Six years after the death of pest control billionaire Randall Rollins, his philanthropic legacy is starting to come into focus — and the picture that’s emerging includes a 10-digit endowment and some surprising new moves.
New IRS filings from late last year show that the R. Randall Rollins 2012 Trust transferred nearly $663 million in 2024 to the Ma-Ran Foundation, the philanthropy founded by the Orkin pest control company co-owner, who died in 2020, and his wife, Margaret “Peggy” Rollins. That more than tripled its assets, vaulting the foundation into the company of the philanthropic elite.
The Atlanta, Georgia-based philanthropy’s endowment now totals nearly $1 billion, making it one of the 200 largest private foundations in the country, and puts it among the top five in Rollins’ home state of Georgia. But unlike its Peach State peers atop that list, the foundation has no website.
Launched in 1991, Ma-Ran — which is presumably a portmanteau of the first letters of the founders’ first names — had never granted more than $15 million in a year until 2024. But now the foundation, which is under the control of Peggy Rollins and her children, Pam and Tim, will need to award around $50 million annually.
Health and education nonprofits seem most likely to benefit from this new grantmaking giant, particularly those based in Georgia. Over the past five years, three quarters of the foundation’s grant dollars have gone to nonprofits in the Peach State, according to Candid.
But when a foundation grows this fast, sometimes its focus areas expand, and there are subtle signs that’s happening for Rollins’ philanthropy.
What does the Ma-Ran Foundation fund?
In the five years before the 2024 transfer that tripled Ma-Ran’s assets, the foundation’s awards largely favored a consistent set of medical and educational organizations.
Top beneficiaries included the Atlanta Speech School ($2 million in both 2022 and 2023), Emory University ($3 million in 2021, $1 million in 2019), and the Rollins Child Development Center ($4 million in 2022).
One of the foundation’s favorite grantees during this time was the Beebe Medical Foundation in Lewes, Delaware, a wealthy beach town. After an initial award years ago to establish Beebe Healthcare’s Margaret H. Rollins School of Nursing, the foundation issued the organization a series of grants, including awards of between $2 million and $4 million each year between 2019 and 2023.
The foundation also backed causes beyond traditional eds and meds, such as the Peachtree Road Methodist Church in Atlanta, Georgia ($1 million in 2023), and the therapeutic sports education nonprofit Chastain Horse Park ($500,000 in 2019 and 2022).
After Ma-Ran tripled in size in 2024, many of those past awardees got another round of big checks. But there were also groups that got much more than ever before.
For instance, major awards went to the private K-12 Lovett School ($6 million) and the Atlanta Historical Society ($5 million), while the Fernbank Museum of Natural History is slated for an award of $3 million for its capital campaign. Not one of the three had ever received more than $100,000 from the foundation.
Other groups got what appear to be first-ever awards. The LIFT Youth Center, located in Ringgold, Georgia, which was not a past foundation grantee according to Candid, received $5 million, while the Atlanta Botanical Garden, which is also absent from the Candid record, was approved for a $10 million grant.
One of the more intriguing new recipients was a Fidelity Charitable donor-advised fund, which received $6 million. Transfers to such accounts are sometimes used to meet foundation payout requirements, yet that does not appear to be the case here. Ma-Ran ended up not only paying off its 2024 distribution amount ahead of the IRS timeline that year, but also racking up a payout surplus of nearly $5 million above the 5% payout requirement that it can apply to future years.
Notably, the single-largest checks from Ma-Ran during this period went to a cause that is not readily visible elsewhere in its portfolio: mental health. Ma-Ran awarded nearly $18 million between 2023 and 2024 to a nonprofit residential mental health facility in Atlanta called Skyland Trail.
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The Rollins family and their philanthropy
After serving in the U.S. Coast Guard, Randall Rollins began working in the family business in 1953, and helped grow its broadcasting arm, which later went public. Then, in 1964, the family went all-in on a dramatic reinvention: In what Forbes calls the first leveraged buyout in American history, Rollins Broadcasting bought Orkin Pest Control.
Today, Rollins Inc., which is the pest control branch of the family’s suite of companies, has a market capitalization of $26 billion, and the family is known in Atlanta high society for “extravagant, Gatsby-esque parties,” according to Forbes.
Randall and Peggy’s foundation long existed in the shadow of other Rollins family philanthropies, but now it is the largest of the bunch. Ma-Ran is more than twice the size of the Gary W. Rollins Foundation (which had $427 million in assets in 2024), the philanthropy of Randall Rollins’ brother, and slightly larger than Randall Rollins’ father’s philanthropy, the O. Wayne Rollins Foundation ($893 million).
For now, Ma-Ran’s endowment includes two rather unusual assets: a pair of IOUs, technically called notes receivable, that the Rollins trust transferred to the foundation, including one for $501 million. Likely the estate held this note at the time of Rollins’ death, or a family member issued it in exchange for other assets as part of the estate process, but it’s rare that so much of a foundation’s assets would be in this form.
Regardless, Ma-Ran’s assets could still grow further. Randall Rollins died with a fortune Forbes put at $5 billion, and more of those funds may end up in the foundation in the coming years, given that such estates usually take time to unwind. Not to mention that Peggy Rollins could choose to put more into her namesake philanthropy. Those seem like good reasons to keep an eye on this foundation.
Michael Kavate covers climate philanthropy and billionaire donors. He welcomes feedback, disagreements, tips and requests.
