Background and career
Jon Lloyd Stryker (born c. 1958) is an American architect, philanthropist, and billionaire heir to the Stryker Corporation medical technology company fortune. Stryker is the founder and president of the Arcus Foundation, which primarily supports great ape conservation efforts and LGBT social justice, and has awarded over $500 million in grants. The threatened colobine species Rhinopithecus strykeri is named after him. According to Forbes, Stryker's net worth is estimated at $5.3 billion.
Stryker was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He is the youngest grandchild of Homer Hartman Stryker, founder of the medical supply company Stryker Corporation. Jon's father, Lee Stryker, died in an airplane crash in 1976. Stryker earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in biology from Kalamazoo College in 1982. He now serves on the college's Board of Trustees and was the recipient of the college's 2010 Distinguished Service Award. He also received a Master of Architecture degree from the University of California, Berkeley.
Stryker is a registered architect in Michigan and is president of Depot Landmark LLC, a development company specializing in the rehabilitation of historic buildings. Stryker is a founding board member of Greenleaf Trust, a privately owned bank in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Stryker is the founder and president of the Arcus Foundation, a private international philanthropic organization primarily supporting great ape conservation efforts and LGBT causes, as well as other social justice endeavors. In 2024, Stryker was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Stryker was named one of the nation's Top 50 donors by the Chronicle of Philanthropy every year from 2006 to 2012 and again in 2014. He was named to Forbes' list of America's Top 50 Givers in 2018. Speaking to Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors in 2008, Stryker explained that the Arcus Foundation's two primary areas of focus, while seemingly unrelated, are bound by the common themes of compassion and justice:
Great apes are under huge threat. They are becoming extinct in the wild, and they are being used in the biomedical and entertainment industry then just being thrown away. We don't use the language of animal rights — it's more of a compassion and conservation language. That's one common ground — the compassion side. Another connection is justice. In our work for human rights, we are among those trying to expand traditional ideas of social justice to include sexuality and gender. In our great apes work, we often see a link between economic development for people and ape conservation — social justice for people can truly enable conservation. In 2016, Jon Stryker and his sister Pat Stryker each gave $5 million to the Equal Justice Initiative to help fund a national memorial to victims of racial lynching in the United States. The siblings made the donation in honor of their late father, Lee Stryker. In 2017, Stryker donated $1.275 Million to expand Virgin Islands National Park with the purchase of an 11.8-acre property on St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands. Stryker is a donor of The New York Community Trust, which announced in 2020 that it would donate $75 million to the city's social services and cultural non-profit organizations that were affected by the coronavirus pandemic.
Stryker, who is openly gay, is one of the world's leading philanthropic donors to the LGBT community. His Arcus Foundation is the top LGBT-specific grant-making organization in the United States, giving more than $17 million a year to organizations working toward social justice for LGBT people in 2013. Stryker is a Platinum Council donor (giving US$50,000 or more in annual contributions) to the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund, a national organization that works to support the candidacies of openly LGBT officials at all levels of government. In 2015, Stryker spearheaded, together with Jurek Wajdowicz, the ongoing international series of LGBT-themed photography books published by The New Press. In October 2019, Styker donated $2 million to Spelman College for the first ever queer studies chair at an HBCU (Historically black colleges and universities).
