Annenberg Foundation |

Ambassador Annenberg’s commitment of $150 million to the Center for Public Broadcasting put college courses on the airwaves, allowing thousands of television viewers to take classes at home and earn credits toward college degrees.

Walter H. Annenberg made an initial $2.65 million gift to the University of Pennsylvania in 1958 to establish the Annenberg School for Communication, a graduate program combining the disciplines of speech and rhetoric with techniques of modern media and mass communications.

Sunnylands, the 200-acre estate in Rancho Mirage, California which was the winter home of Ambassador Walter and Leonore Annenberg will open to the public in early 2012.

The Annenberg Foundation's $100 million gift to The Peddie School in 1993 was the largest gift ever to a prep school. The grant doubles Peddie’s endowment, with most of the funding allocated for scholarships and financial aid.

Ambassador and Leonore Annenberg donate their $1 billion Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This collection includes more than 50 works by 18 of the greatest artists of the 19^th Century and early 20^th Centuries including Manet, Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Picasso.

In 1990, to focus attention on the needs of historically black colleges, the Annenberg Foundation made a lead $50 million challenge gift to the United Negro College Fund in what becomes, at the time, the most successful fundraising drive ever by the organization.

In 1993, with a $120 million grant to the University of Pennsylvania, the Annenberg Foundation endowed the Annenberg School for Communication and created the Annenberg Public Policy Center, which pursues research and convenes discussions on the critical intersection of media, communication and public policy.