr. Morgridge is chairman emeritus of Cisco Systems, an Internet technology company in San Jose, Calif.

The philanthropy of Eli and Edythe L. Broad (No. 13) also supports stem-cell research. In 2006 they donated $137.6-million to the Broad Foundations, which made a $25-million grant last year to the Broad Institute for Integrative Biology and Stem Cell Research at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles. Mr. Broad is founding chairman of the KB Home Corporation and SunAmerica, a financial-services company in Los Angeles.

Africa was also a popular cause for several donors. In addition to Ms. Winfrey’s gift, John and Jacque Weberg (tied for No. 43) directed the bulk of their $50-million gift to Opportunity International, in Oak Brook, Ill., to help the charity expand its programs in Africa that offer small loans to local entrepreneurs. The Webergs are retired owners of retail furniture stores.

George Soros (tied for No. 31), the financier, pledged $50-million to the Millennium Promise Alliance, in New York, to fight poverty in 33 sub-Saharan African villages.

Offering Flexibility

While donors usually peg big gifts to specific programs, some donors took a different approach. Ronald P. Stanton (No. 17), chairman of Transammonia, a corporation in New York that trades and ships ammonia and petroleum, structured his $100-million pledge to Yeshiva University to give officials there the maximum flexibility.

The money created the Legacy Fund, which the university’s president can draw from to start programs long before raising the money needed to pay for them. Once new donors are recruited for the programs, their donations will be put into the Legacy Fund, to keep its value constant.

“It is very rare that a donor would say to a president, ‘You know better than me, and here is a check with minimal stipulations,’” says Daniel T. Forman, Yeshiva’s vice president for institutional advancement.

Other gifts came with more strings attached. Robert W. Wilson (No. 11), a retired hedge-fund manager, pledged $147.2-million to five charities, four of which must attract other donations to receive his pledge. For example, his largest pledge, of $67.5-million to the World Monuments Fund, in New York, will be paid only if the group raises an equal amount from donors outside the United States.

Most donors, like Mr. Stanton and Mr. Wilson, have long relationships with organizations before bestowing a large gift.

For example, a $50-million gift from Melvin and Bren Simon (tied for No. 43 with two other donors) to Indiana University, in Bloomington, “has been in gestation for 15 years,” says Curt Simic, the university foundation’s president.

The money will be used for medical research and a cancer center. Mr. Simic, who expects more gifts from the couple will flow to charities, says: “We are glad they are in Indiana and we don’t want them to move.” Mr. Simon is co-founder of Simon Property Group, a commercial real-estate company, in Indianapolis.

This year also brought surprises for many charities.

Among them: Officials at the California Community Foundation, in Los Angeles, were shocked when they received approximately $200-million from the estate of Mary Joan Palevsky (No. 7), whose wealth grew from investments she made after receiving a $40-million divorce settlement in 1968 from her husband, Max Palevsky, the founder of Scientific Data Systems, an early computer company that was sold to Xerox in 1969. Ms. Palevsky’s single previous donation to the foundation had been $2,200 in 1997 to buy textbooks.

“We had no idea we were in her will,” says Antonia Hernández, the foundation’s president, who heard about the gift after attending Mass on Good Friday. “I was literally screaming” outside the church, she says. “People looked at me like I was crazy.”

Ms. Palevsky didn’t say how the money should be used, but the foundation, whose assets will top $1-billion with the gift, plans to use the money to support a range of charities, including arts and culture and civil-liberties groups, causes Ms. Palevsky supported all her life.

Ms. Palevsky’s gift was among eight bequests on the list this year, including $44-million from the fashion designer Geoffrey Beene (No. 46) to the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, in New York.

In addition to Mr. Beene’s gift, the institution received [a] $100-million pledge from Mortimer B. Zuckerman (tied for No. 18), publisher of the Daily News, in New York.

Other health institutions were also major beneficiaries of the top donors — and many of those donors say they expect to continue to make substantial commitments to charitable causes.

The family of Dan L. Duncan (No. 14), who contributed $100-million to Baylor College of Medicine, in Houston, and $15-million to other causes, isn’t announcing other big gifts anytime soon, says Randa Duncan Williams, Mr. Duncan’s eldest daughter, but it will be making additional donations.

Mr. Duncan’s net worth is $7.5-billion, according to Forbes magazine.

For major gifts, the family will concentrate on medical research and education in the Houston area, where the family lives and where Mr. Duncan founded his energy company, Enterprise Products Partners. “When you make a gift this size, that kind of stops you from making any other big gifts for a while,” says Ms. Williams. “But this is not by any means the last one.”

Noelle Barton and Sam Kean contributed to this article.

AMERICA’S TOP DONORS: AT A GLANCE What Groups Received the Big Gifts 34 colleges and universities 28 foundations 11 arts groups 10 hospitals and medical centers 10 museums and libraries 9 environmental and animal-related groups 7 health charities 7 human-services groups 6 international organizations 5 education groups 3 historic-preservation groups 2 children and youth groups 2 donor-advised funds 2 medical-research organizations 1 Jewish federation 1 public-affairs group 1 school 1 science organization 1,381 other organizations* * Of these organizations, 995 were recipients of gifts from Michael R. Bloomberg, and approximately 200 were recipients of gifts from Ronald O. Perelman. Both men declined to disclose the types of groups to which those gifts were made in 2006. Sources of Donors’ Wealth 17 investments 16 finance 7 family wealth 7 real estate 6 media and entertainment 6 technology 4 oil 4 retail 3 industry 3 manufacturing 2 energy 2 hotels 1 chemicals 1 pharmaceuticals 1 telecommunications Where the Donors Are Where the Recipients Are NOTE: Some donors gave to multiple organizations, whose names and locations the did not disclose.