Saul Brandman Foundation

Saul Brandman Foundation

The Saul Brandman Foundation was established in 1993 to formalize the Los Angeles-based philanthropy of Saul and Joyce Brandman. Saul Brandman built his wealth through garment manufacturing before transitioning into Southern California real estate, assembling a portfolio managed through Domino Realty Management that includes commercial holdings in Beverly Hills. Joyce Brandman, the foundation's president and Saul's widow, has led the entity for three decades alongside directors Mark and Michelle Rubin of Rubin Properties, embedding the foundation within a tight network of regional real estate operators and institutional trustees. The foundation allocates grants across two primary domains: higher education and medical research. Its most recognizable asset is Brandman University, a nonprofit institution established in partnership with Chapman University and designed to serve adult and non-traditional learners with online and hybrid programs. On the medical side, the foundation has directed significant funding to Cedars-Sinai for breast cancer and geriatric research centers, alongside targeted support for other Southern California hospitals. Operations are lean and deliberately low-profile, run out of a Beverly Hills office with a small governing board. In May 2024, Joyce Brandman continued to sign foundation filings as president, confirming her ongoing daily involvement in grant decisions more than three decades after the foundation's launch. Structurally, the foundation differs from the endowment model of institutional peers in its reliance on a single operating partner relationship — Chapman University — for its educational flagship, and its co-mingling of operating directors from a for-profit real estate enterprise, Rubin Properties. This creates an unusual governance overlap where the foundation's grantmaking board members simultaneously manage the commercial property portfolio that serves as a principal source of its asset base.