Unless you live in Virginia, you have likely never heard of Stanley and Dorothy Pauley. The manufacturing magnate and his wife gave millions to universities and hospitals across the state during their lives, yet their Pauley Family Foundation’s assets were relatively modest. For years, it did not even make the state’s top 10.
Then came the couple’s deaths in late 2020 and early 2021. By the end of that year, as I reported recently in a deeper dive into the family’s giving, the Pauley Family Foundation was the richest philanthropy in Virginia, its new $2 billion endowment more than twice the size of the state’s next biggest foundation, according to Candid’s Southern Trends Report.
The Pauley Family Foundation’s overnight growth came amid a boomtime for new mega philanthropies in Virginia, including the emergence of another billion-dollar philanthropy in 2022 and several operations in the hundreds of millions.
“There are a number of family foundations [for whom] the transfer of wealth has either happened or is starting to really have impact,” said Bess Littlefield, CEO of the 130-plus-member Virginia Funders Network.
As the Great Wealth Transfer gets underway, Virginia may offer a preview of what’s to come across the United States. Trillions of dollars are expected to pass from aging members of the Silent Generation and baby boomers to their younger heirs — and also to philanthropy. A study by Cerulli expects as much as $12 trillion to go to charities. Foundation assets, by contrast, only recently topped $1.5 trillion.
Not all of those bequests will land with foundations, but even a small share would redraw the funding map, nationally and locally, and mint a new set of philanthropic power brokers: the heirs themselves and the advisors and staff they choose to help them give fortunes away. The early evidence from Virginia shows just how fast a state’s funding landscape can shift these days — but it also demonstrates how other familiar philanthrosphere dynamics are slower to change.
A wave of new philanthropies
If the Pauley Family Foundation becoming both Virginia’s largest philanthropy and the first billion-dollar foundation based in state borders wasn’t dramatic enough, the next year, it basically happened again — demonstrating the pace of change in this new era.
The untimely 2020 death of 51-year-old William H. Goodwin, from an unspecified cancer, led to his Richmond-based Red Gates Foundation becoming a $1.4 billion grantmaker — the state’s second largest. While the relatively youthful Goodwin’s passing is an imperfect case of the Great Wealth Transfer in action, it may offer a preview of what to expect in the years ahead from his 83-year-old father, businessman William Goodwin Jr., who has long been a major power broker and philanthropist in Richmond and throughout the state.
The Pauleys and the Goodwins are the standout examples in the Commonwealth State, but even more new operations have emerged at the hundred-million-dollar level.
The death of Barbara Brunckhorst, heir to the Boar’s Head deli meat fortune, led to a Richmond-based foundation in her name that recently had $277 million in assets. Defense industry billionaire George Pedersen established the $230 million Pederson Family Foundation in Tysons, Virginia, before his death in 2023. Today, each rank among the state’s top 15 foundations, according to CauseIQ.
Meanwhile, the most significant new multimillion-dollar foundation is actually a second Pauley family philanthropy. The Endeavor Legacy Foundation, led by the couple’s daughter, received several bequests from the Pauley estate and ended 2022 with an endowment topping $761 million — bigger than all but a handful of other Virginia philanthropies.
Meanwhile, several Virginia community foundations have reported record-high donations to the IRS. In 2021, these included the Hampton Roads Community Foundation ($49 million), Charlottesville Area Community Foundation ($58 million) and Community Foundation for Greater Richmond ($104 million), which hosts the Pauley Family Foundation.
Look a little further down the ladder, and there are still more operations with new riches, albeit likely to exert a much narrower impact on the funding scene. Examples include the $63 million Joe Dacy Charitable Trust in Reston and the $60 million Leah and Richard Waitzer Foundation in Virginia Beach.
Of course, new foundations launch every year. Yet these newcomers — particularly those with nine- and 10-figure endowments — are fast redrawing a philanthropic map that — for at least the last seven years, based on Candid’s report — had grown but hardly shifted. There are now several massive new philanthropies for Virginia nonprofits to draw upon. And given that these developments reflect IRS filings from a couple years ago, even more may have since emerged.
The more things change…
There are a lot more philanthropic dollars to go around in the Commonwealth these days and several new names among the state’s largest foundations. But the initial evidence suggests that the biggest checks are landing largely with classic “eds and meds” recipients — long-time funding favorites of many of these donors, and of major donors in general.
For instance, Endeavor Legacy Foundation has pledged $20 million to Hampden-Sydney College, one of its long-time top grantees, while Red Gates has committed $50 million to Virginia Tech, one of the state’s largest universities, and $250 million to help form the Break Through Cancer alliance, which is made up of five the nation’s most well-funded cancer research institutes.
At least one smaller foundation has taken a similar tack. Dr. R. Todd Stravitz, Barbara Brunckhorst’s son, has donated $104 million to VCU, where he was formerly the medical director and still works as a professor, to establish the Stravitz-Sanyal Institute for Liver Disease and Metabolic Health. It’s the largest gift in the history of the university.
Yet a more complete portrait of these funders’ priorities will only emerge when 990 forms become available for the last few years.
Littlefield, head of the Virginia Funders Network, says the impact of these new philanthropies on the state will “depend on how they decide to distribute those dollars.” Her network aims to bring foundations together around issues like affordable housing and workforce development, and seeks to leverage the much-larger sums available through government.
“What I have seen in family foundations as the next generation is taking over… is that the next generation wants to put their own stamp on what the philanthropy will be,” she said. “But they still… want to figure out a way to be respectful of the generations that came before them.”
What that looks like in practice remains to be seen. What seems certain is that we’re going to see a new set of kingmakers emerging, not just in Virginia, but across the country.
