Billionaire Denny Sanford’s $350 Million Gift Aims to Spur Work-Force Development

The South Dakota billionaire banker Denny Sanford has struck again.

This time the philanthropist is giving $350 million to National University in San Diego, to endow current and future programs, with an emphasis on helping working, adult students, he announced on Tuesday.

The university, which is part of the National University system, will be renamed Sanford National University in July in recognition of the donation.

Including this pledge, Sanford has given the university a total of at least $480 million.

“Denny’s done so much for us, and we wanted to honor him,” said Michael Cunningham, the system’s chancellor. “But how do you honor someone who has everything? So we decided to take the initiative and merge two great brands, National and Denny.”

In an interview with the Chronicle, Sanford, a banker, said that he would give the money over the coming years, and that while some of it will benefit programs he established with previous gifts, including Sanford Harmony, a social and emotional learning program for children, the Sanford Institute of Philanthropy, and the Sanford Education Center, much of the new donation will back new programs that the university is creating. They include work-force-development programs, an antibullying project that will be part of Sanford Harmony, expanded Ph.D. programs, and new efforts to make college more affordable and to help adult working students.

The National University system, with affiliates in Seattle, the San Francisco Bay area, and Nevada, offers online and on-site programs. It also operates programs for students from pre-kindergarten through high school.

The university is emphasizing work-force programs that will help working adults. Details will be announced in December, Cunningham said.

The work-force-development aspect of the donation is unusual, said David Andrews, National University’s president since 2016. Few major donors give large sums to such efforts. “We’ve seen a lot of support and large gifts to traditional and selective institutions that have been around for a while,” he said. “We haven’t seen this level of commitment to a working adult who is trying to take care of their family while working.”

Many such students whom National serves work in what Andrews called “helping professions,” and about 30 percent are from the military. “Those students, too, deserve the kind of philanthropic commitment Mr. Sanford is making,” he said.

Cunningham said university officials are hoping that Sanford’s gift will spur other major donors — especially those who, like Sanford, have signed the Giving Pledge — to start giving larger gifts to adult-learning and work-force-development programs.

For his part, Sanford said he “definitely” plans to start encouraging other wealthy donors to back such programs. Sanford, whose net worth is about $2.4 billion, according to Forbes, has given a total of nearly $2 billion to nonprofits, with some of his biggest gifts going to education and health care. He has appeared on the Chronicle’s annual list of the most generous donors nine times since 2005.

Building Trust

Sanford said he gave this latest donation because he had come to trust National’s leaders over the past half -dozen years; he had gotten to know the university and was happy with the way it had managed his gifts.

“I bet on teams,” he said, “and my investment is in a team, not just an idea. And this team delivers.”

Some of Sanford’s other major gifts include $400 million he gave in 2007 to what is now called Sanford Health, for medical research and to open a collection of pediatric clinics; $125 million in 2014 to Sanford Health for genetic-testing efforts; and $100 million to Sanford Health in 2010 for a breast-cancer research and treatment institute.

He has given a total of at least $230 million to the University of California at San Diego, including $100 million in 2013 for a stem- cell-research center. He gave $100 million this year to establish the T. Denny Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion, where researchers are studying the neurobiology of compassion, with the aim of increasing emotional support for doctors who feel burned out or suicidal about the nature of their work.