Lisa Yang Gives $35 Million to Boost Global Wildlife Conservation

A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:

Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine

K. Lisa Yang gave $35 million to endow the Cornell Wildlife Health Center, which will be renamed the K. Lisa Yang Center for Wildlife Health. Her gift will help expand the center’s wide range of multidisciplinary research programs that focus on the challenges at the intersection of wildlife health, domestic animal health, human health and livelihoods, human-wildlife conflict, and the environment.

Yang is a retired investment banker who spent most of her career at the First Boston Corporation and Lehman Brothers. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Cornell in 1974 and serves on the university’s Board of Trustees. She has given extensively to universities, including a gift to establish the K. Lisa Yang and Hock E. Tan Employment and Disability Institute at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

She has also given large sums to programs that help people who are physically or cognitively disabled, and she advocates for individuals with disabilities and autism-spectrum disorders. Yang has appeared on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors for gifts she made in 2020 and in 2021.

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Paul Salem gave $25 million to support the institute’s ocean-related climate research programs. Salem is chairman of the group’s board of trustees. He is a senior managing director emeritus at Providence Equity Partners, a private-equity firm in Providence, R.I., that invests in media, communications, education, and technology companies.

Monmouth College

Marilyn Johnston left a 780-acre farm in Mercer County, Ill., to support the college’s endowment. The farm is valued at nearly $12 million. Monmouth officials said in a news release that they plan to maintain the donation as working farmland. It joins four other farms the college owns.

Johnston was a nurse and a farmer. She graduated from Monmouth in 1948 with a degree in general studies and went on to earn a nursing degree from the University of Colorado. She worked as a nurse in Denver for five years before returning to Illinois to care for her aging parents. She then worked for 25 years at Mercer County Hospital. She was a missionary nurse from 1955 to 1982 and continued to farm her family’s land during her lifetime. She died in September at 98.

Wisconsin Historical Foundation

Jerome Frautschi gave $10 million to the fundraising arm of the Wisconsin Historical Society to support the construction of the Wisconsin History Center, which is scheduled for completion in 2027. The center will replace the Wisconsin Historical Museum, which is not large enough to accommodate the growing demand from school groups and residents or provide enough exhibit space.

Frautschi ran Webcrafters, a book-manufacturing company that he led with his brother, John, for 42 years. The brothers sold the business to the CJK Group, a printing company in Brainerd, Minn., in 2017.

He is a longtime donor to nonprofits in Madison, Wis., and made a splash in the late 1990s when he gave $50 million to build the Overture Center, a performing-arts center that replaced Madison’s outdated Civic Center. By the time the center opened in 2004, Frautschi had given a total of $205 million to the center, which houses a concert hall, a refurbished historic theater, a small theater-in-the-round, and the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.

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