Two Midwestern Universities Land $100 Million Grants: Grants Roundup

Here are notable new grant awards compiled by the Chronicle:

Centene Corporation

$100 million over 10 years to Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis to accelerate research and develop new, personalized treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, breast cancer, diabetes, and obesity.

Grainger Foundation

$100 million to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for its College of Engineering. The engineering school will be named in honor of William Grainger, who graduated from the university in 1919 and went on to create the industrial supply company W.W. Grainger, based in Illinois.

Lyft

$50 million pledge to establish Lyft City Works, the ride-share company’s new program to improve transportation infrastructure in the cities where it does business; to support clean energy; and to provide free and reduced-price rides to homeless people and others in need. The first beneficiary of the program is Los Angeles, and the company has pledged to continue to support the program with $50 million per year or one percent of its profits, whichever is larger.

Rippleworks

$25 million in cryptocurrency to San Francisco State University to endow chairs in financial technology and entrepreneurship, and to create a fund for global innovation in its business school. The donation was of 56 million XRP tokens and came in part as a personal gift from Chris Larsen, an investor who co-founded the cryptocurrency bank Ripple, and his wife, Lyna Lam. The university declined to specify how much came from the Rippleworks foundation and how much was a gift from the couple.

Boniface Foundation

$18 million to Mercy Hospital South to rebuild its labor-and-delivery unit and offer larger patient rooms, upgraded technology, a neonatal intensive-care unit, and better access to newborn services for new mothers.

Sierra Nevada Brewery

$10 million pledge to the North Valley Community Foundation for the Butte Strong Fund, which will provide funding to organizations in six areas of services: housing, children and youth services, health and wellness, education, community development, and business recovery to help the communities devastated by last fall’s Camp Fire in California.

John Templeton Foundation

$7.2 million to Harvard University for the Black Hole Initiative, whose researchers were part of the team that recently unveiled the first-ever photo of a black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 87.

Cleveland Foundation

$5 million over three years to Cleveland Neighborhood Progress to enact its strategic plan and manage a competitive grant program for community-development projects in the city.

Maguire Foundation

$2.8 million to Temple University to endow scholarships for undergraduate students from low-income families and help them graduate with less debt.

Walmart Foundation

$1.5 million to the National Recreation and Park Association to increase access to healthy food and nutrition-education programs at 27 local parks and recreation agencies nationwide.

Arab-American Educational Foundation

$1 million to the University of Houston to create an endowment for the Center for Arab Studies, graduate seminars, research programs, and other educational activities related to Arab culture.

New Grant Opportunity

The Gerber Foundation is accepting letters of inquiry for pediatric-research grants. Grants up to $350,000 each over three years will support research on pediatric health, pediatric nutrition, and the effects of environmental hazards on children under the age of 3. Letters of inquiry are due May 15.

Send grant announcements to grants.editor@philanthropy.com.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy subscribers also have full access to GrantStation’s searchable database of grant opportunities. For more information, visit our grants page.