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Posts tagged as “Vista Equity Partners”

Robert F. Smith to Donate $50 Million to Support STEM Students at HBCUs Via the Student Freedom Initiative

Robert F. Smith to Donate $50 Million to Support STEM Students at HBCUs Via the Student Freedom Initiative

By goodblacknews on October 22, 2020

The Student Freedom Initiative announced today a $50 million personal gift from Robert F. Smith, philanthropist and Founder, Chairman and CEO of Vista Equity Partners. This gift matches the initial funding of $50 Million provided by the Fund II Foundation, announced in June 2020.

Student Freedom Initiative is a public charity whose mission is to serve as a catalyst for freedom in professional and life choices for students attending Minority Serving Institutions.

The Initiative will offer a student and family centric income-contingent payment alternative to the crushing burden of high cost, fixed payment debt in the context of our commitment to a program that provides holistic support to students and capacity building support for participating institutions. Equally important, the Initiative offers paid internships in a student’s area of study, tutoring/mentorships, and targeted HBCU capacity building.

“Each year, thousands of black graduates from HBCUs across America enter the workforce with a crushing debt burden that stunts future decisions and prevents opportunities and choices,” said Robert F. Smith, who is also the Board Chair of the Student Freedom Initiative.

“A college education should empower and prepare our next generation for a limitless future. The Student Freedom Initiative is a culmination of work that followed my gift to the Morehouse College Class of 2019. The $1.6 trillion student debt crisis in our country is a human rights crisis. The Initiative is purposefully built to redress historic economic and social inequities and to offer a sustainable, scalable platform to invest in the education of future Black leaders. I urge others to join this important cause so that together we can liberate the human spirit.”

With 65% of Black wealth consumed by the intolerable burden of student debt, the Initiative was initially established to create onramps to jobs of the 21st century. Following Smith’s historic gift to eliminate the student debt of all 2019 Morehouse College graduates and their parents, the team identified the systemic problems with the current student loan structure.

Billionaire Robert F. Smith Partners with Prostate Cancer Foundation to Address Racial Disparities and Reduce Deaths from Disease

Billionaire Robert F. Smith Partners with Prostate Cancer Foundation to Address Racial Disparities and Reduce Deaths from Disease

By goodblacknews on July 27, 2020

Robert F. Smith, founder, chairman and CEO of Vista Equity Partners and The Prostate Cancer Foundation (PCF) have announced a new effort to reduce deaths from prostate cancer, one of the largest health disparities facing African-American men today.

Prostate cancer affects more than three million men in the U.S., with one in nine men diagnosed with prostate cancer in his lifetime. African-American men are disproportionately impacted, 76 percent more likely to develop prostate cancer than Caucasian men.

African-American men additionally are more than twice as likely to die from the disease compared to men of other ethnicities. Earlier, strategic detection is a key step in finding a cure and ending the health disparity faced by men of African descent.

The research Smith is supporting is intended for development of the Smith Polygenic Risk Test for Prostate Cancer, a non-invasive, early detection test that will identify a man’s lifetime prostate cancer risk using a combination of more than 250 genetic variants obtained from a single sample of saliva or blood.

The Smith Test is expected to cost less than $90 USD and will be made available in PCF’s dedicated Veterans Affairs (VA) network of Centers of Excellence, including the Robert Frederick Smith Center of Precision Oncology Excellence at the VA Chicago.

The test is part of a larger PCF research initiative to improve the understanding of genetic risk in African-American men and transform early detection and imaging strategies, risk management, and clinical-decision making by men at highest lifetime risk of prostate cancer.

RELATED: Billionaire Robert F. Smith Launches Student Freedom Initiative to Ease Student Debt at Historically Black Colleges

The research, led by Dr. Chris Haiman, ScD, a genetic epidemiologist at the University of Southern California, and international colleagues is aimed at accelerating the reduction of prostate cancer disparities for African American men by 2030.

“As African-American men are at an increased risk for being diagnosed or dying from prostate cancer, understanding their risk profile and applying this knowledge earlier with strategic detection, care, and decisions about cancer risk management is of utmost importance to address health inequity in the U.S.,” said Smith.

“This is why I made a personal commitment to help accelerate research, encourage African American men to participate in the study and subsequent testing, and develop new detection strategies that have the power to transform how we diagnose and treat this disease and help save lives.”

Most genomic studies of prostate cancer have focused on men of European ancestry, and there is a vital need for additional resources to develop and optimize a polygenic risk score in those disproportionately affected.

This new Smith-PCF initiative will increase the representation of African American men in the study and vastly expand the research to allow Dr. Haiman to quadruple the size of his study cohort, a key step to providing worldwide access to the Smith Polygenic Risk Test as soon as possible.

About the Prostate Cancer Foundation
The Prostate Cancer Foundation (PCF) is the world’s leading philanthropic organization dedicated to funding life-saving cancer research. Founded in 1993 by Mike Milken, PCF has raised more than $830 million in support of cutting-edge research by more than 2,200 research projects at 220 leading cancer centers in 22 countries around the world. Thanks in part to PCF’s commitment to ending death and suffering from prostate cancer, the death rate is down by 52% and countless more men are alive today as a result. The Prostate Cancer Foundation research now impacts more than 70 forms of human cancer by focusing on immunotherapy, the microbiome, and food as medicine. Learn more at www.pcf.org.

Hip Hop Icon Queen Latifah, Artist Kerry James Marshall and C.E.O. Robert Smith Among Harvard’s W.E.B. DuBois Medal Honorees for 2020

By goodblacknews on October 17, 2019
Queen Latifah; Robert Smith (photos via flickr.com)

Musical artist and Academy Award nominee Queen Latifah, acclaimed artist Kerry James Marshall and Robert Smith, founder, chairman and chief executive of Vista Equity Partners are among the honorees being recognized by Harvard University this year with the W.E.B. DuBois Medal for their contributions to black history and culture.

Harvard is set to honor Latifah, Marshall, Smith, poet and educator Elizabeth Alexander, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution Lonnie Bunch III, poet Rita Dove, and Sheila Johnson, co-founder of Black Entertainment Television on Oct. 22, according to Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.

Past recipients of the DuBois Medal include Dave Chappelle, Colin Kaepernick, Bryan Stevenson, Kehinde Wiley, Quincy Jones, Donna Brazile and LLCoolJ.

Quiet Billionaire Robert Smith Makes Some Noise with $20 Million Gift to National African American Museum

By goodblacknews on September 28, 2016
Billionaire philanthropist Robert Smith is the second-highest private donor — at $20 million — to the new National Museum of African American History and Culture. Oprah Winfrey beat him by $1 million. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
article by Keith L. Alexander via washingtonpost.com

In 2013, when the founders of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture were seeking donors, people directed them to one man: Robert F. Smith.

“We kept wondering, ‘Who is this Robert Smith?’ ” said Adrienne Brooks, director of development for the museum. Meeting Smith became a priority, said Lonnie G. Bunch III, the museum’s founding director. “We wanted to meet him. And soon,” Bunch said, laughing.
Soon many more people will know Robert Smith by name as the museum celebrates its grand opening this weekend. The private-equity financier was the museum’s second-biggest private donor, with a $20 million gift. Oprah Winfrey was No. 1, with $21 million.
Smith has built a fortune that’s made him one of the nation’s richest men — worth $2.5 billion, according to Forbes — but until now he has kept his work and philanthropy relatively quiet.
Even the website of his company, Vista Equity Partners, does not have a picture of him. Better, he had thought, that investors and executives know him first by his abilities. If they saw only the caramel skin of an African American, he might lose out on opportunities.
As Vista’s chairman and chief executive, he is in the business of buying, growing and selling off software companies. Vista’s portfolio has 35 companies with $26 billion in assets under management. He is the majority shareholder of Vista’s management company.
Beyond Wall Street and Silicon Valley, Smith long enjoyed moving in relative obscurity. That changed last fall when Forbes magazine put him on its cover, with an article for which he declined to be interviewed.
Now in an exclusive interview with The Washington Post, he’s ready to talk about his life’s work and the powerful social force that has pulled him out of the shadows: the racial tension escalating across the nation. Smith said he grew fearful that the very fabric of the country that allowed his parents to earn doctorate degrees and him to build a successful business is vulnerable.
Watching TV news, he saw the unrest in Ferguson, Mo., after the 2014 fatal shooting of an unarmed black youth, Michael Brown, by police. Last year he watched the turmoil following Freddie Gray’s funeral in Baltimore. Across the land, he feared, a sense of opportunity is giving way to rising hopelessness and despair.
“The vision I was sold as a kid is unraveling. I see the little tears in the fabric of society every day. This cannot be,” Smith said in the interview.

[A peek inside the National Mall’s latest edition: Tour the museum]

His philanthropic efforts go back years. Through the Fund II Foundation, of which he is the founding president, he has supported nonprofit groups that focus on African American culture, human rights, music education and the environment.
It was time to emerge, he thought, and do more. “We have to do something,” he said. “We have to do something for our community.”
To read full article, go to: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/who-is-this-robert-smith-a-quiet-billionaire-makes-some-noise-with-20-million-gift-to-the-african-american-museum/2016/09/23/547da3a8-6fd0-11e6-8365-b19e428a975e_story.html

Business Titan Robert F. Smith Named Carnegie Hall’s 1st African-American Chairman

By goodblacknews on June 2, 2016
Robert F. Smith, 53, elected chairman of the Carnegie Hall Board of Directors on Thursday. (Credit: Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times)

article by Michael Cooper and David Gelles via nytimes.com

Robert F. Smith, the private equity titan who was named the richest African-American man by Forbes last year after making a fortune in software, also has a quirky musical side.

He owns one of Elton John’s old pianos. He hired John Legend and Seal — and a youth orchestra — to perform at his wedding last summer on the Amalfi Coast. His youngest sons, Hendrix and Legend, are named after Jimi Hendrix and Mr. Legend. And he bought and refurbished a retreat in the Rocky Mountains that was beloved by jazz musicians, including Duke Ellington.

On Thursday, Mr. Smith’s intersecting worlds of money, philanthropy and music came together when he was named the chairman of Carnegie Hall, the nation’s most prestigious concert stage. He became the first African-American to hold the post at a time when diversity at leading cultural organizations lags — a recent survey of New York’s cultural institutions found that nearly 78 percent of their board members were white.

“Carnegie Hall is perfectly placed to champion not only artistic excellence, but also access and exposure to the best music in the world,” Mr. Smith said in a statement.

The election of Mr. Smith, 53, who played an old upright piano while growing up in Denver and was told that with enough practice he might make it to Carnegie one day, brings to an end a low moment at the hall. The billionaire Ronald O. Perelman served as its chairman for less than a year before stepping down last fall after he alienated the board by clashing with the hall’s executive and artistic director, Clive Gillinson.

After shunning the spotlight for years, Mr. Smith, who is based in Austin, Tex., where the private equity firm he founded, Vista Equity Partners, has its headquarters, has recently taken a more public role — starting a foundation, the Fund II Foundation; giving commencement addresses; and donating money. His alma mater, Cornell University, renamed its School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering for him earlier this year after he announced a $50 million gift.

Unlike Carnegie’s most recent chairmen, Mr. Perelman and Sanford I. Weill, the former Citigroup chairman, Mr. Smith does not come from the world of New York finance, and he has not been a major fixture on the city’s social scene — he is more known for flying in to attend events in the city and then flying out. But his work outside the city with investors and tech firms could provide entree to new potential donors in the coming years.

Billionaire Robert F. Smith Gives $50 Million to Cornell Engineering School

By goodblacknews on February 2, 2016

Vista Equity Partners CEO Robert F. Smith (Image: File)
Vista Equity Partners CEO Robert F. Smith (Image via black enterprise.com)

article by Samara Lynn via blackenterprise.com
Robert F. Smith, the founder, chairman and CEO of Vista Equity Partners, made a $50 million commitment to Cornell University’s School Of Engineering, his alma mater.
His gift is being reciprocated. The school will be renamed the Robert Frederick Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell. The donation will also fund the Robert Frederick Smith Tech Scholars Program. The program will focus on providing financial aid, particularly for minority and female students.
“Robert’s generosity will not only elevate our School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, but it will ensure it becomes more accessible than ever,” said Lance Collins, the Joseph Silbert Dean of Cornell Engineering. “I believe an affordable educational path from engineering in Ithaca to Cornell Tech in New York City, for those who wouldn’t otherwise be offered such an opportunity, will produce some of the sharpest minds in engineering and technology. I’m thankful Robert shares this vision and is making it a reality.”
Smith, who is No. 1 on the BE100s Private Equity list, was also recently listed on the Forbes 400—the magazine’s yearly list of the 400 richest Americans. He is the only African American male on the list. Under his leadership, Vista Equity Partners has become one of the world’s most successful investment houses. He received a degree in chemical engineering from Cornell in 1985.
To read more, go to: http://www.blackenterprise.com/news/billionaire-robert-f-smith-gives-50-million-to-cornell-engineering-school/