The University of Chicago shares a unique and little-known connection with what has become the modern family office.

In 1882, nearly a decade before John D. Rockefeller founded the University of Chicago, he established what is largely considered the first full-service single family office in the United States. A single family office manages the wealth and affairs of wealthy families, handling investments, financial planning, taxes, estate management, and other services tailored to a family’s needs.

Working with trusted advisor Frederick T. Gates, Rockefeller bypassed hiring the expensive firms of the day to manage his family’s business affairs, opting instead to create a novel wealth management infrastructure that included professional and administrative staff to handle his and his family’s wealth management needs.

Other prominent and affluent families of the day followed Rockefeller’s lead and created family offices to oversee their financial affairs, investments, and philanthropic activities. Today, the wealthiest individuals—from Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates to Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg—depend on family offices to manage their affairs.

In the spirit of that historical connection, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business is proud to announce the creation of a new Family Office Initiative—one of the first comprehensive programs focused on family office leaders at a major academic institution.

The FOI at Chicago Booth will support the education, research, and networks for current and future family office leaders throughout the world, allowing them to capitalize on the research-driven insights of Booth’s faculty, as well as the resources of the initiative’s collaborators.

Today’s family office leaders have distinct needs and dynamics. While most other similar programs tend to focus largely on the family business, Booth’s new FOI exclusively targets the growing and increasingly important family office sector and its leaders.

The Family Office Initiative includes a steering committee and a council of industry leaders and practitioners, featuring, at present, more than 50 family office leaders from some of the most respected family groups in the United States and Europe. These industry experts form the core of the network mission of the initiative, and they include several Booth alumni, including Morrow Bailey, ’10, managing director at HF Capital; Quan Mac, ’05, CEO and CIO of Greenville Asset Management, a family office for a Grand Rapids, Michigan-based family; and Bob Venable, ’96, president and CEO of the Miami Corporation Management, among several other Booth alumni.

“True to our history, Booth is leading the way by investing resources in a comprehensive program to support the development of family offices, further extending our global reach in this untapped area.”

— Madhav Rajan