Anonymous Scholarships
The University of Chicago has long been known for its Common Core—a curriculum based on the foundational texts of Western civilization, like Homer’s Greek epic The Odyssey. It was thus Read more…
Refine Search Results
Search Results for:
Henry Shaw’s St. Louis Parks
Henry Shaw came to America as a teenager, the son of a man who was looking for new markets for his family’s English steel business. The family set up a Read more…
A National Park for Vermont
Vermont’s first national park, described at its opening as “an entirely new kind…one where the human stories and the natural history are intertwined,” was a gift of Laurance Rockefeller and Read more…
Donor-created Public Parks in Louisville
Native son David Jones co-founded Humana Inc. in Louisville, Kentucky, and built it into one of America’s largest private health-care companies. Along the way he participated in many initiatives to Read more…
Largest Park in Chester County, at No Public Cost
Chester County, one of the three original counties established in Pennsylvania by William Penn, lies west of Philadelphia, and is home to about half a million people. It is a Read more…
Dinosaur Hall at the Museum of the Rockies
The world’s greatest collection of dinosaur fossils is not located at the Smithsonian, or Field, or British museums, not in New York or Oxford or Boston. It is housed in Read more…
Painting a Target on Autism
In the early 1990s, an employee in an Atlanta Home Depot outlet had been missing work, then showing up sleepless and unkempt. Company co-founder Bernie Marcus took her aside and Read more…
Spine, Brain, and Neurological Health in Atlanta
After their son suffered serious neurological injury in a surfing accident, Alana and Harold Shepherd (who runs one of the largest construction companies in Georgia) decided to build up a Read more…
Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts
“You have many parks for recreation, but you have nothing in the performing arts,” Catherine Filene Shouse told the U.S. Secretary of the Interior. “Do you want Wolf Trap?” Heiress Read more…
Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation
The Statue of Liberty may be the best known monument in the world, and the adjoining Ellis Island immigration halls are among America’s most historic sites. Both venues have been Read more…
Saving George Washington’s Birthplace
In the 1920s, a group of public-spirited women became interested in preserving the lands where George Washington had been born, and erecting a Tidewater plantation house similar to the one Read more…
Ellison Medical Foundation
In the 1990s, Oracle software founder Larry Ellison developed a friendship with Nobel-winning molecular biologist Joshua Lederberg of Rockefeller University. This led in 1997 to establishment of the Ellison Medical Read more…
Stowers Institute for Medical Research
Jim Stowers founded Twentieth Century Mutual Funds at his kitchen table in 1958. A low-cost investment vehicle for small investors, the company began with initial capital of $107,000. By the Read more…
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
In 1953, the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes created a medical institute devoted to basic research, then gave it entire ownership of his Hughes Aircraft Company. The institute was intended to Read more…
A Chinese Rhodes Scholarship
Stephen Schwarzman, co-founder of the Blackstone private equityinvestment company, has focused his philanthropic giving on learning, including long-time support of Catholic schools in New York City and a $100 million Read more…
Easy Online Learning
So-called “distance learning” has been available to disciplined students for generations, with instruction and degrees available by mail, television, even radio. The Internet, though, opened yawning opportunities for new forms Read more…
Wielding Litigation to Improve Student Opportunities
In 2014, a verdict arrived in the Vergara v. California case—in which nine school children brought suit arguing that provisions of state law that block the firing of poor teachers Read more…
New Orleans School District Goes All-charter
Before Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans public schools were the worst district in the second-lowest-performing state in the entire U.S. Fully 78 percent of NOLA students attended a school designated as Read more…
Protecting NYC Charter Schools From Political Opponents
New York City is home to one of the most successful charter-school expansions in the U.S., from its initial handful of students in the fall of 2000 to 95,000 enrollees Read more…
Putting a Bloomberg on the Hopkins Rose
In 2013, data entrepreneur Michael Bloomberg made a $350 million gift to Johns Hopkins University. The large donation was structured to fund 2,600 scholarships for needy students, and to create Read more…