The Logan Legacy: Three Brothers Carry on the Philanthropic Work Their Parents Started
/The Logans were the main donors for a center for the arts at the University of Chicago. Photo: Eugene Moerman/shutterstock
At a time when billionaire donors are looming ever larger in philanthropy, it can be easy to overlook the accomplishments of more modest foundations whose founders rarely draw media attention.
If anybody had been watching six years ago, when two brothers on the board of the Reva & David Logan Foundation left to form their own foundations, there might have been whispers about family dysfunction, or at the very least, differences in giving philosophy that the family couldn’t resolve.
As it happens, the split was without drama or rancor — it was simply the result of Richard, Jonathan and Daniel Logan creating different paths to honor their parents’ legacy. Richard remained at the helm of the Reva & David Logan Foundation, named after their parents, while brothers Jonathan and Daniel formed their own foundations.
“We all wanted to go our separate ways,” said Daniel Logan. But, he added, “actually, we do have a lot in common.”
Following the amicable split, the brothers have maintained contact with each other in their philanthropic endeavors. Indeed, they often fund each others’ projects. The work they support is faithful to their father David Logan’s passions, but their giving also reflects their individual interests and personalities. Here’s a look at what these three philanthropic brothers support, what drives their giving, and how they’re each paying homage to their parents’ legacy in their own ways.
Reva and David Logan’s legacy
Reva and David Logan, both Chicago natives, met at the University of Chicago, on the steps of the law school. David was a lawyer and an investor. His many interests — including the arts, jazz, investigative reporting and social justice — were what primarily shaped the family’s philanthropy.
In 2007, the Logans, their sons and grandchildren all contributed to the family’s $35 million cash gift to the University of Chicago to build a home for the “study, practice and presentation of the arts” at the university. The gift jump started a fundraising campaign for the $114 million Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, and is one of the largest gifts to the school by a single donor (or single family, in this case), as well as among the largest single cash gifts to the arts in the city of Chicago.
The Reva & David Logan Foundation, created in 1965, may be a relatively modest foundation next to the billion-dollar behemoths we often write about, but it demonstrates how one family can make its mark on the world through a long track record of giving. For instance, the foundation was a significant funder of Ken Burns’ PBS documentary on the history of jazz. It also endowed a chair in investigative reporting at the University of California-Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, and was a major supporter of the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR).
David Logan was engaged in the foundation’s work well into his 80s, and all three brothers sat on the board. In 2011, when David Logan died at the age of 93, Robert J. Rosenthal, then the head of CIR, described him as a “no-nonsense, direct and powerful personality with a wonderful intellectual curiosity.”
“Mr. Logan understood the role investigative reporting has in protecting democracy,” Rosenthal said. “His vision and his philanthropy have been crucial to the success and survival of CIR.”
By the time of David’s death, son Jonathan Logan had already served for years on CIR’s board, and had just ended a term as its chair.
In 2013, Reva Logan died. The University of Chicago hailed the 60-year partnership of husband and wife, which “sustained their family as well as a wide community of artists, writers and scholars.” Meanwhile, from early on, each brother had been drawn to a particular facet of their parents’ philanthropic vision.
One foundation becomes three
Not long after the deaths of David and Reva Logan, the single family foundation became three. By 2016, Daniel and Jonathan had each formed their own foundations, supported by two $92 million “contraction grants” from the Reva & David Logan Foundation. Richard Logan assumed the presidency of the original foundation. Each foundation now has roughly $100 million in assets, according to their most recent tax filings.
Jonathan founded the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation. Daniel, meanwhile, named his foundation “Revada” — a blending of his parents’ first names.
According to Candid, using the most recent available tax filings, over the past five years, the Reva & David Logan Foundation gave 720 grants totaling nearly $48 million to 292 organizations, including grants in 2021. The Revada Foundation gave 126 grants totaling nearly $10.5 million to 58 organizations, including grants in 2020. The Jonathan Logan Family Foundation gave 134 grants totaling $17.6 million to 80 organizations, including grants in 2019.
The brothers remain in touch with one another, said Gloria Logan, Daniel Logan’s spouse and a director and secretary on the board of Revada. They are aware of each foundation’s work, and it’s not unusual for two or even three brothers to support the same project. All three brothers’ foundations also continue to support the University of Chicago’s Logan Center for the Arts.
“The biggest benefit of each of us now having our own foundation is that it allows us to honor the legacy of our parents, while at the same time, letting us pursue our individual priorities through our philanthropy,” Jonathan Logan said in an email. “If you look closely at what each of our foundations is currently supporting, you’ll see strong echoes of our parents’ areas of interest, but also ways in which we have each branched out into new areas that reflect our individual passions.”
The brothers tend to give to institutions where their money will be noticed and have a significant impact, another trait they inherited from their father, Dan said. Like their parents, they also contribute to the nonprofits serving the poor and marginalized, mostly in the regions where they live.
But their styles are different. The Revada Foundation is entirely a family affair, with a board consisting of Dan, Gloria and their son and daughter. Dan is president and has no staff, relying on his family’s help to move grants out the door. By contrast, both the Reva & David Logan Foundation and the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation have larger boards and professional staffs, according to their most recent tax filings.
The Jonathan Logan Family Foundation doesn’t accept unsolicited requests and accepts grant proposals by invitation only. Revada doesn’t solicit applications, but is open to letters of inquiry. The Reva & David Logan Foundation accepts proposals from nonprofits, and the website details the foundation’s priorities and criteria. (The current website notes that due to “internal capacity changes,” it would not accept new letters of inquiry during summer 2022. The message remains. Efforts to reach Richard and foundation staff were not successful.)
Giving for impact
Judging just by their giving history, Richard might be the most fun to have a drink with, Dan to take in a play with, and Jonathan to have a deep discussion about the future of journalism with.
Dan and Gloria Logan were willing to do a lengthy interview for this story, so I’ll start with them. Not that they’re hungry for publicity. “We have purposely flown under the radar because that’s where we are comfortable,” Gloria said. “Dan’s parents were very much like that.”
But when they did give, David and Reva wanted their grants to make a real impact, Dan said. For example, his father was a prodigious collector of illustrated art books. “He collected modern illustrated books from the turn of the century with all the famous modern artists,” Dan said. He could have given his collection to larger museums, but he was worried that his collection might get lost.
Instead, David gave his books to the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco. The museum “actually built a little room for the books, and they were going to be shown and used, whereas sometimes, you give [a collection] to a large museum and it goes into a closet somewhere,” Dan said.
It appears that Dan and Gloria make similar calculations about targeted impact when they give. For instance, Dan attended Knox College, in Galesburg, Illinois, and his Revada Foundation recently gave $2 million to the school to endow a professorship on peace and justice. Knox, a small liberal arts college, is known for its diverse student body. The new Logan professor will direct Knox’s new program committed to helping students explore “equity and equality; empowerment and agency; intellectual, financial and social freedom.”
An acting major in college, Dan co-founded Mosaic Theater in 2014, serving racially diverse audiences in the Washington, D.C., area. The theater has benefited not only from Dan Logan’s personal donations, but also from generous grants from both the Reva & David Logan and Revada foundations (Both Chicago natives, Dan and Gloria moved to the Washington, D.C., area 40 years ago.) Revada has also given more than $1.4 million to D.C.’s Studio Acting Conservatory to acquire and renovate a building to serve as the theater’s new home.
Language and literature is another interest that propels Revada’s giving. Dan Logan worked as a speechwriter for elected officials, including, for a brief time, then-Sen. Joe Biden. In addition, he’s studied and written poetry. So when he and Gloria heard about plans to build Planet Word in D.C., they were intrigued.
Planet Word claims to be the only museum in the country “dedicated to inspiring a love of words and language.” When Dan learned that the museum would include sections dedicated to poetry and to speechwriting, he was hooked. Revada gave the new museum nearly $700,000. Revada also is pitching in to renovate the home of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Dan said.
Finally, as a collector of contemporary illustrated art books, Dan Logan has also been a major donor to the Codex Foundation, whose mission is to advance the notion that handcrafted books are an art form.
New directions for investigative reporting
Revada doesn’t fund much investigative reporting. But Richard and Jonathan more than fill the gap, continuing to fund the nonprofits their parents originally supported, but shaping their giving portfolio to adapt to new challenges.
The Jonathan Logan Family Foundation’s mission is to support “organizations that advance social justice by empowering world-changing work in investigative journalism, documentary film and arts and culture.” Its grantees include the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists; ProPublica; PBS’s “Frontline”; the Marshall Project, which focuses on criminal justice, and “Reveal,” CIR’s award-winning podcast and radio program.
Almost as soon as his foundation was up and running, Jonathan gave a long-term $1 million grant to a nonfiction program created by the Carey Institute for Global Good, based in Rensselaerville, New York. Now dubbed the Logan Nonfiction Program, it offers opportunities for nonfiction practitioners working on long-form projects to spend up to three months at the Institute’s upstate retreat.
More recently, Jonathan has given major grants to institutions focused on reporting on urban problems and the Black experience.
Two years ago, a $1.2 million grant from his foundation helped launch the Logan Center for Urban Investigative Reporting at Temple University, Philadelphia. The Center’s focus is on issues confronting major American cities, such as gun violence, economic inequality and crumbling infrastructure.
In 2022, Jonathan Logan gave Howard University a $2 million grant to digitize its Black Press Archives. He said that his foundation was “proud to partner with Howard to help bring to life the reporting and stories that, in many cases, would be lost to history but for the Black press.”
His donations of more than $1.7 million to the Invisible Institute in Chicago also helped support hard-hitting investigations like the nonprofit’s report on police departments’ use of police dogs to brutalize suspects, which won a 2021 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.
Logan’s funding interests also include documentaries. For example, he invested $400,000 in the documentary “Welcome to Chechnya,” which exposed the brutal repression of the LGBTQ community in that region and won a Peabody award.
Social justice in Chicago
The Reva & David Logan Foundation’s aim is to serve as “a timely catalyst to initiate and support powerful, innovative ideas and approaches that challenge the status quo.” The foundation says it encourages its grantees “to think radically and act positively to alter society and the world.”
Richard Logan’s social justice giving through the foundation is quite extensive, and mostly focused on poor and marginalized communities in Chicago. In 2021 alone, the foundation’s social justice grants totaled $4 million, and include support for local education programs ranging from preschool to high school and community college. Richard has also given a $1 million grant over three years to a community school in Oakland, California.
Richard Logan is another strong supporter of investigative journalism, often giving to the same nonprofits that Jonathan Logan supports, such as the Invisible Institute and CIR. But he also funds several investigative reporting initiatives in the United Kingdom, along with initiatives in Paris, Berlin and Peru.
The foundation’s website states that Richard has been a strong advocate for the freedom of WikiLeaks’ co-founder Julian Assange, who has been pursued by the U.S. Department of Justice for the past 12 years for publishing sensitive diplomatic and military information in 2010.
In 2018, when the Chicago nonprofit Protect Our Parks sued the Obama Foundation for siting the Obama Presidential Center in a location that would encroach on a Chicago park, the Reva & David Logan Foundation jumped in with an initial $100,000 grant to pay the group’s legal fees. More grants followed after the nonprofit lost its lawsuit and opted to appeal. Richard Logan called the Obama Foundation’s plans a “land grab” that would harm the community.
“What would David do?”
“Families who give are in many ways at the center of the philanthropic sector, and their influence is far-reaching,” said Nicholas Tedesco, president and CEO of the National Center for Family Philanthropy. “There's a history here of tremendous wealth creation in the United States, and equally, a tremendous commitment to reinvest that wealth into the community.”
How these foundations evolve over time, and whether they remain true to the founders’ legacy, is crucial to their stewardship of funds whose tax-exempt status is meant to serve the larger public, Tedesco said.
Nevertheless, he added, it’s not unusual for family members to form their own foundations. “Families change across generations, and new interests emerge and circumstances in the world change, and people’s perceptions and experiences are different… That’s just natural.”
Even as their philanthropic paths diverge — and sometimes come together again — all three Logan brothers have sought to be faithful to their parents’ vision.
In an email, Jonathan Logan wrote that the Jewish principle of tikkun olam informed his parents’ desire to “repair and improve the world.”
“Social justice was important to them,” Jonathan wrote. “They particularly loved journalism and the arts. And most important, my parents wanted to support brilliant leaders, not just organizations. Their values and priorities are deeply embedded in the work we do every day.”
Or as Gloria Logan put it: “We always think, ‘What would David do?’”