10 Americans who are not only wealthy but charitable

Forbes released their 2015 Forbes 400 list Tuesday, ranking America's wealthiest individuals. The Monitor decided to take a look at which of these individuals donated the most to charity, based on the 2014 Philanthropy 50. So here we give you the 10 wealthiest and most charitable Americans, based on the percentage of wealth donated last year. 

1. Nick Woodman

Seth Wenig/AP
GoPro's CEO Nick Woodman holds a GoPro camera in his mouth as he celebrates his company's IPO on June 26, 2014.

Founder and CEO of GoPro, the company that manufactures wearable sports and adventure cameras, Nick Woodman donated 28.6 percent of his worth last year. Mr. Woodman ranked #389 on the Forbes 400 with a net worth of $1.75 billion. Woodman donated $500 million to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation to start the Jill + Nicholas Woodman Foundation. The Foundation will focus on addressing education, affordable housing, transportation, and environmental issues. 

1 of 10

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.