Staff Report
Published Oct. 8, 2012

Trustees of The Duke Endowment have elected Greenville businesswoman Minor Mickel Shaw to serve as chair of its board.

Shaw will be the 10th person to hold the position since the endowment’s founding in 1924. She succeeds the late L. Neil Williams Jr., who headed the endowment board from January 2011 through August.

Minor Mickel Shaw

Shaw joined the board in 1999. She chairs the Committee on Educational Institutions, and has served as chair of the Committees on Governance and Child Care. She also is a member of the Committees on Investments and Human Resources.

Based in Charlotte, The Duke Endowment was established in 1924 by N.C. industrialist and philanthropist James B. Duke. As the largest private foundation in the Southeast, it focuses on four program areas: child care, health care, higher education and rural churches.

In 2011, it distributed nearly $113 million in grants to organizations in North and South Carolina. Health Sciences South Carolina, a statewide biomedical research collaborative based in Columbia, has received a total of $32.25 million from the endowment.

Shaw is the president of Micco LLC, a private investment company. She also chairs the Greenville-Spartanburg Airport Commission and the Daniel-Mickel Foundation.

Her board memberships include the S.C. Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities Foundation, MDC, Hollingsworth Funds, South Carolina ETV Communications, Piedmont Natural Gas, BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina and Columbia Nations Funds.