Harold Simmons - Philanthropy

Philanthropy

In 1973, Simmons was a significant contributor to the Dallas Civic Opera.

Harold Simmons is a former board member of the Edwin L. Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University. He has given $1.8 million to establish the Simmons Distinguished Professorship in Marketing, and $1.2 million for the President's Scholars Program.

The Harold Simmons Foundation is the philanthropic arm of the Simmons financial empire. Two of Simmons' daughters, Serena Simmons Connelly and Lisa Simmons Epstein, are its administrators. The foundation supports the causes of immigration rights, campaign reform, prison reform, handgun control, and reproductive rights. The contributions to the presidential bids of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama made by Serena Simmons Connelly were privately made, not funded by the foundation.

Simmons donated money to help fund the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment at the University of Texas. He has previously given to UT athletic programs and the McCombs School of Business. By 2005, total donations from his family and foundation to the UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas exceeded $70 million.

In 2006, Simmons pledged $1 million to the George W. Bush Presidential Library contingent upon its being located at SMU.

In 2006, Harold Simmons made a grant to the Young America's Foundation to establish the Harold Simmons Lecture Series, which enabled former U.S. Senator Zell Miller to tour college campuses during the 2006-2007 school year to promote "his message in defense of America from foreign and domestic threats to our freedom."

Since July 2006, Simmons has given funds to a chronic kidney disease research team led by Dr. Kamyar Kalantar-Zadeh to examine predictors of longevity in chronic kidney disease. Subsequently, the “Harold Simmons Center for Chronic Disease Research and Epidemiology” was created in “Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute” at “Harbor-UCLA Medical Center”, which has published a large number of scientific reports and articles.

In 2007, Oprah Winfrey announced that Harold and Annette Simmons, her neighbors in Montecito, California, had contributed $5 million to her Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa.

In 2007, Harold and Annette Simmons announced a $20 million gift to Southern Methodist University to provide an endowment for the university's School of Education and Human Development. The gift allocated $10 million for construction of a new facility, to be named the Annette Caldwell Simmons Building; $5 million for graduate student fellowships; and $5 million for faculty support and an endowed deanship.

In 2008 the Harold Simmons Foundation made a donation of $5 million to the Dallas Zoo, the largest single private contribution in the zoo's 120 year history.

Annette and Harold Simmons have been underwriters for 28 consecutive years to the Dallas Crystal Charity Ball Fashion Show and Luncheon. The Crystal Charity Ball has distributed more than $82 million to children's charities since 1953.

The Harold Simmons Foundation is a major donor of over $500,000 to the Dallas Women's Foundation which commissioned a study of women's economic security in the 12-county Dallas-Arlington-Fort Worth metropolitan area.

The Harold Simmons Foundation issued a $50 million challenge grant to the Parkland Memorial Hospital Foundation, to aid in fundraising to build a new public hospital, one of the largest private gifts for a public hospital campaign in the nation.

The Harold Simmons Foundation made a gift to the Legal Hospice of Texas, a nonprofit law firm providing compassionate legal services at no charge to low-income individuals who are terminally ill, in 2010 and 2012.