Wealthy Donors

When Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen pledged this summer to give away most of his fortune, he singled out brain science and biology as among the likely beneficiaries.

Now, the Mercer Island billionaire is following up with $9.4 million in grants to seven research teams, including two at the University of Washington.

The projects include efforts to build tiny microscopes that can peer into the living brain and to identify the neurons that control anxiety and aggression.

Drexel University on Tuesday morning will announce a whopping $45 million gift from corporate executive and alumnus Bennett S. LeBow for a new academic center for its business school, which already bears his name.

It's Drexel's largest gift from a single donor and the 12th largest to be made to a U.S. business school, Drexel officials said.

Wealthy Americans are making smaller gifts to charity, with more than half of them making their largest gift to fund nonprofit operations, a new study says.

They also are volunteering more, and those who volunteer more are giving more, says the 2010 Bank of America Merrill Lynch Study of High Net Worth Philanthropy.

Overall average gift amounts from wealthy Americans fell 35 percent from 2007, after adjusting for inflation, although several sectors saw average gift amounts grow 4 percent to 21 percent.

The good news is that most Canadians worth $1 million or more feel it's important to give back to the community. The bad news is about one in four of these high-worth individuals do not.

Survey results released Monday — to coincide with National Philanthropy Day — by BMO Harris Private Banking show that 76 per cent of holders of at least $1 million in investable assets say it is important to them to give something back.

Now that Republicans have made major gains in the Congressional elections, donors have a better idea of how lawmakers are thinking about taxes—and that could be a major influence in their decision making as the year-end giving push gets into high gear.

Even though Republicans made low tax rates for the wealthy part of their election pledge, their victories do not mean that wealthy donors now lack a key motivation to give, says Robert F. Sharpe, a Memphis planned-giving consultant.

Gifts to charities from wealthy Americans plummeted by an average of nearly 35 percent from 2007 to 2009, according to a new study released on the giving habits of the rich.

Affluent donors who had donated an average of more than $83,000 in 2007 gave only about $54,000 on average two years later during the heart of the economic downturn, according to the study by Bank of America Merrill Lynch and the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University.

We'd like to introduce SOFII to those of our readers who don't know about it and share some of the fundraising efforts that have made it into the site's Best of the Best Showcase.

The Malkani family made its fortune selling plane tickets and tour packages to India's fast-expanding middle class, building one of the country's first online travel agencies.

Now the Malkanis are among a growing number of successful Indian entrepreneurs blazing another trail: charitable giving.

As India's wealth continues to expand, a growing number of millionaires here are finding ways to do more for the poor, especially as cash-strapped foreign donors, including the United States, curtail aid.

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are urging U.S. billionaires to give away their money, but economic uncertainty is deterring rich Americans from increasing their giving, say bankers to the very wealthy.

Chief executives of Wells Fargo Private Bank, Credit Suisse Private Bank, Bessemer Trust, Silvercrest Asset Management and Bank of America's U.S. Trust told the Reuters Global Private Banking Summit that some rich people were reassessing their giving as the country recovers from its worst recession in decades.

On the day the Circle Ten Council of the Boy Scouts grew $25 million richer, Trevor Rees-Jones and Rex Tillerson were riding around in a golf cart at the national Jamboree, witnessing firsthand the power of Scouting.

That was two months ago when Tillerson, the chief executive of Exxon Mobil, asked fellow Dallas oilman Rees-Jones to make a $25 million donation to the local chapter. It was a lofty sum, more than anybody has given a regional Scouting chapter.