Alan Ashton

As Alan Ashton traveled the world, he noticed a common thread: “In areas where philanthropy thrives, the economy does well.”

And it’s with this ethos that Ashton joined a small sport and Olympic legacy exploratory group in 1998 with the goal of creating an organization that could be used as a platform for economic development and image building, as well as a vehicle to land future Olympic Games after the 2002 Winter Games.

In fact, Ashton was the first private contributor to the newly formed Utah Sports Commission Foundation, providing valuable seed money when the organization was still fledgling and unproven. As the organization has grown, it is only now that the full impact of the early support and vision from founding members like Alan Ashton can be truly appreciated.

A global leader in the early days of computing, Ashton graduated from the University of Utah with a Ph.D. in computer science and co-founded WordPerfect, a groundbreaking word-processing software and predecessor to Microsoft Word. Ashton’s WordPerfect was at the vanguard of the wave of tech companies that relocated to Utah County and helped shape the area into the tech hub Silicon Slopes, as it’s known today.