A Gift from the Heart
By Robbie Shell
A $40 million donation from Jon Huntsman, W'59, and his family reflects their
firm belief that sharing wealth is an opportunity to change people's lives
There is a sign on the wall behind
Jon Huntsman’s desk in the
executive offices of $5.2 billion
Huntsman Corp. in Salt Lake
City, Utah. It reads:
“The greatest exercise of the
human heart is to reach down
and lift another up.”
“Right after we were married and
Jon was earning about $225 a
month, I noticed that $50 was
missing from every paycheck,”
recalls Karen Huntsman. “I realized
he was giving $50, anonymously,
to one of the families
in our neighborhood who Jon
thought needed extra help. It taught me early on that if
you don’t learn to have a charitable heart when you have
nothing, you will never learn it when you have a lot. Jon
has always wanted to make a difference in people’s lives.”
Most members of the Wharton community now know
about Jon Huntsman’s latest gift to the Wharton School —
$40 million, donated in May 1998, in unrestricted funds.
It is the largest gift ever made by an individual to a business
school.
And many in the business community know of Huntsman’s
extraordinary success in founding the largest
privately-held chemical company in the U.S. and building
it into a $5.2 billion global enterprise with 10,000
employees and multiple locations worldwide. His rise
from a manufacturer of plastic
egg containers to head of a company
with billion-pound world
class petrochemical, plastics,
rubber, textiles and packaging
facilities has been chronicled
in publications ranging from
Forbes and the Financial Times
to the Wall Street Journal and
New York Times.
But few know about the man
and the family behind the $40
million donation. Indeed, this
is just the way the Huntsman
family likes to give: with little
fanfare, with great generosity
and with a sincere feeling of gratitude
to the people and the institutions who have made a
difference in their lives.
In fact, the biggest long-term benefit to Wharton may
not be financial; rather it may be an infusion of the spirit
that animated this donation. What is the path that leads
to, and the philosophy behind, a gift of this sort?
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