WILLIAM S. CUMMINGS
President of Cummings Foundation
Founder of Cummings Properties, LLC. & New Horizons

[Biography | Honorary Degree]

To William S. Cummings, “giving back” often means “paying it forward” by investing in worthy projects and people with promising futures.

Widely known as an enormously successful real estate developer and founder of the flagship firm Cummings Properties, he is equally well known as a philanthropist.

Cummings Properties was established in 1969 with the construction of Cummings Park, followed by the adjacent Tower Office Park, in Woburn, Mass. Today, the corporation operates nearly eight million square feet of office and research space, as well as luxury condominiums and other residential properties, in 10 metropolitan Boston communities. In 1998 he was named “Real Estate Entrepreneur” of the Year for New England by Ernst & Young.

Cummings attributes his extraordinary success to being able to take calculated risks, and knowing how to draw on others’ strengths. “I like to foster the attitude that, whatever idea you have, if you do it alone, it will be only 80 percent as good as it could be,” he notes.

Today, most of Cummings Properties’ investment portfolio has been donated to Cummings Foundation. Established in 1986, it is now one of the largest charitable foundations in Massachusetts with assets of $500 million. Cummings and his wife, Joyce, spend much of their time working for the foundation.

The foundation owns and operates two not-for-profit independent and assisted living facilities, New Horizons at Choate and New Horizons at Marlborough, which collectively serve more than 500 seniors. The foundation also supports the McKeown Scholars program, which awards college scholarships in the communities where most of Cummings Properties’ 500 employees live. Through the foundation, Bill and Joyce Cummings endowed the Cummings Family Chair in Entrepreneurship and Business Economics in the School of Arts and Sciences at Tufts and made the landmark $50 million naming gift for Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine.

Cummings has served 25 years as a director of the Woburn Boys and Girls Club. Since the early 1990s he has also published three community newspapers, joined boards of directors, and has even been licensed as an auctioneer and a justice of the peace.

He is a graduate and trustee emeritus of Tufts University and was an overseer of Tufts School of Medicine. He is the recipient of the Tufts University Distinguished Service Award, the highest award the University gives to an alumnus.