Harvard just announced its largest-ever donation: a $350 million unrestricted gift to its School of Public Health. The donor is Hong Kong-based Morningside Foundation, led by two brothers who earned their fortunes in real estate, private equity, and venture capital. One brother, Gerald Chan, earned a graduate degree from Harvard. The school will be renamed in honor of their late father as the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Greater China is home to 358 billionaires (including 64 Hong Kong billionaires), according to the 2014 Hurun Global Rich List. Yet with a few exceptions—including the Harvard gift and Chinese tech titans’ recent fondness for the ice bucket challenge—a culture of domestic philanthropy has been relatively slow to take root. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet hosted a lavish 2010 dinner in Beijing intended to encourage the Chinese elite to embrace philanthropy, but several tycoons snubbed the Americans’ invitations and declined to open their wallets.
Now, at last, China has a powerful homegrown evangelist for philanthropy: Jack Ma. As co-founder and executive chairman of Alibaba Group, which filed paperwork last week to raise as much as $21.2 billion in an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange, he is one of China’s most respected and closely watched tycoons—and he’s publicly embracing a culture of giving.
Ma joined Alibaba co-founder Joe Tsai earlier this year in establishing a personal philanthropic trust to be “funded by share options granted by Alibaba … for approximately two percent (2%) of Alibaba’s equity,” according to a statement. The trust will focus on the “environment, medicine, education, and culture.” In Ma’s words, “Alibaba was founded 15 years ago with a mission ‘to make it easy to do business anywhere’ and a set of principles and values that emphasize our responsibility to society. Giving back to society is deeply embedded in Alibaba’s culture.”
The total value of the fund will depend on the performance of Alibaba’s upcoming IPO. If the company is valued at $120 billion, or more, the charitable trust will be worth at least $2.4 billion.
via Can Jack Ma’s Alibaba Fortune Jump-Start Chinese Philanthropy? – Businessweek.
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