Philanthropy, Civic Vision
McColl has supported a broad range of academic, civic and arts causes for Charlotte, the state of North Carolina and the Southeast — strongly encouraging Charlotte's urban redevelopment (enabled by Bank of America's revitalization of Fourth Ward and building of Gateway Village in Third Ward), playing a key role in Charlotte's attracting the Carolina Panthers NFL and the Charlotte Hornets NBA franchises, supporting Habitat for Humanity, chairing The Forum for Corporate Responsibility (2003), financing inner-city and minority-owned businesses, encouraging light and high-speed rail, and supporting civil rights and and gay rights.
The headquarters of the Kenan-Flagler Business School at UNC-Chapel Hill was named the McColl Building upon its completion in 1997 in recognition of McColl's efforts on behalf of his alma mater. McColl has mentored students of the McColl Business School at Queens University of Charlotte where he served on the Board of Trustees for 19 years (1991–2005). McColl gave the initial for Charlotte's Teaching Fellows Institute, and McColl's daughter, Jane McColl Lockwood, is president of Charlotte-based McColl Foundation.
Many of McColl's philanthropic contributions have focused on his family. He endowed the Charlotte Children’s Theatre which includes the McColl family Theater, funded the McColl Center for Visual Art (a Charlotte-based organization that promotes the visual arts in the Southeast), endowed an English professorship at the Norfolk Academy, Norfolk, Virginia in honor of first cousin Edith Pratt Breeden (Patty) Masterson (1922–1997, attorney, teacher), and endowed a professorship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science in honor of his mother Frances Pratt Carroll McColl and sister Frances Carroll McColl Covington (1932–1990).
| “ | My mother taught everyone in the family to love books, and we have prospered from having access to them and, perhaps more important, knowing where to turn to find the information we need." Recalling hours his mother spent reading to her four children in Bennettsville, S.C., McColl said, “I think we were educated far beyond my school system. | ” |
In 1991, McColl purchased, restored, and relocated one of his great-grandfather Duncan Donald McColl's homes in Bennettsville, South Carolina and then donated it to Marlboro County. It became a new home for the Marlboro County Chamber of Commerce and The South Carolina Cotton Trail. See: the D.D. McColl house
In 1998 and 2004, Jane Spratt McColl, with Hugh McColl, donated 400 acres (1.6 km2) on the Catawba River in York County near Rock Hill, South Carolina for an environmental museum, possibly to be named the Museum of Life and the Environment, with building design by architect William McDonough.
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