Billionaire Benioffs Give $30 Million to Fight Homelessness (Gifts Roundup)

A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:

Baylor University

An anonymous donor gave $100 million for the university’s $1.1 billion fundraising campaign. Some of the money will be used to create a matching fund. Another portion will help create up to 17 new professorships and will back new programs in health, data sciences, materials science, leadership and ethics, and other causes.

University of California at San Francisco

Marc and Lynne Benioff gave $30 million to establish the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, a new center where experts from different fields will research the causes of homelessness and try to identify ways to prevent and end homelessness.

Marc Benioff is a billionaire tech entrepreneur who founded Salesforce.com and has been a vocal critic of wealthy Bay Area tech leaders, whom he publicly urged in 2014 to start giving more to anti-poverty efforts in the Bay Area where they have made their fortunes.

The Benioffs have pledged a total of $66 million over the years to end homelessness in San Francisco, and they had given extensively to other nonprofits in the Bay Area and elsewhere. Serial donors, they have appeared on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 report of the biggest donors six times since 2010.

Rollins College

Kathleen Rollins pledged $10 million to renovate Mills Memorial Hall, which will be renamed for the donor. She serves on the Board of Trustees.

Rollins (who is no relation to the founders of the college) studied behavioral science and graduated from there in 1975. She is married to Gary Rollins, the chief executive of the Rollins pest-control company founded by his father and uncle in 1948.

Harvard Medical School sand Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Charles Broderick gave a total of $9 million ($4.5 million apiece) to MIT and Harvard to support research into the effects of cannabis on the brain, internal organ systems, overall health, and behavior.

Broderick founded Uji Capital LLC, a family investment office through which he has invested in legal cannabis companies. He has holdings in Tweed Marijuana Inc. and Aphria Inc. He was an investor in Tokyo Smoke, which merged with DOJA Cannabis in 2017 to create Hiku Brands, which was acquired by Canopy Growth Corporation in 2018.

He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from MIT in 1999 and 2000, respectively, and a master’s degree in East Asian Studies in 2005.

University of Washington

Armon Dadgar, and his partner, Joshua Kalla, pledged $3.6 million to the Office of Minority Affairs & Diversity to create the Armon Dadgar and Joshua Kalla Term Scholarship for Educational Opportunity Program Students, which will provide full scholarships to underrepresented minority, economically disadvantaged, and first-generation college students in need of financial aid.

Dadgar is a co-founder and the chief technology officer of HashiCorp, a cloud infrastructure automation software company in San Francisco. He graduated from the university in 2011 with a degree in computer science. Kalla is an assistant professor of political science and statistics and data science at Yale University.

Highpoint University

Jerry and Joan Murdock committed nearly $1.3 million for the Jerry W. and Joan S. Murdock Endowed Scholarship to help students who need financial support.

Jerry Murdock founded IPS Packaging in Greenville, S.C. He graduated from High Point in 1962 with a bachelor’s degree in business administration and was a scholarship student himself. One of 12 children, he was sent to live at the Methodist Children’s Home in Winston-Salem, S.C., after his mother passed away and his father could no longer care for the family.

He attended the university on a full scholarship and said in a news release that he decided then that he would someday give the university $1 million.

Union for Reform Judaism

Peter and Jill Kraus gave more than $1 million through their Kraus Family Foundation to launch the Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus Initiative for Immigrant and Refugee Justice.

The program is named for Peter Kraus’s grandparents, who rescued 50 Jewish children in 1939 in Austria and Germany before World War II broke out. The money will be used to help young immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and their families and will and support the organization’s policy and advocacy work.

Peter Kraus is chairman and chief executive of Aperture Investors, an international financial firm with headquarters in New York. Jill Kraus is a former design director for Avon Products and vice president for design at Swarovski.

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