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New Rankings Based on OC Charitable Giving

For this year’s philanthropy lists, the Business Journal ranked both corporate and private foundations by the amounts they gave to Orange County charities, instead of by total giving. The criteria include that the foundation is either headquartered here in OC, focuses a significant amount of its giving on OC charities, or that a principal lives here. Giving, in and of itself, can be volatile and fluctuate from year to year.

While both corporate and private foundations file as private entities or as a 501(c)(3), we are keeping the pattern of two different lists, one for corporate—those created by companies—and one for private, created by individuals or families. The corporate list contains privately held and public companies.

Also note that the most recent numbers on both lists—OC giving, total giving, and assets—are based on the most recent year the foundations gave us information or filed their last 990-PF, the tax return of all foundations. The Business Journal ranked 21 corporate foundations and 41 private foundations in this way. For those that did not provide OC giving dollars from their most recently filed return, or cannot because they don’t break down giving by geographical area, we ranked by total giving.

The corporate foundations list reflects a wide breadth of OC businesses, from baseball to banking to insurance. It’s significant, according to Dan McQuaid, president and chief executive of OneOC, because the list highlights some of OC’s most charitable companies, “who recognize that you can do well in business by doing good in Orange County,” he said. OneOC works with nonprofits and companies to help them maximize the social impact of their philanthropy.

“The hope is that more companies will be like these exemplary companies listed in contributing their wealth and talent to making a healthier, more vibrant OC,” he said.

Corporate Giving

• At the top of the corporate list is perennial No. 1, San Francisco-based Wells Fargo & Co., which has its OC regional foundation office in Irvine. The foundation dropped its giving to OC causes by almost 22% from about $5.8 million to about $4.6 million. The local budget has been funded at about $4 million steadily over the last several years, said Lisa Woolery, vice president of OC media relations and corporate communications.

She explained the discrepancy this way: “In addition to the foundation’s budget, different lines of business sometimes make donations to nonprofits which are passed through the foundation. Additionally, there are various enterprise and state level grants that are passed through our local foundation that are competitive in nature, so that causes some fluctuation in our overall giving number.”

Wells Fargo & Co.’s foundation has assets of about $72 million, and its total U.S. giving was about the same as a year ago.

• Newport Beach-based Pacific Life is No. 2. Its foundation increased its giving to OC charities by about 26% from about $3.2 million to about $4.1 million. And No. 3 is Pac Life’s former subsidiary, Newport Beach-based PIMCO. Its foundation increased its giving in OC by about 17% from about $1.2 million to about $1.5 million.

• Rounding out the top six in the million-dollar range of OC giving are Irvine-based Allergan Foundation at No. 4; Santa Ana-based Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation and Competition in Healthcare at No. 5; and Irvine-based Edwards Lifesciences Foundation at No. 6.

Private Giving

The private foundations list reflects individuals or families who have established 501(c)(3) foundations. Some individuals don’t go this route and instead create donor-advised funds. One place they could set up those funds is through Newport Beach-based Orange County Community Foundation. The foundation gave out $60 million in grants in fiscal 2016, President Shelley Hoss said.

• Costa Mesa-based Argyros Family Foundation is No. 1 on the private list. Its giving in OC increased by 20% from about $13.4 million to about $16.1 million.

• No. 2 is the Newport Beach-based Simon Foundation for Education and Housing, which decreased its OC giving by about 4% from about $4.5 million to about $4.3 million. Its total giving is down by about 30%. That’s because of a timing difference with some scholarship funding occurring in January 2017 versus December 2016, foundation chairman Gary Singer said. Its assets went up about 565% from about $7.8 million to about $52 million. That’s because of a sizable gift to the foundation at the end of last year, Singer said.

• No. 3 among private foundations is Newport Beach-based Crean Foundation, whose OC giving went up about 4% from about $2.9 million to about $3 million.

There’s one new addition to the private list in the top 10: Fountain Valley-based David and Diana Sun Foundation. It gave approximately $2 million to OC charities. David Sun is the co-founder of Fountain Valley-based Kingston Technologies. In 2001, he and his wife created the foundation, with most of its grants going to education and healthcare programs in his home country of Taiwan.

Naturally, private foundations here give more specifically in OC: University of California-Irvine and Chapman University; Childrens’ Hospital and St. Joseph Hoag; Segerstom Center for the Arts and Pacific Chorale, to name but a few.

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