Major Gifts

The Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York City has received a $2 million gift from alumnus Calvin Klein, and the company he founded, Calvin Klein Inc. Klein made a donation of $1 million, through the Calvin Klein Family Foundation, which was matched by a $1 million donation by Calvin Klein Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of PVH Corp. This is the largest gift received to date from an FIT alumnus to the institute.

A family donating $30 million to McMaster University wants to speed up the development of stem cell therapies.

Of the total going to the university, $24 million will be used to establish the Boris Family Centre in Human Stem Cell Therapies, which will speed the commercial development of discoveries made at the McMaster Stem Cell and Cancer Research Institute.

The other $6 million from the Marta and Owen Boris Foundation is for a unique clinic that will allow patients with complex health problems to see several specialists and have related tests during one visit.

While we can't prevent all "bad things" from happening to our good organizations, we can take proactive steps to make them less likely.

Stanford University's School of Engineering and Columbia Journalism School have received a $30 million gift to establish a New York City-based Institute for Media Innovation, which will seek new ways for technology to enhance a robust free press.

The gift, announced Monday morning, comes from Helen Gurley Brown, longtime editor of Cosmopolitan and author of the 1962 bestseller "Sex and the Single Girl," which set the stage for the women's liberation movement.

On Tuesday the Juilliard School announced a $20 million gift to endow its graduate-level program in historical performance. The sheer size of the gift is enough to make heads snap in the early-music world, whose practitioners typically struggle to stay a step ahead of poverty.

The donor is Bruce Kovner, the chairman of the school’s board, who recently retired as chairman of the $10 billion hedge fund Caxton Associates.

Laurie Johnston took a gift of $200 more than a half-century ago and turned it into $1 million. The retired pharmacist donated $500,000 on Friday to both the Misericordia Health Centre Foundation and the Riverview Health Centre Foundation.

The impetus for his philanthropy dates back to 1949 when Johnston was a cash-strapped student in his fourth year of pharmacy school. He was considering taking a year off to work when a friend of the family called him over one day and handed him an envelope containing $200.

On Wednesday, hedge fund billionaire and philanthropist James H. Simons and his wife, Marilyn, announced the biggest gift by far in State University of New York’s history, $150 million to Stony Brook University. It is the sixth largest donation ever made to an American public university, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, and is twice as large as the previous record for a gift to a public university in New York — the $60 million that the Simonses’ foundation gave to Stony Brook in 2008.

American casino and hotel magnate Sheldon Adelson has been dishing out generous donations to Jewish causes over the past week.

On Tuesday, he doubled his overall contribution to Yad Vashem in the past decade by announcing a $25 million gift to the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem.

A week earlier, Adelson increased his annual contribution to Birthright-Taglit — the program that brings Jews aged 18 to 26 from the Diaspora on a free trip to Israel — twofold, to $10 million

Joining the ranks of major givers in Miami, developer Jorge Pérez has pledged to donate $35 million in cash and art from his personal collection to the new Miami Art Museum, which will bear his name when it opens in two years.

The donation includes $5 million that Pérez has already pledged and partially paid; an additional $15 million for the capital campaign and $15 million worth of Latin American art to be chosen by the museum.

The USC School of Public Policy is getting a $50-million donation from the charity established by the founder of the Price Club warehouse-style shopping chain, university officials announced Tuesday.

The school will be renamed for the late Sol Price, who earned an undergraduate and law degree from USC and went on to success in discount membership retailing and in real estate investments.