Roberts Enterprise Development Fund
George Roberts was co-founder of the pioneering private-equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., and when he entered philanthropy he brought the mindset of an investor expecting returns, only this Read more…
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Violence-free Zones
In the 1980s, Sister Falakah Fattah and her husband, David, used the House of Umoja, a neighborhood group they founded, to help Philadelphia’s gangs negotiate truces and reduce violence. Robert Read more…
First Things First
A group of Chattanooga, Tennessee, businessmen led by Hugh Maclellan, the chairman of his family’s foundation, sat down in 1997 to confront the hard facts about collapsing families in their Read more…
Ansari X Prize, SpaceX
Until recently, anyone hoping to slip the surly bonds of Earth needed to talk to a federal bureaucrat; there was no such thing as a private or nonprofit space effort. Read more…
Cincinnati Works
When Dave Phillips reached his mid-50s as managing director of a large accounting firm, he retired early and joined his wife Liane in attacking poverty in his home town of Read more…
The Simons Foundation
James Simons was a mathematician before he earned billions operating a hedge fund, and since he and his wife Marilyn established their charitable foundation in 1994 their philanthropy has focused Read more…
Neighborhood Trust
Recognizing that low-income workers in Manhattan were having trouble budgeting, saving, and staying out of debt, a former New York City school teacher raised $85,000 from donors including Atlantic Philanthropies Read more…
Improving Public Understanding of Technology
Alfred Sloan, son of a machinist, finished an electrical engineering degree at MIT in three years, graduating as the youngest member of his class. He later presided over the rise Read more…
Training Brains for Business
Industrialist and philanthropist Charles Koch has spent years studying and promulgating what he calls “principled entrepreneurship”—the combination of “judgment, responsibility, initiative, economic, and critical thinking skills, and sense of urgency Read more…
Pioneering Worker Bonuses and Profit-sharing
George Eastman had no wife or children and believed in giving while living. One of the world’s richest men, he gave away more money ($2 billion in current dollars) than Read more…
Beating Homelessness in Chicago
After Tom Owens retired from his successful career as an IT entrepreneur, inspiration from Mother Teresa led him to pour his energy and money into helping poor and homeless people Read more…
Lincoln’s Cottage
It is little known that for fully a quarter of his presidency, Abraham Lincoln didn’t live in the White House. He and his family chose to reside at a cottage Read more…
Last of the Mellon Pictures
When philanthropist Paul Mellon died in 1999, he bequeathed 110 major works of art to the National Gallery, the last in a very long string of art gifts from the Read more…
Making an Impressionism on Denver
The Denver Art Museum has been admired for its contemporary, Native American, and Western art. In 2006 the building gained a major Daniel Libeskind-designed expansion, thanks to a $20 million Read more…
Saving Negro Spirituals
Edward “Ned” McIlhenny, who ran the Louisiana Tabasco-sauce company founded by his father, racked up some major accomplishments as a preserver of rare birds and plants (see 1892 item on Read more…
Helping Disadvantaged High School Students Love the Classics
Walter Teagle, longtime president of Standard Oil (now ExxonMobil) graduated from Cornell University in 1899, served as a Cornell trustee for 30 years, and was an energetic advocate for “liberal Read more…
Fighting Cancer at Johns Hopkins
In the last decade or so, Johns Hopkins University has jumped to the top of the charts when it comes to cancer research and treatment, and this has been particularly Read more…
CDHI Foundation
Huntington’s disease is a genetic disorder that destroys portions of the brain involved in movement, thinking, and emotions, progressing over decades with ultimately fatal results. It strikes perhaps 30,000 persons Read more…
Foundation Fighting Blindness
To research methods of preventing, treating, or curing diseases like retinitis pigmentosa and macular degeneration—afflictions that impair or end vision for more than 10 million Americans—venture-capitalist Gordon Gund co-founded the Read more…
Analyzing an Archive of Tumors
Marie-Josée Kravis has served on the overseers’ board at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center for decades, and she heads the board of its research arm, the Sloan Kettering Institute. Read more…