Barbro Osher
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Barbro Osher (born May 21, 1940 in Stockholm) is the Swedish Consul General in San Francisco and a well-known philanthropist, chairman of the Bernard Osher Foundation and of the Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation. Together with her husband Bernard Osher she gave the third largest contribution to charity in 2006, according to the online magazine Slate. Barbro Osher is also the owner and publisher of Vestkusten, a Swedish-American newspaper.
Barbro Osher graduated from Stockholm University with a degree in languages and political science. After working in publishing, and as a copywriter in Sweden she moved to the United States in the 1980s. From 1995 to 1998 she served as the Consul General of Sweden in Los Angeles.
Together with her husband since 1980, Bernard Osher, she donated 10 million shares of Golden West Financial stock, worth 723.2 million US dollars, to the Bernard Osher Foundation. The money will be used for college scholarships, performing-arts programs, higher-education projects, and the support of three medical-education centers, established by earlier donations. The medical-education centers all aim at integrating conventional and alternative approaches to medicine. They are located at the University of California at San Francisco School of Medicine, at Harvard Medical School, and at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm.
In 2006, Barbro Osher was awarded a honorary doctorate at the Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts at Göteborg University.
[edit] Sources
- The Bernard Osher Foundation: Biographies
- The 2006 Slate 60: Donations
- "Frikostig generalkonsul vill inspirera andra" (Swedish) - interview in Dagens Nyheter, August 14, 2005
- Hedersdoktorer vid Konstnärliga fakulteten 2006 (Swedish) - Gothenburg University press release
