Richard and Helen DeVos
Lee University will honor its major benefactors, Richard and Helen DeVos, in a luncheon on Tuesday September 21, which will showcase its new Science-Math complex.
The noon luncheon will open an event called “Celebration 2010”, which marks the completion of Lee’s four-year “Press Toward the Mark” Campaign. The 73,000 sq foot Science and Math complex will be officially dedicated in a ceremony and ribbon-cutting at 10:30 a.m. Friday.
DeVos first befriended the Church of God’s premier educational institution in 1988, according to president Dr. Paul Conn, who called the Michigan couple “a major catalyst in the expansion and development of our campus for over twenty years.” DeVos will be joined by several dozen community leaders who have made contributions to the new science building.
Richard DeVos is owner of the NBA basketball Orlando Magic franchise, among many other business interests. He is listed each year in the national rankings of the world’s wealthiest men. He declines to discuss the size of his personal fortune, but Forbes magazine in 2010 estimated that he is among America’s fifty wealthiest citizens with a net worth which it guesses to be $4.5 billion.
Tuesday’s luncheon will be the first public look at Lee’s new science facility, the second phase of which was completed and opened to students last month. The luncheon will be staged in the building’s “Great Room” which connects the two wings of what is now the largest building on the Lee campus. During the past three years, Conn said, business and corporate leaders from Cleveland and Bradley County conducted what he calls a “very quiet, very effective fund-raising campaign” to help pay for the building.
The DeVoses are among the nation’s leading philanthropists. They are frequent patrons of the arts, health care, education, and many causes which emphasize their Christian faith. They are lifelong members of the Christian Reformed Church. In explaining their giving to Lee University, they recently said, “We appreciate the commitment of Lee University to provide an academic program that is socially stimulating and spiritually dynamic for your students.”
Helen DeVos was an elementary schoolteacher as a young woman; her continuing interest in teacher education was recognized by Lee University in 1998 with the naming of the Helen DeVos College of Education in her honor.
The DeVos family have been leaders in the recent renaissance of downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan, a city whose urban resurgence has been hailed as a model for mid-sized cities across the nation. DeVos and his friend Jay Van Andel were co-founders of Amway Corporation, which they began in 1959 in Grand Rapids and built it into one of America’s largest privately held companies.
(Source: Lee University)