Mega-gift watchers take note: A new $5 billion pediatric campus is going up in Dallas, thanks in part to four gifts of $100 million or more apiece from Texas funders. Called the Moody Children’s Hospital (after the Moody Foundation, which gave the largest gift among these funders), the new campus is slated to open in 2031. It will be connected by skybridge to UT Southwestern Medical Center’s existing William P. Clements Jr. University Hospital on what will be a 33-acre, state-of-the-art pediatric campus.
Children’s Health, a pediatric healthcare system based in North Texas, will jointly own and operate the new campus along with UT Southwestern Medical Center. It will have 552 beds across three towers on a 33-acre campus, along with a chapel, playrooms, music therapy and a library. Children’s Health currently serves more than 370,000 patients annually through the hospital in Dallas and one in Plano.
Four $100-million-plus gifts for a medical center deep in the heart of Texas is good news for the region’s children, and for local business: The hospital is the largest construction project in Dallas right now.
It is also yet another example of the growing power of the regional rich, those lesser-known billionaire donors who are making money and giving it away far from traditional coastal wealth centers like New York or California, and outside the hot fields of tech or finance.
The rise of the regional megadonor
The clout of the ultra-rich donor is on the rise across the country, in virtually every domain of philanthropy. Take the Tulsa, Oklahoma-based businessman George Kaiser, who took over his family’s oil company in the 1960s and went on to buy the Bank of Oklahoma. With an estimated net worth of around $16.7 billion, Kaiser clocks in as the 172nd richest person in the world, as of today. In 1999, he founded the roughly $5 billion George Kaiser Family Foundation, which supports children, families and entrepreneurs in Tulsa, and works with philanthropic and public partners to pilot programs that can extend beyond the city and state.
Or consider Florida’s newly robust slate of philanthropic foundations. The Great Wealth Transfer is rapidly reshaping Florida’s philanthropic landscape, as my colleague Michael Kavate recently reported, driven by the state’s business growth, trust and estate settlements, intergenerational giving and inbound migration. Nearly half of Florida’s top 10 largest private foundations either did not exist or were too small to qualify as “large” just five years ago; nearly a third weren’t major players as recently as 2021. Top names include the Paul J. DiMare Foundation, the Betty Wold Johnson Foundation, the John and Daria Barry Foundation, and the Charles & Margery Barancik Foundation.
Texas is another Sun Belt center for major donor-driven regional expansion. The benefactors behind this new medical center come from the Lone Star State’s growing class of big-time donors who are reshaping the landscape of Dallas, the nation’s ninth-largest city and fourth-largest metropolitan area, including Fort Worth.
Big money to help small patients
The first two $100 million gifts for the new pediatric campus project came in 2024: one from the Jean and Mack Pogue family and the other from the Rees-Jones Foundation. This was the first time in Texas history that a not-for-profit construction project received two individual gifts of $100 million each.
The Pogue Family Foundation, founded in 2001, lacks a website, but has been an active supporter of children’s health in Dallas, giving Children’s Health and UT Southwestern more than $200 million in support over the past 40 years. Mack Pogue, the son of a cotton gin operator, founded Lincoln Property Company and grew it into one of the country’s largest real estate companies. He passed away shortly after the foundation’s $100 million gift was announced.
The Pogue Family Foundation had $331 million in total assets in 2024 and gives about $15 to $16 million in grants each year. The foundation does not accept grant requests and gives to preselected charitable organizations focusing primarily on healthcare, medical research, and education in the Dallas area.
The Rees-Jones Foundation, meanwhile, was founded in 2006 by Jan and Trevor Rees-Jones. Trevor is an attorney who made his money doing oil deals. He founded Chief Oil & Gas in 1994 and the company was reportedly the biggest winner in the shale fracking boom, known for grossing $7 billion over seven deals in seven years. Forbes lists him as worth $5.9 billion.
The foundation is inspired by the founders’ Christian faith; Jan Rees-Jones wears a large silver cross around her neck in the website’s mission video, in which she and Trevor explain the process by which they decided on their philanthropic priorities. It had around $666 million in total assets as of 2024 and has given out $884 million since its founding, across more than 300 grants.
The Rees-Jones Foundation gave more than $35 million to the Southwestern Medical District hospital complex in the past, establishing the Rees-Jones Center for Foster Care Excellence in 2012, the only clinic in North Texas dedicated to children in the child welfare system. The central hospital tower will be named Rees-Jones Tower after their new gift.
In its other North Texas giving, the foundation focuses on eight key areas, including child welfare, animal welfare, family and youth, neighborhood development, disability and evangelism and discipleship. Some 30% of its grants go to international organizations, specifically Christian groups in East Africa and India working on poverty relief and systemic causes of “distress and inequity.” The foundation also gave $30 million and the couple gave much of their personal collection to help establish the forthcoming Rees-Jones Library of the American West at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, due to open in 2027.
Two more Texas foundations tap their wealth for children’s health
In 2025, the Galveston-based Moody Foundation made an undisclosed, nine-figure gift to the new hospital campus. The Moody family fortune is the only old money among these four gifts, at least by Texas standards, dating back to the late 19th century, when William Lewis Moody Sr. built a Galveston-based cotton and banking business. His son, William Lewis Moody Jr., expanded into insurance, hotels, ranching and other industries.
Moody Jr. and his wife, Libbie Rice Shearn Moody, created the Moody Foundation in 1942 to benefit Texans in perpetuity. The Moody Foundation has been a major Texas funder for more than eight decades and the family’s largesse is apparent all over the state: I lived in Moody Towers as a student at the University of Houston back in the 1980s. Galveston has Moody Gardens; Dallas is home to Moody Performance Hall; UT Austin has Moody College of Communication. The foundation has given out more than $2.6 billion through nearly 5,500 grants over its history, focusing largely on education, social services, children’s needs and community development. It currently gives out $80 million a year and has made a pledge of $1 billion to “transform education in Texas by 2035.”
Finally, in April 2026, UT Southwestern Medical Center, Children’s Health and the Southwestern Medical Foundation announced the fourth gift, totaling $100 million from the Stephens Greth Foundation. The newest of these funders, it also lacks a website as of now. Lyndal Stephens Greth formed the foundation in 2024, following the sale of the private oil exploration and production firm Endeavor Energy Resources to Diamondback Energy for $26 billion in stock and cash. Forbes estimates her worth at about $31 billion, putting her at No. 67 on the Forbes Billionaire list as of today. Her father, the late oilman Autry C. Stephens, founded Endeavor and grew it into one of the largest private oil producers in the U.S., generating some 327,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day in 2024.
In 2024, the same year Autry Stephens passed away, the Midland, Texas-based Stephens Greth Foundation received $2 billion in initial contributions. Stephens Greth, who had chaired Endeavor prior to the sale, now serves as the foundation’s director and executive chairman. As she said in a press release about the gift, “Building a brand-new, state-of-the-art pediatric hospital from the ground up in Dallas, where we’ve lived for over 30 years, to benefit the children of our community is a once-in-a-generation opportunity.”
A big state, getting bigger
While the Moody Foundation represents Old Guard Texas philanthropy, the Rees-Jones, Pogue and Stephens Greth gifts reflect fortunes created or dramatically expanded over the past few decades. The hospital they are helping to build is rising in a state with one of the largest concentrations of new wealth in the country.
The new hospital is needed, because along with rising wealth, the Lone Star State’s population is booming. The Dallas region’s rapidly growing pediatric population is projected to increase by more than 700,000 children by 2050, from about 2.5 million today.
Texas added nearly 2.5 million residents between 2020 and 2025, more than any other state. Some moved to the state for jobs created by the 314 new corporate headquarters added between 2015 and 2024. Texas now has 57 Fortune 500 company headquarters — more than any other state.
With a growing number of billionaire fortunes gushing from Texas-traditional sectors like oil, real estate and business, nonprofits in the Lone Star State are poised for a future of ever more support from homegrown funders.
Note (7/24/26): This article has been updated to clarify that UT Southwestern Medical Center will jointly own and operate the new campus along with Children’s Health, and to remove a statement that the Moody Children’s Hospital will replace the current Children’s Medical Center Dallas. Such a future use has not yet been decided.
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