This Billionaire Heiress and Her Husband Have a Huge Philanthropic Footprint in Their Hometown

In the unforthcoming world of mega-giving, where most foundations run by living donors don’t have a public website, much less a grants database, Form 990s are often the only surefire way to determine how and where the funding flows. Some folks find combing through these documents as riveting as a root canal, but for some of us — and I admit, there aren’t many! — it’s a fascinating way to follow the money and at least partially demystify the donors in question.

My colleague Sue-Lynn Moses and I recently crunched Candid data to understand how living mega-donors give through their private foundations. While I was working on that project, the Kalamazoo, Michigan-based Ronda E. Stryker and William D. Johnston Foundation caught my eye.

The couple are best known for their mega-gifts, like a historic $30 million gift to Spelman College, where Stryker is a trustee, back in 2018. The pair also made a $100 million gift to create a medical school at their alma mater, Kalamazoo’s Western Michigan University (WMU), and a $20 million pledge to the Harvard Medical School Department, where Stryker is on the board.

Mega-gifts often make national headlines, and they can define or distort a donor’s “brand,” especially when their foundation — if they have one — doesn’t proactively tell the public where all the other money is going. Seeing as Stryker and Johnston do have one, I decided to get a fuller picture of how they give by cheerfully diving into their foundation’s Form 990s.

I discovered an “open-door,” place-based institutional grantmaker exclusively focused on organizations serving Kalamazoo County. Its largest grants flow to the city of Kalamazoo, and unlike most living donor foundations, it accepts applications. And while many living donors fund their operations with annual contributions under a “pay-as-you-go” model, Stryker, who’s worth $8 billion and change, made massive contributions in 2015 and 2021 and nothing in between.

In a moment, I’ll take a closer look under the hood of the foundation, why another step change in giving may be on the horizon, and at the mystique that continues to surround the couple. But first, let’s get to know Ronda and William.

It’s a family affair

Ronda Stryker’s grandfather Homer Stryker was an orthopedic surgeon, inventor and founder of the Kalamazoo, Michigan-based Stryker Corporation, a medical technology company.

Homer’s only son and Ronda’s father, Lee, took over the company in the 1950s. In 1976, he died when a plane he was piloting crashed in Wyoming. When Homer passed away in 1980, his three grandchildren — Ronda, Pat and Jon — each inherited one-third of a family trust that held shares of the Stryker Corporation and have since embarked on their own philanthropic ventures, donating at least $855 million combined, according to Business Insider.

Pat Stryker is the founder of the Bohemian Foundation, which focuses on music, arts and the community, while Jon Stryker’s Arcus Foundation supports LGBTQ causes and the protection and conservation of great apes and gibbons. In 2020, Forbes named the Strykers the 22nd richest family in America.

Ronda Stryker and William Johnston married in 1983. After working in the public school system, they pivoted to philanthropy in the early 1980s and established the foundation in 1995. At 69 years old, Ronda Stryker has served on the Stryker board for almost 30 years, and, according to Bloomberg, has sold more than $1.8 billion of stock since 1993. Johnston is chairman of Greenleaf Trust, an investment management company which is also a shareholder in Stryker Corporation, the latter of which had $17 billion in revenues in 2021. Stryker and Johnston have three children.

Big support for the City of Kalamazoo

So what’s their foundation into? The Stryker Johnston Foundation’s website defines its mission as partnering “with organizations and groups to change the systems and structures that create intergenerational poverty, particularly among Black people, people of color, and other communities that have been left out or left behind.” It currently has a staff of seven, and Ronda is the president of the board while William’s the treasurer and secretary.

The foundation accepts applications for its two rounds of grant funding each year, with a deadline for the second round coming up on August 29, 2023. Click here for eligibility criteria and guidelines.

There’s no grants database on the foundation’s website. However, a closer look at its Form 990s shows that of the 224 grants it disbursed for the fiscal years ending in 2019, 2020 and 2021, 89% flowed to organizations based in Kalamazoo. This giving ran the gamut, with recipient organizations operating in fields like youth development, public media, immigration services, literacy and early education, and housing and homeless services. Notably, the amount of grants the foundation earmarked for general operating support rose from 31% in 2019 to 61% in 2021.

The foundation’s top recipient is actually the City of Kalamazoo itself. In 2016, Johnston and philanthropist William Parfet pledged $70 million to create the Kalamazoo Foundation for Public Excellence to fund city operations and projects in perpetuity. As IP’s Alyssa Ochs noted at the time, that raised questions around public entities’ potentially unhealthy reliance on private dollars.

Undeterred, the Stryker Johnston Foundation went on to disburse what were by far its largest grants to the city in fiscal years 2019 ($26.4 million), 2020 ($24.9 million) and 2021 ($27.1 million). The grants accounted for 67%, 60% and 44% of its total grantmaking in each year, respectively, while in 2021, the board approved a $27.4 million grant to the city “for future payment.” All told, the foundation gave the city $85 million from 2016 through 2021.

In 2021, city officials announced that the Kalamazoo Foundation for Public Excellence received an anonymous commitment of $400 million, pushing the value of the endowment close to officials’ intended goal of $500 million, whereby it would spin off $25 million a year into the city’s general fund. For reference, that single pledge outstrips the total amount a group of big philanthropies put into the so-called “Grand Bargain,” the city of Detroit’s public-private Hail Mary to claw its way out of bankruptcy back in 2014. Note also that Detroit has nearly 10 times Kalamazoo’s population.

So it came to be that seven years after Johnston and Parfet’s initial pledge, philanthropy is a permanent line item in the City of Kalamazoo’s budget. But it remains unclear, officially at least, who put forward that $400 million.

A “pay-as-you-please” model

My analysis of the Stryker Johnston Foundation’s Form 990s yielded another interesting finding. From 2012 to 2014, on average, the foundation received $4 million in non-stock incoming contributions per year from Ronda Stryker, disbursed $3.8 million annually, and kept its end-of-year asset value at $2.9 million. This is the “pay-as-you-go” model in action — money goes in, money goes out and assets remain low.

Then, in 2015, Stryker went all-in, contributing $99 million in Stryker Corporation shares. That funded the foundation for the next five years, during which she did not contribute a dime. In 2021, she made another big splash, contributing $56 million in stock. This isn’t “pay-as-you-go” as much as “pay-as-you-please.” As one might expect, the 2021 infusion enabled the foundation to dramatically ramp up its grantmaking. It disbursed $62.2 million in grants that year, a 57% increase over 2019’s figure of $39.6 million.

Another bump may be on the horizon, considering Stryker sold $142 million worth of stock between May 2022 and 2023. Since she’s facing a formidable capital gains tax bill, a lot of that windfall likely ended up in her foundation, or maybe a donor-advised fund — or both.

The mystery deepens

No amount of Form 990 number-crunching can fully dissipate the air of mystery surrounding mega-donors, and Stryker and Johnston are no exception, as there’s reason to believe their giving may be far more substantial than what public records indicate. That brings us back to Kalamazoo.

In 2005, a group of anonymous donors announced the Kalamazoo Promise, a pledge to pay up to 100% of tuition at any Michigan college for graduates of the city’s public schools. “Though the donors were not identified, area residents suspect the Stryker family was behind that gift,” wrote Bridge Michigan’s Ted Roelofs in 2021.

Stryker and Johnston were originally anonymous when they made that $100 million gift to create a medical school at WMU. When it was first announced in 2011, Forbes’ Joann Muller assumed the couple was behind it, writing, “There aren’t a lot of people in Kalamazoo who can afford to make a $100 million anonymous cash donation to Western Michigan University to start a new medical school.” Three years later, Stryker and Johnston, the latter of whom is a university trustee, revealed they were, in fact, the donors.

Fast-forward to 2021. In addition to the anonymous $400 million commitment to the Kalamazoo Foundation for Public Excellence, an anonymous “alumni couple” announced a gigantic $550 million commitment to WMU. To my knowledge, none of these anonymous donors have come forward, and there’s a chance they never will. Either way, I have my suspicions. After all, there aren’t a lot of couples in Kalamazoo — population roughly 73,000 — who can afford to dish out $400 million and $550 million a pop.

Featured