Generosity Facts

Grace Groner bought 3 shares of Abbott Laboratories stock for $180 in 1935. She was a secretary. She held those shares for 75 years, reinvesting every dividend, while living in a one-bedroom cottage and buying clothes from rummage sales. When she died at 100, those shares were worth $7 million. She left every cent to her old college.

At his 2019 Morehouse College commencement address, billionaire Robert F. Smith announced his family would pay off the student loan debt of the entire graduating class. The gift covered all 396 seniors and ultimately totalled $34 million - including Parent PLUS loans. He told them: 'I know my class will pay this forward.'

Kristina Ulmer's sister died hours after her final waitress shift, leaving $80 in tips behind. Kristina kept it untouched for four years, then added her own savings, broke it into $20 bills, and handed one to each of her 26 students: use it for kindness. It is now a nonprofit, 350+ acts strong.

Americans filled a 700-boxcar train with food for war-torn France in 1947. It came entirely from ordinary citizens, not the government. France answered two years later with 49 boxcars of its own, one for every state. Six million French and Italian donors packed them with 52,000 gifts. Air Force jets and fireboats greeted it in New York Harbor. Most of those boxcars are still around today, kept in museums nationwide.

Grady-White has built offshore fishing boats in Greenville, North Carolina since 1959. Eddie Smith was 26 when he bought the near-bankrupt shop in 1968. Buyers later offered him more than $400 million. He turned them down and gave the company away: voting control to a trust, the profits to a charity. Then he paid every worker a bonus scaled to years of service. The hulls are still laid up by hand.

Zac Brown Band has sold out Fenway Park fifteen straight times. The band gives away four free cruises at every tour stop. At Fenway on August 2, Zac Brown stopped between songs and told the whole park he was buying every person there a cruise for two. All 37,000 of them. Four more go out at the next stop.

Colorado farmer Nick Venetucci began handing free pumpkins to children from his truck in the 1950s. Soon school buses were pulling up to his farm, and every child went home with one. Over about 50 years he gave away more than a million. Local schoolchildren collected pennies to pay for a bronze statue of him. Children on field trips to the farm still go home with a free pumpkin every October.