A Community Foundation Receives $45 Million to Benefit 8 Iowa Nonprofits

A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:

Community Foundation of Greater Des Moines

Harriet Macomber left more than $45 million to establish endowments to benefit eight Des Moines, Iowa, area nonprofits: the BWA Foundation, the Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines Symphony, Drake University Law School, Orchard Place, United Way of Central Iowa, St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral, and the YMCA of Greater Des Moines.

Harriet Macomber, who died in 2020, was a Des Moines-area philanthropist who worked closely with a number of the nonprofits she and her late husband, Locke Macomber, supported during their lifetimes. She served for decades on the board of Business Women’s Association Foundation, a 130-year-old grant maker that supports education, health, and well-being programs for women and children in the Des Moines area, and on the board of trustees of the Des Moines Art Center, where she was also a docent.

Locke Macomber was chairman and president of the former Valley National Bank, a Des Moines bank, where he worked for 36 years. Prior to his banking career, he served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. He died in 1998. A grandfather and an uncle, both named John MacVicar, had been mayors of Des Moines.

Stanford University

The billionaires Ann and John Doerr pledged $1.1 billion to establish the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, which aims to tackle the world’s most urgent climate and sustainability challenges and will focus on eight areas of scholarship: climate change, Earth and planetary sciences, energy technology, sustainable cities, the natural environment, food and water security, human society and behavior, and human health and the environment.

The new school will house a collection of academic departments and interdisciplinary institutes. It will also be home to a “sustainability accelerator,” which, among other efforts, will award grants to develop new technologies in environmental sustainability and related arenas, advance new policies, and support partnerships.

John Doerr is a venture-capital investor who joined the investment firm Kleiner Perkins in 1980. There he backed technology start-ups that have since become some of the biggest companies in the world, including Compaq, Sun Microsystems, Amazon, and Google. He now serves as the firm’s chairman. The Doerrs are not Stanford alumni. They both earned degrees in electrical engineering from Rice University.

The university received additional gifts for the new school but did not disclose the amounts. Two of the gifts are from Yahoo! co-founders and Stanford alumni: Jerry Yang and his wife, Akiko Yamazaki (also a Stanford graduate), and David Filo and his wife, Angela.

Huntington Health

Andrew and Peggy Cherng gave $25 million, through their Panda Charitable Foundation, to support Huntington Hospital’s surgery programs and to name a building on the medical center’s campus, the Cherng Family West Tower.

The Cherngs founded the Panda Restaurant Group, which operates the Panda Express chain and other dining brands. They started the company in Pasadena, Calif., where the hospital is located. Peggy Cherng is an engineer who worked for aircraft companies before joining the family restaurant business.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

David Rubenstein gave $15 million to support the museum’s National Institute for Holocaust Documentation and its ongoing efforts to build its collection of documents, preserve the collection, and make it accessible to researchers and others in the United States and abroad. The institute will be renamed the David M. Rubenstein National Institute for Holocaust Documentation.

“This commitment is particularly meaningful as it comes at a time of rising antisemitism and Holocaust denial and distortion,” said Stuart Eizenstat, the museum’s chairman. “Ensuring that future generations of students, teachers, and researchers have access to the firsthand evidence of the history of the Holocaust and its contemporary lessons is an enormous gift to the American people, our soldiers who fought valiantly to defeat Nazism, and the survivors and victims of the Holocaust whose legacies will be preserved in perpetuity.”

Rubenstein is a billionaire who co-founded the Carlyle Group, a private-equity firm in Washington. He served earlier in his career as chief counsel to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments and as President Jimmy Carter’s deputy assistant for domestic policy. He has written several books and hosts The David Rubenstein Program: Peer-to-Peer Conversations, a television talk show in which he interviews prominent figures in business and academia.

A longtime philanthropist, Rubenstein practices what he calls “patriotic philanthropy.” He has given extensively to the National Park Service, the National Archives, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Library of Congress, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, George Washington’s Mount Vernon, and the Smithsonian Institution. He has appeared on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors six times since 2010.

University of Kentucky College of Engineering

Stanley and Karen Pigman gave two gifts totaling $11.25 million through their Karen and Stanley Pigman’s Lighthouse Beacon Foundation. Their gifts will back building projects and scholarships.

Of the total, $10 million will pay for the renovation and expansion of the Funkhouser Building, which will add more up-to-date teaching and research spaces to the engineering school. The money will also support more faculty members and research programs. The couple gave $1.25 million to support need-based scholarships for students from Eastern Kentucky who pursue a degree in the new Department of Engineering Technology.

Stanley Pigman, a scholarship student, earned a bachelor’s of science in mining engineering from the university in 1981. He began his career as a project engineer with Sierra Coal Company and went on to become a market analyst with Old Ben Coal Company. He later held executive roles at a number of other coal companies and later founded several coal and coal-services companies.

University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School

Charles Ackerman left $11 million to endow the Center for Sustainable Enterprise, which provides education, research, and other programs aimed at developing businesses and business practices that aid social and environmental sustainability. The center will be named for the donor.

The bequest will pay for a new building, M.B.A. fellowships, the expansion of the undergraduate business program, support for graduate research projects, and the center’s operations and new staff hires.

Charles Ackerman founded Ackerman & Company, a commercial real-estate development firm in Atlanta, and Ackerman Security Systems, a home-security company he sold to Imperial Capital Group in 2015. He earned a bachelor’s degree in science from the university in 1955 and then served two years in the U.S. Army. He earned a law degree from Emory University School of Law in 1960 before entering the real-estate business. He died in 2017.

Whitman College

Katherine Weingart gave $10 million to launch and endow the J. Walter and Katherine Weingart Opportunity Scholarship, which will provide full scholarships to Whitman students from Washington state. Starting with first-year students in the fall of 2023, the scholarship will eventually be available to all four class years.

Weingart is a retired psychology instructor who taught at Walla Walla Community College for more than 30 years. The scholarship is named for her late husband, J. Walter (Walt) Weingart, who taught history at Whitman for 35 years before retiring in 2002. He died last year.

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