David Bohnett has been funding social justice for 25 years. The founder and chairman of the David Bohnett Foundation, devoted to improving society through social activism, has given away more than $135 million of the foundation’s money and his own to organizations focusing on a handful of areas, including LGBTQ equality, the city of Los Angeles, the arts, technology access, gun violence prevention, animal welfare, and research and leadership development programs.

Bohnett has an interesting backstory that has informed his giving and continues to drive it, including being “a rare, openly gay MBA student at the University of Michigan” during the 1980s, as IP founder David Callahan wrote in 2014. Bohnett became an activist in grad school and manned a “‘gay crisis hotline,’” where he talked to students about how to come out,” Callahan wrote. Bohnett also volunteered to appear before freshman psychology classes to dispel ignorance and negative ideas about gay people. He would stand before the students, looking like the perfectly normal Midwesterner that he was, and say, ‘I’m gay, ask me anything.’”

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