Julia Koch Has a New Foundation. What Can We Expect From the Family’s Future Giving?

Julia Koch. David Koch Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

In the last few years, Walmart heiress Alice Walton and Julia Koch — the widow of David Koch — have been sitting at the top of Forbes’ America’s Richest Women list. Julia Koch is currently worth $64.3 billion and someone with the potential to become a major philanthropist. Koch’s rise is part of a larger trend of women wielding increasing power in the philanthropic sector, including MacKenzie Scott, Laura Arnold, Priscilla Chan and others.

However, it’s been hard at times to disentangle Julia Koch’s own personal philanthropic interests from the broader David H. Koch Foundation and its looming billionaire founder, who was also a major right-of-center donor. Back in 2022, I charted out a few things we might expect from Koch in the coming years. As president of the David H. Koch Foundation, we noted longstanding family interests in health and arts, including major donations to Lincoln Center, the Met, and NYU.

But Julia Koch’s philanthropy is now starting to come into focus, in the form of the recently established Julia Koch Family Foundation, which she quietly launched in 2023. The foundation itself has no formal website and tax records are not yet available to the public. However, a press release calls it a “new chapter for philanthropist Julia Koch and her children while continuing the family’s lifelong commitment to philanthropy.”

This suggests a family affair where Julia Koch and her three children will play a role in shaping a new chapter of family giving. That same press release charts out early interests of the foundation, which will focus on supporting “transformative initiatives in healthcare, education and the arts, with a particular focus on causes that impact the communities that are near and dear to the family.”

The Julia Koch Family Foundation kicked off its early grantmaking with a big, eight-figure donation to NYU Langone. In late February, the foundation made a $75 million gift to NYU Langone Health toward its new Julia Koch Family Ambulatory Care Center in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Is this the kind of giving we should expect from this new chapter of Julia Koch’s philanthropy? Here are a few things to keep in mind going forward.

Big health giving

The Koch family overall are no strangers to big-time health philanthropy. Late last decade, Julia and David Koch made a $10 million gift to Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford for a new clinical research unit focused on allergy and asthma. Son David Jr. has severe nut and shellfish allergies and is required to carry an epi-pen. The couple also made an earlier gift to David H. and Julia Koch Research Program in Food Allergy Therapeutics at Mt. Sinai. David Koch, of course, endured his own health struggles, including a harrowing experience surviving a USAir jetliner crash in 1991, only to be diagnosed with prostate cancer a year later.

So it’s no surprise that one of Julia Koch Foundation’s first major grants is toward healthcare. The new ambulatory care center will offer full-service radiology and imaging, operating rooms for ambulatory surgery, endoscopy suites and eight physical therapy bays. “My family and I have been impressed with NYU Langone’s transformation in the past two decades,” said Julia Koch at the time.

It also makes sense that one of the foundation’s first grants would be with a large organization with which the family has been familiar for years. Julia Koch herself has personally supported NYU Langone’s Hip Center, home to the Julia Koch Associate Professor of Orthopedic Surgery; she was treated by a doctor at the facility. She also gave a $1.4 million gift to NYU to establish the Julia Koch Endowed Scholarship for medical students.

As future healthcare giving kicks off, look for some of the other organizations the family has longstanding relationships with (Mt. Sinai, Lucile Packard) to be prime potential grantees.

From New York to Florida

Like many wealthy New Yorkers looking to beat the winter chill, Julia Koch has a winter home in South Florida. That makes her one of many super-wealthy transplants in the state. Other billionaires who call Florida their second home include David Tepper and NYU Langone board chair Ken Langone, who spoke to the connections between the Big Apple and South Beach in the recent announcement of Koch’s donation.

“Palm Beach County is full of New Yorkers, many of whom now live there year-round. For the rest of us, it’s a home away from home,” he said. “Julia understands that need and has been an incredible partner.” South Florida should be looked at as a potential regional focus for Julia Koch’s philanthropy going forward.

Julia Koch’s children may also shape the future of the family’s giving. Daughter Mary Julia Koch, a Harvard 2023 graduate, is a staff reporter for the New York Sun, a conservative publication. In my last post on Julia Koch, I noted that the the wider Koch clan pulled back from some of the more overt ideological stances they were known for when both brothers were alive. That said, this question of just how conservative future Koch family giving will be remains an open one as the next generation takes on more of a role.

David Jr., meanwhile, has been in recent talks to become a minority owner of the New York Nets. He’s a 2021 Duke grad with a BA in political science and government. The youngest sibling, John Mark Koch, still keeps a low profile. This next generation of Kochs may well become some of the most powerful heirs in the country.

Other interests and questions

The new Koch foundation will also support education and the arts. Julia Koch has a longstanding interest in the performing arts and once served on the board of directors for the School of American Ballet, where she annually chaired the Nutcracker Family Benefit and Winter Ball. As one example of this arts and cultural giving, in 2023, the the David H. Koch Foundation gave $5 million to the Cox Science Center in West Palm Beach.

Other questions remain as this foundation gets off the ground. First is how much money Julia Koch can readily deploy toward philanthropy. Billionaire fortunes are usually not entirely liquid, and in the Kochs’ case, billions are most likely locked up in stock in the family’s privately owned company and in other non-cash assets that can’t be moved to charity easily. Since the foundation is still quite young and public tax records aren’t available, it’s unclear what the asset base of the foundation is, or how much will be invested into the foundation each year.

Another question is whether more unconventional organizations will receive Julia Koch’s money. The David H. Koch Foundation often made some of its largest gifts to established organizations in New York. NYU certainly fits that bill, as well. But will Julia Koch move away from this kind of standard giving to big institutions and make connections to other types of organizations in New York, Florida and beyond?