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1999–today
The fortune and the foundation: Judd Leighton, the banker of the Founders leg, and his wife Mary Morris Leighton gave in two forms: personally, in gifts like the 3 million dollar Notre Dame directorship told above, and through the Judd Leighton Foundation, which their fortune endowed and which stands among the largest foundations seated in South Bend — assets of 149,593,378 dollars on its 2024 federal filing. The foundation's grantmaking is concentrated by its charter in St. Joseph County: health, education and economic development, in grants that run from a few thousand dollars to seven figures — a single documented instance, its 1,015,000 dollars to the University of Notre Dame in its 2024 filing year, shows the foundation still giving at the scale of the personal gifts that preceded it.
The award endowment: In 1999 Judd and Mary Morris Leighton and the Leighton-Oare Foundation gave 2.1 million dollars to the Community Foundation of St. Joseph County to create the Leighton Award for Nonprofit Excellence — an endowed award, carrying a 100,000 dollar challenge grant, for the county's outstanding charity; its first recipient was LOGAN, the county's organization for people with developmental disabilities. It remains the largest documented single gift to the Community Foundation by a local family in this record.
The names at the hospital: Memorial Hospital's map carries the Leighton name four times — the Leighton Memorial Heart and Vascular Care Center, the Memorial Leighton Trauma Center, the Leighton Senior Center and the Memorial Leighton Healthplex — and The History Museum's gallery is the Leighton Gallery. The Tribune's account of the 2012 IU South Bend gift lists these among the Leighton Foundation's funded works; the individual amounts behind the hospital and museum names are not published in the record reached, and the names are recorded here, as the Fort Wayne leg recorded its own unfigured namings, in words rather than figures.
Sources:
- The Judd Leighton Foundation's Form 990-PF filings, as compiled from the filings (tax year 2024) — assets of 149,593,378 dollars; the grant of 1,015,000 dollars to the University of Notre Dame.
- The Chronicle of Philanthropy (23 September 1999) — the 2.1 million dollar gift creating the Leighton Award, and its first recipient.
- South Bend Tribune (2012) — the Leighton Foundation's funded facilities at Memorial Hospital and the Northern Indiana Center for History.