Tom Golisano’s $50 million gift to create the University’s Golisano Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Institute isn’t the only major commitment he’s made in 2024.
In October, Inside Philanthropy showcased the extraordinary commitments entrepreneur and philanthropist Tom Golisano, a Rochester area native, is making to Upstate New York this year. Following is an excerpt from the article by Ade Adeniji published on October 8, 2024. Adapted and reprinted with permission.
Billionaire Tom Golisano Gave $360 Million to Upstate New York Nonprofits. Here’s What He Had to Say
By Ade Adeniji
Staff writer, Inside Philanthropy
In September, 2024, billionaire Paychex founder Tom Golisano surprised 82 nonprofit organizations at a press conference with a $360 million commitment in unrestricted grants. The beneficiaries, all in Upstate New York, work on causes including animals, education and healthcare for developmentally disabled children.
Raised in a middle-class suburb of Rochester as the son of a macaroni salesman and a seamstress, Golisano is worth $6.5 billion today. He has a track record of giving that goes all the way back to the 1980s, when he established the Golisano Foundation, and his lifetime giving totals some $775 million.
After high school, he worked as a bank teller to help his parents with their finances, and then went to Alfred State Tech, a two-year college.
After graduating, he eventually found work at a payroll processor that provided services for large companies. But soon he noticed a gap in the market and realized he could provide these same services to small companies with 50 employees or fewer. So Golisano took the leap and started his own company, Paychex, in 1971, with just $3,000 and a credit card. The early days were tough, but soon, the company started making money and expanded its orbit beyond western New York. In 1983, the company went public. Today, it employs 16,000 people and has a market value of around $50 billion.
Two years after Paychex went public, Golisano and his wife at the time, Gloria, decided that they wanted to start giving back. Their son, Steven, is developmentally disabled, and Gloria sought to better understand his condition.
Over the past three decades, Golisano and the Golisano Foundation have emerged as top donors in this space, pledging or donating more than $300 million to support individuals with autism and other intellectual and developmental disabilities. A main component of the foundation’s work is building institutions and centers that it intends to serve as national models of collaboration for inclusive health.
Golisano thinks that there’s still not enough awareness in the philanthropic community about the range of organizations on the ground working on developmental disabilities. And that lack of awareness serves as a barrier for these organizations to connect with funders.
One of the Golisano Foundation’s biggest grantees in the developmental disabilities space is the Special Olympics. The foundation contributed more than $67 million to launch and expand the Special Olympics Healthy Communities program so that people with intellectual disabilities can access healthcare in their communities all year.
So why did Golisano decide to take his giving to the next level in Upstate New York? The Golisano Foundation already had a long-running list of trusted grantees that it has worked with through the decades in Upstate New York and southwestern Florida. Golisano calls both of these places home, and had provisions in his will for more money to flow to these organizations in the form of a bequest. But more recently, he started to change his thoughts about that.
“I applied for immortality and didn’t get it,” Golisano said. “So I decided that rather than waiting for me to kick the bucket, I would advance the money to them ahead of time. Why make them wait?”
Of the $360 million, $201 million flowed to Rochester organizations, along with another $66.5 million to Buffalo nonprofits and $40 million to ones in Syracuse. Golisano gifted the remaining $52 million to the Golisano Foundation. Organizations run the gamut from nonprofits that serve the community like Veterans Outreach Center and the Child Advocacy Center of Greater Rochester; education groups, including Alfred State College and Niagara University; and animal welfare organizations, including Better Together Pet Rescue Center and Rochester Emergency Veterinary Services. Golisano’s huge commitment to animal welfare organizations is thanks to his wife, former world No. 1 women’s tennis player Monica Seles, a passionate animal advocate.
