William R. Kenan Jr. (Image: William R. Kenan Jr. Charitable Trust)
Charitable Trust, a major source of charitable grants, grew from a will signed by an 89-year-old American businessman who left almost 60% of his $161 million estate to charity. Kenan created the trust in 1961, and it became active upon his death in 1965. By 2020, the trust held $685 million in assets, having distributed thousands of grants totalling nearly $700 million since 1965. Of that total, $20 million endowed the William R. Fund for Ethics, founded in 1995, which provides significant funding to the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. William Rand Kenan Jr. was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1872, according to the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. He entered the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1890 and discovered a passion for chemical and mechanical engineering there.
Decades later, as Kenan and his advisers prepared his will, he reportedly told his longtime secretary, “I feel this money has been given to me as a trust. He went on to say that he had to preserve it and make sure it did something worthwhile, according to the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. The William R. Kenan Jr. His family had reached North Carolina from Scotland, via Ireland, in the 1730s. He took part in research on converting calcium carbide into acetylene gas, which fuelled lamps that competed with electric lights. That experience led to a career at Carbide Manufacturing Company, which later became Union Carbide. You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.
