$300 Million Health Gift; $85 Million to Okla. Community Foundation

A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:

Sanford Health

South Dakota banker Denny Sanford pledged $300 million to advance graduate medical education, including creating eight new graduate medical residencies and fellowships, and to expand the Sanford Sports Complex, a Sioux Falls, S.D., sports campus that will provide sports and recreational programs for youths.

The money will also be used to back a big new program aimed at creating and building a virtual hospital that is still in the early planning stages, according to Sanford Health’s news release.

A longtime donor to many institutions in South Dakota and California, where he has homes, Sanford gave the health-care system $400 million in 2007. That gift turned the small health-care provider into one of the largest in the country. He has appeared on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors 11 times since 2005.

Oklahoma City Community Foundation

Sue Ann Arnall gave $85 million through her Arnall Family Foundation to provide grants to nonprofits throughout Oklahoma that are working to improve the lives of individuals, children, and families caught up in the child-welfare and criminal-justice systems. Most of the money will be distributed to the charities over the next five years.

Arnall is a lawyer and former oil industry executive. She began her career while still in high school, researching county records for an oil well lease broker. She later created and managed natural gas and oil marketing departments for Unit Drilling and Exploration Company and later for Continental Resources, where she worked for 17 years. She also managed the hedging and futures trading for Continental.

She started her foundation in 2015 and attracted attention that same year for a roughly $1 billion divorce settlement she received from Continental’s founder, Harold Hamm. It was one of the costliest U.S. divorce settlements on record.

Mayo Clinic

Helene Houle donated $60 million for a patient wing of Mayo Clinic Hospital — Rochester, Saint Marys Campus. The wing will be named for Houle’s late husband, John Nasseff.

Houle is a St. Paul, Minn., philanthropist. Nasseff was a publishing executive and longtime donor to Mayo, dating back to the 1960s when his youngest son, Arthur Nasseff, had life-saving surgery at Saint Marys Hospital when he was 16. John Nasseff died in 2018 on his 94th birthday.

Providence Tarzana Foundation

Donald and Andrea Friese gave $50 million to expand and renovate Providence Cedars-Sinai Tarzana Medical Center. A building that houses hospital patients will be named for the Friese family.

Donald Friese is the former CEO and sole shareholder of C.R. Laurence, an architectural hardware, equipment, tools, and supplies company that he sold in 2015. He worked for the company for 54 years, starting out in the warehouse of what was then a small business and over time helped to build it into a company with annual revenues of more than $500 million.

The couple give primarily through their Friese Foundation, which supports charities like the Salvation Army and causes such as child welfare groups, health care, veterans organizations, animal-rescue efforts, and education. It is unclear if they are giving this latest donation through their foundation or as a personal donation.

Mount Sinai Health

The economist Sanford Grossman pledged $5.9 million though his Sanford J. Grossman Charitable Trust to establish the Sanford Grossman Interdisciplinary Center in Neural Circuitry and Immune Function at the Icahn School of Medicine, where experts in Alzheimer’s disease, genetics, stem cells, and other fields will work together to develop tools for early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s and research a variety of aspects of the disease.

Grossman founded QFS Asset Management, an alternative-investment firm in Greenwich, Conn., in 1988. He was also a professor of economics and finance at Princeton University and University of Pennsylvania at various times in the 1980s and ‘90s. He served as a public director of the Chicago Board of Trade in the 1990s.

American India Foundation

Lata Krishnan and Ajay Shah gave $5 million for a fellowship program that will be renamed the AIF Banyan Impact Fellowship. The nonprofit conducts development work in India and focuses on education, public health, leadership development, and empowering girls and women.

Krishnan is CFO of Shah Capital Partners, a private-equity firm founded by Shah, and currently serves as co-chair of American India Foundation’s Board of Directors. Shah co-founded and is a former managing partner of the Silver Lake investment firm’s middle-market private-equity fund, Silver Lake Sumeru, in Menlo Park, Calif.

Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology

Mike and Linda Mussallem donated $4.1 million to establish a scholarship fund for students from northwest Indiana and the Chicago metropolitan area to attend Rose-Human. The scholarships will be directed toward students from diverse socioeconomic, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds. The scholarships will be awarded to six students annually and will cover the students’ full tuition for four years.

Mike Mussallem has served as chairman and chief executive officer of Edwards Lifesciences since 2000, when the Irvine, Calif., company became an independent, publicly traded entity from Baxter International. Mussallem held a variety of engineering and leadership posts at Baxter for more than 20 years. He earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering at Rose-Hulman in 1974.

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