Lancaster Community Foundation Receives $65 Million

A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:

Lancaster Community Foundation

Dale High gave $65 million through his High Foundation to establish a donor-advised fund that will support a variety of nonprofits and charitable efforts in the Lancaster, Pa., area.

High serves as chairman emeritus of the High Companies, which includes 10 businesses in construction, welding, real estate, and related industries. He has worked for the company, which was founded in 1931 by his father, Sanford, for his entire career. High’s family has had a long association with the community foundation, and he served as chairman of its Board of Directors from 2002 through 2006.

University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law

Robert and Tracy Eglet pledged $25 million to support the law school. Of the total, the couple have earmarked $20 million for scholarships for first-generation students and students of color and the remaining $5 million to back the law school’s advocacy center.

The Eglets are lawyers and co-founders of Eglet Adams, a personal-injury law firm in Las Vegas. Robert Eglet is a trial lawyer and a 1988 graduate of the McGeorge School of Law. Tracy Eglet specializes in the personal injury law areas of product defect and general negligence.

University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering

Daniel Epstein gave $14 million to support the hiring of more faculty in industrial and systems engineering whose expertise and research is on computational systems, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Some of the gift will also go toward upgrading the facilities that house the Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering.

Epstein founded the ConAm Group, a real-estate development and investment company in San Diego. He earned a bachelor’s degree from USC Viterbi in 1962. In 2003, he gave the university $10 million to establish the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering.

University of Michigan

Daniel and Sheryl Tishman pledged more than $11.1 million through their NorthLight Foundation to expand the School for Environment and Sustainability’s environmental-justice programs. It will establish the Tishman Center for Social Justice and the Environment, the Tishman Scholarship Fund, and two Tishman Professorships in Environmental Justice, one in the school for environment and sustainabilty and the other in the College of Engineering.

Daniel Tishman is principal and vice chairman of Tishman Hotel and Realty, a commercial real estate firm in New York. He previously served as chairman and CEO of Tishman Construction Corporation and currently is a member of the Board of Directors of its parent company, AECOM.

Vassar College

Dede Thompson Bartlett gave $10 million to support the construction of a new building that will house the offices of Admission and Career Education and will be named the Dede Thompson Bartlett Center.

Bartlett is a retired corporate executive who served in senior executive posts at Exxon Mobil and the Altria Group. Following her retirement in 2002, Bartlett became a lecturer on career education at colleges across the country as a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow, a program administered by the Council of Independent Colleges. She graduated from Vassar in 1965.

Bartlett said in a news release that she had long been interested in enhancing career opportunities for students partly because her early career path was difficult. Vassar had no formal career-education program at the time, and her first job, typing letters to clients of the Far East America Council, “was not an auspicious beginning.”

Howard University

The Baltimore philanthropists Eddie and Sylvia Brown gave $5 million to their alma mater to back the Graduation Retention Access to Continued Excellence (GRACE) program that helps students facing financial barriers.

The Browns met on Howard University’s campus in 1957. He graduated in 1961 and went on to become an engineer at IBM in the 1960s. In 1983, he founded Brown Capital Management, a multibillion dollar investment firm in Baltimore that is the second oldest African-American-owned investment management firm in the world. Sylvia Brown graduated in 1962 and taught at Baltimore City Community College and later became assistant director of admissions and registration.

The couple are prolific donors and have given more than $40 million over the years to education, the arts, and health care primarily in the Greater Baltimore area.

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