Phil Knight Gives $75 Million for Heart Transplants, and Denny Sanford Gives $25 Million for Veterans: Gifts Roundup

A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:

Providence Heart Institute

Nike founder Phil Knight, and his wife, Penny, gave $75 million to develop a heart-transplant program and support other cardiac services. The Knights gave the institute $25 million in 2014.

Phil Knight co-founded Nike. He and his wife are longtime donors to many nonprofits in their home state of Oregon and elsewhere. they have appeared in the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 report of the biggest donors six times since 2006.

Sanford Health

South Dakota banker Denny Sanford gave $25 million for a new program to partner with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to provide pharmacogenetic testing to U.S. veterans. Sanford Health plans to raise an additional $25 million for the program, which will look at a patient’s genetics to help determine how the person’s system could metabolize and react to various drug therapies.

The donor is chairman of United National Corporation, a banking business, and a serial philanthropist who has given about $1.5 billion to charity since at least 2005. He has appeared on the Chronicle’s annual list of the biggest donors nine times.

In an interview with the Chronicle last week, Sanford said he has given Sanford Health about $1 billion over the years because he has been impressed with its efficient operations and the way officials there keep him updated on what they are accomplishing with the money he donates. His first gift to the group was $16 million in 2003 to build a children’s hospital shaped like a castle. He said he plans to leave Sanford Health a large bequest when he dies.

Sanford’s latest donation backs an effort that starts this year with a pilot program in Durham, N.C., for cancer survivors that will eventually expand to help up to 250,000 U.S. veterans by 2022. The testing program, PHASeR (Pharmacogenomics Action for Cancer Survivorship), can help determine which medications will be most effective for patients. It could improve patient access to appropriate treatments while reducing adverse and costly drug reactions.

North Dakota State University Foundation

Robert and Sheila Challey committed $10 million to support the creation of the Sheila and Robert Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth, an interdisciplinary research institute focused on global development, trade, and economic growth.

In addition, the billionaire industrialist Charles Koch gave $10 million to the effort through his Charles Koch Foundation. Koch has served as chairman and CEO of his family’s company, Koch Industries, since 1967.

Robert Challey is a real-estate developer who earned a chemistry degree from the university. His parents, Clyde and Myrtle Challey, both graduated from the institution, and Myrtle Challey taught food and nutrition classes there.

University of Southern California

Leonard and Pamela Schaeffer donated $17 million to back the USC Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics. The couple’s earlier donations helped launch the center in 2009, and they endowed it with a $25 million gift in 2012.

An expert in health policy and economics, Leonard Schaeffer is a senior adviser to a private equity firm and a USC professor and trustee. He was the founding chairman and CEO of WellPoint, a health-insurance company, and served in the federal government as administrator of the Health Care Financing Administration (now known as CMS) and as assistant secretary for management and budget at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

University of Arizona

Andrew Weil pledged $15 million to back the Center for Integrative Medicine, which will be named for him. The money will be used to establish and endow two professorships and a special fund for programs.

Weil founded True Food Kitchen restaurants and is an expert on medicinal plants, alternative medicine, and the reform of medical education. He founded the Center for Integrative Medicine in 1994. In addition, he holds the Lovell-Jones Endowed Chair in Integrative Rheumatology and is a clinical professor of medicine and professor of public health at the university.

Arapahoe Community College

Donald and Susan Sturm, and their family committed up to $10 million through their Sturm Family Foundation to create the Sturm Collaboration Campus at Castle Rock. Some of their gift will be matched by other donors.

The new campus will partner with Colorado State University, the Douglas County School District, and the town of Castle Rock, Colo. to create educational and work-force programs in cybersecurity, secure software development, business, accounting, entrepreneurship, and health care. Students’ schedules will be designed to make it easier to work while they attend college.

Donald Sturm founded Sturm Financial Group, a bank holding company, in Denver, Colo., and American National Bank-Northern Colorado.

University of Texas at Austin

Sinclair Black committed $4 million to support the School of Architecture’s urban-design programs. The professor emeritus taught at the architecture school for 50 years. He retired in 2017 and gave $1 million that year to establish the Sinclair Black Endowed Chair in the Architecture of Urbanism.

His latest gift will be used to expand the School of Architecture’s partnerships with the City of Austin and other community-serving organizations and to support other programs within the school.

Pennsylvania State University

John and Natalie Patton pledged $2.5 million to the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics to establish the John and Natalie Patton Family Research Fund within the newly created Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center. The center is establishing a program to search for extraterrestrial intelligence and create a graduate curriculum.

John Patton founded Dance Biopharm, a company that develops inhaled insulin products to treat diabetes patients, and he co-founded Inhale Therapeutics (now Nektar), where he helped lead the development and FDA approval of the first inhaled insulin product. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Penn State in zoology in 1967.

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