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2005–2026
The Suracks: Chuck Surack built Sweetwater Sound into one of the largest music retailers in the country, and the Surack giving is the broadest in this record: by the Indianapolis Business Journal's account the Surack Family Foundation supports more than 600 nonprofits a year. The documented signature gifts: 5 million dollars to Taylor University in 2024 for the Horne Academic Center — a Fort Wayne fortune's gift to a university in Upland, printed here because the fortune and the givers are Fort Wayne's; 3 million dollars to Purdue Fort Wayne's music industry building and 3 million dollars pledged to Trine's Fort Wayne campus, both told above; the 1 million dollar Surack Family Foundation grant to Purdue Fort Wayne in the 2025 listings; and an endowed scholarship at Saint Francis whose amount is unpublished. The family's giving runs through education because, in Chuck Surack's own repeated formulation, music and education built his company; the record shows the formulation is accurate.
Barbara Bradley Baekgaard and Vera Bradley: The Vera Bradley fortune's signature giving is institutional: the Vera Bradley Foundation for Breast Cancer, begun by Baekgaard and co-founder Patricia Miller in 1993 after their friend Mary Sloan's death and established in 1994, has directed 41.7 million dollars to breast-cancer research by its 2025 annual report's account — nearly all of it to the Vera Bradley Foundation Center for Breast Cancer Research at Indiana University School of Medicine, its partner since 1999. It is cumulative fundraising across three decades, raised from thousands of donors through the foundation's events, and it is printed here as cumulative — not as a personal gift — but in scale it is the largest single channel of charitable money any Fort Wayne business fortune has built, and the Baekgaard name on it is a founder's, not a sponsor's.
Steel Dynamics and the rest: The Steel Dynamics Foundation's documented Fort Wayne gifts are the 3 million dollar Trine pledge and the 1.2 million dollar Ivy Tech gift told above, with co-founder Keith Busse's personal 200,000 dollar Trine commitment beside them; the foundation's larger pattern runs to the company's plant communities across several states. The Don Wood Foundation — the 80/20 Inc. fortune, established 2018 — granted 8.9 million dollars across 88 grants in 2024 alone, including 1 million dollars to OrthoWorx; its full record is in the Nonprofits leg. The Rolland fortune's documented signature is the Lincoln gift told above. Two honest negatives close the category: Do it Best, one of the city's largest private companies, shows no single announced major gift in the record reached — its giving runs through corporate and foundation channels without a headline figure — and Frank Freimann's documented major gift left town: 500,000 dollars to Notre Dame's Memorial Library, while the trust bearing his name paid in large part for Freimann Square at home, dedicated in 1973, in an amount the record does not state.
Sources:
- Taylor University (2024) and Indianapolis Business Journal — the Surack gifts and the foundation's annual pattern.
- Vera Bradley Foundation for Breast Cancer annual report (2025) — cumulative research donations of 41.7 million dollars.
- Trine University and Ivy Tech releases (2008; 2022) — the Steel Dynamics gifts; Don Wood Foundation Form 990-PF (2024), as compiled in the Nonprofits leg.
- Freimann Charitable Trust records, as compiled in the Wealth section of this history — the Notre Dame gift and Freimann Square.