Houston Grand Opera Receives $22 Million for Young Artists Program

A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:

Houston Grand Opera

Ernest and Sarah Butler gave $22 million to establish a fund within the Houston Grand Opera Endowment to help the opera company expand its young-artists training program. Organization officials have renamed it the Sarah and Ernest Butler Houston Grand Opera Studio.

Ernest Butler is a retired otolaryngologist who founded the Austin Ear Nose and Throat Clinic as well as Acoustic Systems, a company that manufactures booths for hearing tests, musical practice, and broadcasting. Sarah Butler is a retired teacher.

The couple have been attending Houston Grand Opera performances for more than 35 years and are impressed with how the organization operates and the success of its training program, Ernest Butler said in a news release.

“The two of us have followed the HGO Studio since its inception, watching its graduates go on to successful careers in opera,” Ernest Butler said. “We’ve decided to create a new fund within the HGO Endowment that supports the program, because we’ve seen the endowment’s careful fiscal management firsthand.”

Temple University

Jeanne Zweig left $10.9 million to establish the Jeanne Zweig Endowment Fund, which will provide scholarships and pay for assistive technologies and other accommodations and support services for students with physical disabilities. Temple plans to begin awarding the scholarships to eligible students in the fall.

Zweig founded Zweig, Ramick & Associates, an accounting firm in Bensalem, Pa., and worked earlier in her career for the international accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. Zweig, who was born with cerebral palsy, earned a bachelor’s degree and an MBA from Temple in 1953 and 1954, respectively. She was a longtime donor to the university and supported its Office of Disability Resources frequently over the years. She died in 2015.

University of California at Berkeley

Lynn Barr gave $10 million to Berkeley Public Health, the university’s public-health college, through her Barr-Campbell Family Foundation. She is giving the money to establish the Rural Health Innovations Program and to support 25 fully paid scholarships per year to students working to earn a master’s degree in public health through the college’s online program.

Barr is an executive at the National Rural Accountable Care Consortium. She also founded Caravan Health, a health care management company that she sold to Signify Health last year for roughly $250 million. She previously led the California Health IT and Exchange Strategic Planning Team under California Health and Human Services and established the Rural Health Information Technology Consortium. Earlier in her career, she worked for United Health Group, where she developed a $20 million rural-hospital loan program. She earned a master’s degree in public health from Berkeley in 2010.

Santa Fe Community Foundation

Deborah Fishbein left $8.5 million to support local arts and culture, animal welfare, and environment groups, and she directed a portion of the bequest to establish two funds to support the Institute of American Indian Arts and the Museum of International Folk Art.

She was the widow of Martin Fishbein, a social scientist and the Harry C. Coles Jr. Distinguished Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication, at the University of Pennsylvania, and the founding director of the Health Communication division of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. He died in 2009, and Deborah Fishbein died in 2020. The couple had a second home in Santa Fe.

Northwestern University

Harry Seigle gave $5 million to expand and endow the Pritzker School of Law’s Seigle Clinic for Immigrant Youth and Families, which represents children, young adults, and parents in immigration-court proceedings. Seigle made the gift in memory of his mother, Lora Seigle, who was born in Germany and emigrated to the United States as a Jewish refugee in 1936.

Seigle is principal of the Elgin Company, which focuses on real-estate management, investing, and philanthropy. He is the former president of Seigle Inc., his family’s lumber supplier based in his hometown of Elgin, Ill. Seigle earned a law degree from Northwestern in 1971.

University of Utah

John and Marcia Price gave $5 million through their John and Marcia Price Family Foundation to the university’s Utah Museum of Fine Arts to establish an endowment to support the museum’s executive director position.

John Price earned a bachelor’s degree in geological engineering at the university in 1956. He is the founder of a Salt Lake City construction company, JP Realty; he later served as the U.S. ambassador to Mauritius, Comoros, and the Seychelles under President George W. Bush.

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