How to apply
To apply for a Toulmin Fund grant, nonprofit organizations should follow the discretionary grant-making application process on the Dayton Foundation website: www.dayton foundation.org
DAYTON — Philanthropist Virginia B. Toulmin’s $26 million gift is an “unbelievable charitable legacy” for the Dayton region, said Mike Parks, president of Dayton Foundation.
The largest single gift in the foundation’s 89-year history creates a permanent endowment that will produce more than $1 million annually for Dayton-area nonprofit organizations.
“It’s a big impact for the community,” Parks said. “You think about an additional $1 million of help at a time in our community when resources are so precious, it couldn’t come at a better time.”
Toulmin, a former president of the Dayton Woman’s Club, died June 13 in Sarasota, Fla. She was 84.
The former businesswoman was the widow of international patent attorney Harry A. Toulmin Jr. and spent 41 years in the Dayton area.
Virginia Toulmin understood that she could not anticipate the region’s future needs and endowed an unrestricted fund, Parks said.
Virginia Toulmin was raised in St. Louis and had a bachelor’s degree in nursing from Washington University.
She moved to the Dayton area in 1958 when she married Toulmin, a patent attorney who practiced with his father, Harry Aubrey Toulmin Sr., in the downtown Dayton partnership of Toulmin & Toulmin.
Virginia Toulmin met her late husband while working as a stewardess nurse with the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. Toulmin traveled weekly between offices in Washington, D.C. Dayton and Springfield.
Toulmin appointed his bride to the board of Central Pharmaceuticals Inc., a small Indiana company he rescued from bankruptcy.
Upon his death in 1965, she became the company’s president and strived to fulfill his dream of growing the company.
In 1995, she sold the business for more than $178 million to German pharmaceutical giant Schwarz Pharma. That became the basis for her philanthropy.
“Virginia greatly appreciated all her time here in Dayton,” Parks said. “This was really her gift back to Dayton for all that it had done for her.”
She moved to Florida about eight years ago after 20 years of spending winters there. She became deeply rooted in that cultural community and had given millions to the opera, theater and symphony, according to the Sarasota Herald Tribune.
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