Elementary School Teacher Leaves Goucher College $55 Million

A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:

Goucher College

Anica Donnan Rawnsley left an estimated $55 million to her alma mater. Of the total, $50 million will be invested in the college’s endowment and eventually help support scholarships. The remaining $5 million will support a variety of other Goucher programs. Rawnsley earned a bachelor’s degree from Goucher in 1951 and a master’s degree in education at Bank Street College of Education. She was an elementary-school teacher who served on the faculty of Germantown and Abington Friends School and Friends Central in the Philadelphia area.

She served two eight-year terms on Goucher College’s Board of Trustees and was named a trustee emerita in 1997. Rawnsley also had deep ties to Washington & Jefferson College, from which her father, grandfather, and many other family members graduated. In 1975, she became the first woman to join Washington & Jefferson’s Board of Trustees, and she left the college $50 million in her will. She died in 2023. Rawnsley appeared on the Chronicle‘s Philanthropy 50 list of the most generous donors earlier this year.

Dartmouth College

Steven and Daryl Roth gave $25 million to renovate and expand the Hopkins Center for the Arts, the college’s performing arts complex. The renovation project will create a new entrance, recital hall, dance studio, performance lab and additional spaces.

Steven Roth is a real estate developer who leads Vornado, a commercial real estate management firm in New York, and the real estate investment trust, Alexander’s Inc. He graduated from Dartmouth in 1962 with a bachelor’s degree in economics and then earned an MBA from its Tuck School of Business in 1963.

Daryl Roth is a Tony Award-winning theater producer who has produced seven Pulitzer Prize-winning plays, including Clybourne Park, August: Osage County, Anna in the Tropics, Proof, Wit, How I Learned to Drive, and Three Tall Women. She also founded Daryl Roth Theatre, an off-Broadway performance space in New York, and its annex, the DR2 Theatre.

Inova Health

Carolyn Peterson and her adult children, Lauren, William (Rick), Jon, and Steven, gave $20 million to the Fairfax, Va., research hospital. Of the total, the family is directing $15 million to support Life with Cancer — a program that provides free psychosocial and education support to cancer patients and their families — which will be renamed for the family. The remaining $5 million will be used to renovate the Inova Fairfax Hospital’s emergency room.

Carolyn Peterson is the widow of Milt Peterson, who founded the Peterson Companies, a real-estate development firm in Fairfax. Their sons Jon and Rick now lead the company as CEO and chairman of the investment board, respectively. Carolyn and Milt Peterson gave a gift to establish the Life with Cancer program in 1988.

Norton Healthcare

Elizabeth Pahk Cressman left $20 million to support programs and research in Parkinson’s disease and movement disorders at the Norton Neuroscience Institute. Some of the programs the money will support include exercise groups, to help slow the progression of Parkinson’s, and patient support groups.

Cressman, who died in 2021, was an anesthesiologist at what is now Norton Women’s & Children’s Hospital, in Louisville, Ky. Her husband, Frederick K. Cressman, was a pathologist who died in 2010 after a seven-year battle with Parkinson’s.

Cornell Lab of Ornithology

Linda Macaulay pledged to give $10 million through a personal donation and through her Macaulay Family Foundation over the next five years to hire more developers, programmers, and A.I/ experts as part of an effort to expand the capabilities of the Merlin Bird ID app developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

The app identifies birds by sound, from photos, and by using the lab’s large eBird database to determine an identification based on the day and location entered by a user. The expansion effort aims to get the app into more people’s hands in more parts of the world.

Macaulay is an ornithologist and a research associate of Cornell University who specializes in sound recordings of birds and animals outside of the United States. She has contributed to the discovery of new species with her recordings, and her work has been instrumental to the creation of the Merlin Bird ID app.

She has made audio recordings of thousands of birds, including at least 650 recordings that were the first for the species. The Cornell Ornithology Lab’s Macaulay Library archive houses more than 6,000 recordings she has made of birds around the globe, and those recordings helped to train the Merlin Bird ID app to recognize different birds.

Macaulay’s late husband, William, founded First Reserve Corporation, a Stamford, Conn., private-equity firm focused on energy companies. He often served as his wife’s wingman, lugging around the recording equipment on the couple’s worldwide travels to record bird vocalizations. William Macaulay died in 2019 at 74.

Accelerate – The National Collaborative for Accelerated Learning

Ken Griffin gave $9 million through his Kenneth C. Griffin Charitable Fund to support an extensive math-tutoring program within Miami-Dade County Public Schools in partnership with Accelerate and the University of Chicago Education Lab.

The program will introduce tutors into math foundational-skills courses, and is aimed at offering additional support to students who may have fallen behind academically because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Griffin founded Citadel Investment Group, a Miami hedge fund, and has given extensively to arts and culture groups, medical care and research, universities, and other nonprofits. He appeared on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors in 2014, when he gave Harvard University $150 million, primarily to support financial aid.

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