Gifts Roundup: Cincinnati Zoo Secures $50 Million for Elephant Habitat

A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:

National University System

The university, in San Diego, has received $100 million from Denny Sanford, chairman of United National Corporation, a bank in Sioux Falls, S.D. The gift will be used to expand a nationwide Social Emotional Learning program for children in preschool through sixth grade with the ultimate goal of helping kids form strong relationships and avoid divorce, abuse, and bullying behavior as they grow up.

Sanford established the Sanford Education Programs with an initial $1 million donation to the university in 2013 and followed up with a $28 million gift last year. He spoke to the Chronicle this week about the personal motivations behind his latest gift.

Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden

Harry and Linda Fath have pledged $50 million to the zoo’s newly announced $150 million capital campaign to quintuple the size of its elephant habitat. The couple has given $10 million outright and will partially match future gifts to the campaign from other donors.

Harry Fath is a lawyer who founded Fath Properties, which manages 30 apartment buildings in Indiana, Kansas, Ohio, and Texas. He is also a minority owner of Major League Baseball team the Cincinnati Reds.

This is the second $50 million gift the Faths have promised this year, coming after a February pledge to Mercy Ships to build a second floating hospital. The couple made the Philanthropy 50 list of America’s most generous donors for the first time in 2017.

City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism

The journalism school has received $20 million from Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, via his Craig Newmark Philanthropies.

Newmark says the gift is part of his long-range plan to strengthen the public’s trust in journalism and the news media. He has made several gifts in support of this goal, including $1 million to the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in 2016 and an unrestricted $1 million gift to ProPublica last year.

In honor of the CUNY gift, the school will be renamed the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. See more from the Chronicle on Newmark’s latest journalism donation.

University of Kansas at Lawrence

Lavon Brosseau, a retired high-school teacher in Concordia, Kan., left $7.4 million to the university to endow scholarships for students majoring in the arts, humanities, and education.

The bequest will endow a breadth of programs at the university, including an honors scholars program for students in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences; the Center for Learning, which opened in 2016 at the Spencer Museum of Art; awards and programs for students majoring in the humanities and the arts; and scholarships as well as prize money for students enrolled in the UKanTeach Program.

Brosseau died in 2016 at the age of 88. Over her lifetime, she amassed a large parcel of farmland in Kansas that made up the bulk of her estate.

Baylor University

The Waco, Tex., institution received a $2.5 million bequest from Lorene Davidson, who died in 2013 at the age of 100. The gift will endow the Floyd F. Davidson Endowed Memorial Chair in Biology, named for the donor’s late husband, a professor of biology at the university for almost 30 years.

The couple met while Floyd was teaching biology and Lorene was an English major at Stephen F. Austin State University. They married shortly before Floyd joined the Baylor faculty in 1946; he died in 1990.

Alliance for Gun Responsibility

Paul Allen and Nick Hanauer have each given $1 million to back a 2018 ballot initiative that aims to enact tougher restrictions on the sale of semiautomatic weapons in Washington State.

Allen is a co-founder of Microsoft, the founder and head of the Seattle investment company Vulcan, and the owner of the National Football League’s Seattle Seahawks. He is a prominent philanthropist and has appeared on the Philanthropy 50 every year since 2002. Hanauer is a venture capitalist.

Napa Valley Vintners

Samantha Rudd, owner of the winery Rudd Oakville Estate in Oakville, Calif., has donated $1 million to this trade association for winemakers in Northern California. The gift will go toward the association’s support for Napa Valley charities that focus on community health and children’s education.

University of Mississippi at Oxford

Thomas and Jim Duff have given $1 million to support the Flagship Constellations program, which brings together multidisciplinary research teams of faculty, staff, and students from the university’s Oxford and Medical Center campuses to develop innovative solutions to complex problems.

The brothers co-own Duff Capital Investors, which owns 19 businesses in insurance, construction, food and beverage, and transportation in Mississippi. They made the gift in honor of their late father, Ernest, who was a corporate lawyer and alumnus of the university. Ernest Duff died in 2016.

Correction: A previous version of this story mistakenly identified Nick Hanauer rather than Paul Allen as the owner of the Seattle Seahawks.

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