Community Organizer | Class of 2018

Creating a model of grassroots collective action that enables individuals facing incarceration, their families, and their communities to play an active role in their defense

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4100450&forum_id=2#36978212)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacArthur_Foundation#History

History

John D. MacArthur owned Bankers Life and Casualty and other businesses, as well as considerable property holdings in Florida and New York. His wife, Catherine, held positions in many of these companies. Their attorney, William T. Kirby, and Paul Doolen, their CFO, suggested that the family create a foundation to be endowed by their vast fortune. One of the reasons MacArthur originally set up the Foundation was to avoid taxes.[9][10]

When MacArthur died on January 6, 1978, he was worth in excess of $1,000,000,000. He left 92 percent of his estate to found the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The composition of the Foundation’s first board of directors, per MacArthur’s will, also included J. Roderick MacArthur, John's son from his first marriage, two other officers of Bankers Life and Casualty, and radio commentator Paul Harvey.[1] Jonas Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine, later joined the Foundation's board of directors.[11]

MacArthur believed in the free market.[12][13] However, MacArthur did not spell out specific parameters for how his money was to be spent after he died. MacArthur told the Foundation's board of directors, "I figured out how to make the money. You fellows will have to figure out how to spend it."[14]

Between 1979 and 1981, John's son J. Roderick MacArthur, an ideological opponent of his father with whom the elder MacArthur had an acrimonious relationship, waged a legal battle against the Foundation for control of the board of directors.[9] The younger MacArthur sued eight members of the board, accusing them of mismanagement of the Foundation's finances.[15][16]

By 1981, most of the original board had been replaced by members who agreed with J. Roderick MacArthur's desire to support liberal causes.[17] This ultimately resulted in the creation of what, in 2008, historian[18][19] and conservative commentator[20] Martin Morse Wooster called "one of the pillars of the liberal philanthropic establishment."[21] In 1984, MacArthur again sued the board of directors, asking a Cook County circuit court to liquidate the entire MacArthur Foundation. He dropped the suit later that same year when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.[22][23]

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4100450&forum_id=2#36978251)