Jackie and Mike Bezos Give $166 Million to NYU Langone Health for Low-Income Families

A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:

NYU Langone Health

Jackie and Mike Bezos gave $166 million through their Bezos Family Foundation to back programs at the NYU Langone Hospital—Brooklyn that aim to improve the health of low-income and underserved people in the borough’s Sunset Park neighborhood.

Jackie Bezos is the mother of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. She created the Bezos Scholars Program at the Aspen Institute, the Aspen Challenge, and Students Rebuild, all of which are education programs for various age groups. Mike Bezos, Jeff Bezos’s stepfather, spent 32 years working as an engineer and manager with the oil and gas giant Exxon Mobil.

Obama Foundation

Jeff Bezos pledged $100 million for unrestricted support of the nonprofit’s programs. Bezos asked foundation officials that the plaza at the Obama Presidential Center, which is under construction in Chicago, be named the John Lewis Plaza, for the U.S. congressman and civil-rights activist who died last year.

The naming of the plaza is part of an effort by the foundation to give donors the option to name various public spaces within the center for prominent people who have made a positive impact for social justice.

Bezos founded the online retail giant Amazon in 1994, and his net worth is estimated at $204.7 billion, according to Forbes. He has ramped up his giving in the past several years and has appeared on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors twice since 2018.

University of Notre Dame

Harry and Linda Fath pledged $50 million to support undergraduate financial aid. Harry Fath is a lawyer and the owner of Fath Properties, a Cincinnati company that manages apartment buildings in Indiana, Kansas, Ohio, and Texas. He is also a minority owner of the Cincinnati Reds baseball team.

He followed an older brother to Notre Dame and graduated from the university in 1963. He served in the U.S. Army and earned a law degree from the University of Cincinnati. After practicing law for a few years, Fath began making investments in real estate, which ultimately led to the founding of Fath Properties.

The couple have given extensively to numerous charities and landed on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors twice in recent years.

Houston Methodist

Mary Neal and her husband, Ron Neal, gave $25 million to expand the medical system’s Houston Methodist Cancer Center, which will be renamed for the donors.

Mary Neal is an obstetrician-gynecologist who was affiliated with the Woman’s Hospital of Texas before retiring from private practice after 25 years. She now serves as a part-time volunteer gynecologist at San Jose Clinic, a health care provider for underserved communities in Houston. Ron Neal co-founded Houston Energy, an oil and gas exploration company.

Rockefeller University

Michael and Vikki Price gave $25 million to create the Price Family Center for the Social Brain, a neuroscience effort aimed at discovering the neuronal, cellular, and molecular foundations of social behavior.

Michael Price recently retired from Evercore, an international investment advisory firm in New York. He has served on Rockefeller University’s Board of Trustees since 2014 and has been involved with the university for more than 20 years.

South Florida Science Center and Aquarium

Howard and Wendy Cox gave $20 million to kick off the center’s capital campaign and support renovation and expansion of the center’s campus and outdoor exhibition spaces. The center will be named for the donors.

Howard Cox is a venture-capital investor who joined Greylock Partners, a Menlo Park, Calif., venture-capital firm, in 1971 and currently serves as the firm’s special limited partner. Wendy Cox is a real-estate investor.

Community Foundation of Collier County and other groups

Wilfred and Joan Larson left $38.9 million to three nonprofits. They bequeathed $13.6 million to establish the Wilfred and Joan Larson Endowment Fund to support nonprofits in the Naples, Fla., area.

Wilfred Larson was an executive with the pharmaceutical giant Bristol-Myers Squibb for 28 years and retired in 1991 as president and CEO of Westwood-Squibb Pharmaceuticals. He died in 2019 at 91. Joan Larson died in 2017 at 89.

The Larsons also left $15.4 million to Grand Traverse Regional Community Foundation, in Traverse, Mich., and $9.9 million to the Community Foundation of Greater Buffalo, to support the town where they lived in the 1990s.

University of Miami Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine

Bharat Desai and Neerja Sethi pledged $20 million through their Desai Sethi Family Foundation to establish a urology institute within the medical school’s Department of Urology.

The billionaire couple founded Syntel, a technology consulting company, in 1980. In 2018, it was acquired by Atos SE, a French technology firm, for $3.4 billion. Desai was born in Kenya and raised in India. He came to the United States in 1976 to work as a computer programmer for Tata Consulting Services and became a U.S. citizen in 1985. He and Sethi met at Tata.

Stetson University

Antoinette LaValle left $15 million to establish the Antoinette LaValle Endowed Creative Arts Fund, which will provide full-tuition scholarships to students majoring in art history, digital arts, studio art, or theater arts.

In her youth, LaValle lived outside Paris when the Nazis invaded the city during World War II. She had a talent for art but had to scrounge for materials to teach herself to draw and paint. She later immigrated to the United States and worked as a personal assistant to an investment manager on Wall Street. Through that role, she learned to manage her own investments and quietly amassed a fortune. She died in 2020 at 93.

She was not a Stetson alumna, but contacted the university about 10 years ago and started donating to the university’s Homer and Dolly Hand Art Center and to programs to help students in the studio arts and the Creative Arts Department.

Ohio State University

Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein, and their son Jeffrey Schottenstein pledged $10.15 million through the Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Family Foundation to establish the Jeffrey Schottenstein Program for Resilience, which will help students struggling with mental-health issues. The gift will also be used to endow a chair of psychiatry and resilience in the College of Medicine.

Jay Schottenstein leads SB360 Capital Partners, a holding company for a variety of the family’s retail and wholesale businesses; serves as executive chairman of Designer Brands, a shoe retailer; and is executive chairman and CEO of the clothing retailer American Eagle Outfitters.

Jeffrey Schottenstein founded TACKMA sportswear brand and is chief investment officer at SEI Inc., another of the family’s holding companies. Jeffrey Schottenstein cited his own experiences with anxiety and depression when he was a freshman at the university as an impetus for the gift.

“Living with mental-health challenges can be an incredibly lonely and isolating experience. Even with increased openness about mental health, there’s a quiet stigma that needs to be eliminated so we can improve access to treatment. That’s what we are doing here,” Jeffrey Schottenstein said in a news release. “This holistic, skills-based wellness and resilience-building program is what I desperately needed when I was on campus.”

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