AT A GLANCE
• The Faye Allene Rife Brown Foundation gave roughly $6 million to 51 Payne County organizations over 27 years.
• Allene Brown taught at OSU for more than three decades. Her husband, Floyd, was among OSU’s first forestry graduates. They had no children.
• Its biggest gifts built First Presbyterian Church’s Fellowship Hall, helped start Our Daily Bread and funded OSU forestry camp scholarships, spay-and-neuter help for pets and Payne County Youth Services.
• The foundation has made its final grants and will dissolve Dec. 1.

Allene Rife Brown spent her career at Oklahoma State University teaching students to plan, cook and serve meals for a crowd. Her husband, Floyd, one of the school's early forestry graduates, later worked in OSU's forestry department as a computer program analyst.

"I will guarantee you that no one would say a faculty member in forestry at that time or in human sciences would be in the financial position based on salary to start any kind of a foundation," said Andrea Arquitt, an associate professor emerita who taught in Allene's department.

Decades after their deaths, the foundation Allene left behind has helped feed Stillwater's hungry, sent OSU forestry students to field camp in Floyd's name and paid to spay and neuter thousands of Payne County pets.

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