Leon Levine, founder of the Leon Levine Foundation, has died at 85, the Charlotte Observer reports.

Levine, who established the Family Dollar Stores retail chain, and his wife, Sandra, helped fund health care, education, the arts, and community causes in Charlotte, North Carolina, awarding more than $450 million through their foundation—a figure that does not include the couple’s personal giving. Born in Wadesboro, the youngest of four children, Levine was 12 years old when his father died and he began helping his mother and a brother run The Hub, the family department store in Rockingham. In 1959, at the age of 22, Levine used $6,000 to open the first Family Dollar Store in Charlotte. In 2015, Family Dollar Stores was sold to Dollar Tree for a reported $8.5 billion.

Levine’s philanthropy in Charlotte spanned decades and included support of local parks and museums and major gifts for hospitals, colleges, and medical research. Notable grants include funding for scholarships at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte totaling $33.8 million and support for the Levine Cancer Institute, part of Atrium Health, totaling $45 million. Other grants included $10 million to help create the Levine Children’s Hospital and $15 million to establish the Levine Center for the Arts’ cultural campus of museums and theaters in Charlotte.

Following his retirement from Family Dollar in 2003, Levine embarked on what he called his “second career,” Levine Foundation president Tom Lawrence told the Observer in 2020. “The first decades of his life were about building a business and making money; now it’s philanthropy.”

“There’s a lot of visibility with larger named organizations around the Charlotte area,” Lawrence continued, “but what gets lost is that literally hundreds of groups have been funded by his foundation....The vast majority of grants were given to causes that just needed operating funds.”

(Photo credit: Kam King Heslop)