Lululemon Founders Give Nearly $76 Million to Conserve and Expand Canadian Parkland

A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:

BC Parks Foundation

Chip and Summer Wilson pledged approximately $75.9 million through their family foundation, the Wilson 5 Foundation, to conserve and expand parkland in British Columbia, Canada. The nonprofit will use the money to match gifts from others and to buy forest, mining rights, and other land that it will turn into national parkland that Indigenous groups will manage and use to generate revenue.

Chip Wilson is an American Canadian businessman who has dual citizenship and founded Lululemon Athletica, an athletic-apparel company in Vancouver, British Columbia. Summer Wilson, a former lead designer at Lululemon, founded imagine1day, a charity that is working with Ethiopia’s public-education system and its government education offices to help Ethiopian children gain access to education that is free of foreign aid by 2030.

University of California at Santa Barbara

Bay Area billionaires Marc and Lynne Benioff gave $60 million to establish the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory. Of the total, $50 million will go toward expanding research programs at the lab, and the remaining $10 million will be used to renovate the university’s Marine Biotechnology Lab, an ocean-research facility. The building will be renamed for the Benioffs.

Marc Benioff founded and leads Salesforce.com, a customer-relationship management provider and web-based computing company in San Francisco. The couple have previously given a total of $28 million to the university, including $10 million in 2015 to create the Benioff Ocean Initiative. Their latest donation expands that program into the new Ocean Science Laboratory.

The Benioffs gave $1.5 million in 2019 to the Sustainable Oceans Alliance, a coalition of leaders under 35 that focuses on developing new and potentially profitable ideas to protect and rehabilitate the ocean. They are also longtime donors to a range of causes, primarily in the Bay Area. They have appeared on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors eight times since 2010.

University of Pennsylvania Basser Center for BRCA

Mindy and Jon Gray gave $55 million to establish the Basser Cancer Interception Institute, where researchers will work to develop drugs and other treatments aimed at halting hereditary cancers like breast, ovarian, pancreatic, and prostate at the earliest stages.

Jon Gray is president and COO of the Blackstone Group, a private-equity firm in New York, and chairman of Hilton Worldwide Holdings, a hotel and resort company. He earned bachelor’s degrees in English and business from the university in 1992. Mindy Gray is a former marketing executive at Edwin Schlossberg, an exhibit-design firm. She was an editor at Ziff Davis Publishing earlier in her career. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the university in 1992.

Including their latest gift, the Grays have given the university more than $125 million, including the $25 million gift that established the Basser Center in 2012 in honor of Mindy’s sister, Faith Basser, who died at 44 of BRCA-related ovarian cancer.

University of North Carolina School of Medicine

William and Dana Starling pledged $25 million to the Department of Psychiatry to create the UNC Suicide Prevention Institute, which will expand and improve care to patients and house research programs that aim to better understand the neurobiology of suicide and how suicide can be prevented.

The Starlings said in a news release that they are giving the gift to honor the memory of their sons, Tyler and Gregory, both of whom died by suicide.

“Our two children are gone, and it’s important to recognize their wonderful, short lives,” William Starling said. “I’m not sure how else to better do that than to help other families who may be struggling with their own children down the road. We want to recognize our children, and this is a special way to do that.”

William Starling is CEO of Synecor, which invests in and manages new life-science companies. He also co-founded and later sold several medical-device companies. He earned a business administration degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1975.

Water for People

The billionaire MacKenzie Scott gave $15 million to back the nonprofit’s efforts to provide lasting access to clean water, sanitation services, and hygiene programs to more than 200 million people globally by 2030. The organization works closely with local leaders and governments in countries across Latin America, Asia, and Africa to help build sustainable safe water and sanitation systems.

Scott is a novelist who helped start the online retail giant Amazon with her former husband, Jeff Bezos. She has given more than $12.8 billion in mostly unrestricted gifts to charity since 2020 and has devoted much of that money to nonprofits that usually do not receive multimillion-dollar gifts and to charities that help underserved or overlooked populations. She appeared on the Chronicle’s Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors of 2020.

Texas Tech Athletics

John and Tracy Sellers gave $11 million and have directed $10 million toward the construction of the Dustin R. Womble Football Center and the new south end zone at Jones AT&T Stadium. The remainder of the gift will pay for improvements to Rocky Johnson Field, where the university’s softball team plays its games.

John Sellers co-founded and serves as co-chief executive officer of Double Eagle Holdings, an oil- and gas-exploration company in Fort Worth and Midland, Tex. He played on the football team and graduated from the university in 2004. Tracy Sellers also graduated from Texas Tech in 2004. She played on the university’s softball team.

University of Alabama at Birmingham

J. Frank Barefield Jr. gave $10 million to be evenly split between the Department of Criminal Justice in the College of Arts and Sciences and an entrepreneurship program in the Collat School of Business. The criminal-justice department and the entrepreneurship program have been named for the donor.

Barefield is president of Abbey Residential, a property-management company in Birmingham, Ala. He serves as chairman of Crime Stoppers of Metro Alabama, a nonprofit that operates anonymous crime-tip lines and offers cash rewards for information that leads to the arrest of wanted individuals in Alabama. He graduated from the university with a bachelor’s degree in finance and later earned an M.B.A. there. He previously worked in investment banking and as an accountant before founding the real-estate company that would later become Abbey Residential.

Climate Emergency Fund

Adam McKay pledged $4 million to support the nonprofit’s grant making to climate activists. McKay is a writer, director, and producer of television and film. He is an executive producer of the HBO television show Succession and directed the film Don’t Look Up. He also co-wrote and directed Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and many other films. He serves on the nonprofit’s Board of Directors.

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