Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering
Cornell University is one of the strongest engineering schools in the country, but until 2015 did not offer an undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering. This despite the growing importance of Read more…
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Archaeology Goes Donor-funded
Archaeology was born thanks to private funding and passion. Then came a nationalistic phase where governments began to heavily regulate digs, and to fund them. In the past two or Read more…
Opening Former Communist Societies
Born in Hungary in 1930, George Soros endured Nazi occupation as a child and then communist oppression under Stalin. In 1947, he escaped to London and attended the London School Read more…
Turning Peasants Into Landowners
In 1982, Seattle lawyer and philanthropist Chi-Dooh “Skip” Li heard a guest speaker at his church suggest that helping poor Latin Americans buy the land that they were farming might Read more…
Ford Launches Microfinance
When economist Muhammad Yunus returned to his native Bangladesh after studying in the U.S. as a Fulbright Scholar, he bored into the problem of South Asian poverty that then seemed Read more…
New Urgency Against Tropical Diseases
In the early 1970s, the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation was searching for worthy candidates for its first international grants. The foundation’s namesake, heir to the Avon fortune, had recently doubled Read more…
Ford Boosts Market Democracy in Latin America
In the first two decades of its existence, the Ford Foundation was a conventional family philanthropy that mostly limited its donations to local projects in the Detroit region. As the Read more…
Averting Millions of Deaths by Starvation
When the Rockefeller Foundation decided to extend the Green Revolution (see 1943 entry) to Asia and Africa, it went looking for philanthropic partners for the huge venture. To that point, Read more…
A Life Serving the Poor in Haiti
W. L. Mellon, grandnephew of business titan Andrew Mellon, grew up in privileged circumstances in Pittsburgh, dropped out of college to work in the family bank, and endured an unsuccessful Read more…
Heifer International
A Midwestern farmer named Dan West was ladling out milk to youngsters on a Church of the Brethren relief mission when he realized, “these children don’t need a cup, they Read more…
Green Revolution
In the early 1940s, disease was destroying half of the wheat harvest in Mexico, and the country’s farmers (like many others in the developing world) were unable to produce enough Read more…
Aluminum-clad Asian Education
Charles Hall, a son of overseas missionaries, worked in a shed behind his family home in Oberlin, Ohio, to develop a smelting process that eventually reduced the cost of aluminum Read more…
Inventing International Exchange Programs
International exchanges of scholars and leaders—which have had a large role in fostering peace, freedom, and economic liberalism across the globe—were invented by American philanthropic organizations. One early exchange program Read more…
Rescuing Jews Amid World War
When World War I broke out in 1914, about 60,000 Jews were living in Palestine under the rule of the Turks (who sided with Germany). The outbreak of hostilities left Read more…
Building a Palace for Peace
Andrew Carnegie was deeply utopian on the question of international peace. (See the 1910 entry on our list of achievements in Public-Policy philanthropy.) He was enthralled by the declarations and Read more…
Aiding Armenians After Genocide
As part of a jihad launched by Muslim authorities in Ottoman Turkey to exterminate Christian minorities, up to 1.5 million Armenian Christians were destroyed, starting in 1915, through systematic killings, Read more…
Rockefeller Pioneers Public Health in Foreign Lands
The Rockefeller Foundation was at the center of the global effort to control diseases in the first half of the twentieth century. That was its very goal when the foundation Read more…
Birthing Modern Medicine in China
In 1863, John Rockefeller introduced kerosene to China as part of the expansion of his thriving oil business. To lend a practical boost to its romantic marketing slogan “oil for Read more…
Carnegie Bolsters Scottish Universities
Andrew Carnegie, one of the fathers of modern philanthropy, was born in Scotland. When industrialization crippled his father’s handloom business, the Carnegie family emigrated to America in search of a Read more…
Missions to the Philippines
The American missionary movement reached its peak influence in the late 1800s, when thousands of Christians funded by donors and churches back home were in service overseas. After the U.S. Read more…