Mayo Clinic Gets $200 Million for Medical School: Gifts Roundup

A roundup of notable gifts compiled by The Chronicle:

Mayo Clinic

Billionaire Jay Alix donated $200 million to endow the School of Medicine, back scholarships for medical students there, and support a professorship. The school will be renamed Mayo Clinic Alix School of Medicine.

Alix founded AlixPartners, a consulting firm that specializes in the restructuring of troubled corporations. The firm advised giants like General Motors and Enron after they filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Alix sold his firm in 2006 to Hellman & Friedman for an undisclosed amount.

Sheryl Sandberg Philanthropy Fund

Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg is ing $100 million to charity. She gave stock valued at about $50 million to her donor-advised fund, primarily to support the Sheryl Sandberg & Dave Goldberg Family Foundation, which backs two groups Sandberg created — LeanIn.org and OptionB.org. LeanIn works to foster female leadership, and OptionB is an interactive website to help people facing grief and other types of adversity.

In addition, Sandberg pledged $50 million in cash to start a new foundation later this year that will be called the Sandberg Goldberg Charitable Support Fund.

Sandberg, whose net worth Forbes has pegged at $1.6 billion, is Facebook’s chief operating officer.

Wabash College

Paul Woolls and Betty O’Shaughnessy Woolls gave $40 million for the college’s capital campaign, which is raising money to endow scholarships, professorships, and academic programs and support immersive learning programs for students, the annual fund, and new building projects.

Paul Woolls is a retired lawyer who owns Progeny Winery in Angwin, Calif. He graduated from Wabash in 1975. Betty O’Shaughnessy Woolls is a former real-estate developer who founded O’Shaughnessy Estate Winery in Angwin, Calif., in 1996. The couple co-chairs of the college’s fundraising effort.

University of Oklahoma

Harold Hamm donated $34 million through his foundation for the Harold Hamm Diabetes Center at OU Medicine. The money will support research, enable the center to hire more faculty and researchers, and pay for new technologies.

Hamm is chairman and chief executive of Continental Resources, an oil and gas exploration and production company. In 2011, he gave the university $20 million for the diabetes center, which was then named for him.

Brown University

John Atwater and Diana Nelson gave $31.6 million for the new performing-arts center being planned at the university and to back other programs.

Of the total, $20 million will create the Diana Nelson and John Atwater Lobby in the performing-arts center, and $11.6 million will support the Brown Annual Fund and the Brown Promise, a program aimed at replacing loans with scholarship funds in all financial-aid packages.

Atwater founded Prime Group, a real-estate equity and investment firm. He graduated from Brown in 1983 and is a Brown Corporation member. Nelson is chairman of the global hospitality and travel corporation, Carlson Companies.

Santa Clara University

Two couples gave a total of $25 million for a new athletics complex. Stephen and Patricia Schott donated $15 million, and Mark and Mary Stevens gave $10 million. The center will be named for the Schotts.

Stephen Schott owns Citation Homes Central, a homebuilder in Santa Clara, Calif., and is a former managing partner and co-owner of the Oakland Athletics major-league baseball team. He graduated from the university in 1960 and has served on its Board of Trustees since 1988.

Mark Stevens is a former partner in the venture-capital firm Sequoia Capital, an early investor in Google and LinkedIn, among other tech companies. Mary Stevens graduated from the university in 1984 and worked in commercial real estate. She has been a trustee since 2012. The Stevenses have appeared twice on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors.

Success Academy Charter Schools

Kenneth Griffin donated $10 million through his Kenneth C. Griffin Charitable Fund to support Success Academy’s middle-school programs.

Griffin founded the Chicago hedge fund Citadel. He has been giving large sums to charity frequently in recent years and appeared on the Philanthropy 50 list in 2014.

His contribution will go toward Success Academy Lafayette Middle School, which is scheduled to open in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in August, and two additional middle schools, one in Brooklyn and one in Queens.

Susquehanna University

Lucille Arthur pledged $10 million to expand endowed scholarships for students from Dauphin County, Pa., who are attending Susquehanna and to support athletics programs and endow the athletic -director position.

Arthur is the widow of Douglas Arthur, who earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Susquehanna in 1949. He served as an officer in the U.S. Air Force during World War II and worked for 37 years for Nationwide Insurance Company, retiring in 1986 as a vice president and regional manager. He died in 2006.

The Arthurs are longtime donors to the university. In previous years, they established the Douglas E. and Lucille Groff Arthur Scholarship, and paid for the Douglas E. Arthur Plaza on campus. University officials announced plans to name the sports stadium for Douglas Arthur.

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