Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Chief to Step Down After 14 Years

Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, who as president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation pushed to make it easier for people to maintain their health regardless of socioeconomic background, said Tuesday that she will step down as soon as a successor is named.

Dr. Lavizzo-Mourey, 61, has led the foundation for nearly 14 years. She is the first woman and the first African-American to lead the New Jersey-based institution, which in 2014 ranked as the nation’s third-largest private philanthropy with $10.3 billion in assets. The foundation made $346 million in grants that year and nearly $348 million in 2015.

In 2014, under Dr. Lavizzo-Mourey’s direction, the foundation shifted its grant strategy to promote what it describes as a “culture of health” in which changes in diet, the built environment, work-force policy and school lessons combine to make it easier for people to eat better, exercise more, access medical care, and make other choices that improve health.

To that end, this year the foundation gave $50,000 to Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health to examine the role residential segregation has on heart disease among African-Americans in the deep South, and $210,000 to Harvard Medical School to develop an artificial-intelligence tool to diagnose patients in underserved areas of the country.

Previously, Robert Wood Johnson focused more of its attention on individual health issues, like preventing tobacco use.

The health of many Americans has improved during her tenure, Dr. Lavizzo-Mourey said during an interview with The Chronicle Tuesday. She cited a stabilization — and even improvement in some states — of the childhood obesity rate, and increased life expectancy in some areas of the country.

But the gains are uneven. Black and Latino populations in many areas have not seen increases in life expectancy, and many areas of the country are plagued by opioid addiction.

“There are places where we are getting healthier,” she said. “At the same time, there are signs we cannot be at all timid about this. We’ve got to redouble our efforts to really get to the point where as a nation we are all healthier.”

The culture-of-health shift built on Dr. Lavizzo-Mourey’s work battling childhood obesity. In 2007, the foundation dedicated $500 million to the problem. Eight years later, in 2015, Robert Wood Johnson doubled that pledge, committing another $500 million over 10 years.

The first installment of the investment focused on research that helped make the case that childhood obesity is a national epidemic. Much of the second round of grants will be directed toward advocacy work — pushing to make school lunches healthier, and getting food and beverage companies to more clearly label their products and reduce the amount of calories they contain. The foundation said a special effort will be made to warn parents of young children that drinking sugary sodas is unhealthy.

Dr. Lavizzo-Mourey said she was stepping down because much of the work of shifting the foundation’s strategy, such as reorganizing internally and developing relationships with a broader slate of partners, had been accomplished.

“We at the foundation are at a really important inflection point in our work,” she said. “It’s really at a point where it’s ideal for someone to come in and take it to the next level.”

Michelle Obama Comes Calling

Dr. Lavizzo-Mourey’s years-long efforts caught the attention of the Obama White House. First Lady Michelle Obama leaned heavily on Robert Wood Johnson’s work in her “Let’s Move!” campaign to encourage children to exercise and eat healthy food.

Under Dr. Lavizzo-Mourey’s leadership, health-care organizations “stopped just talking to ourselves” and started designing approaches to health with input from government social-services departments, social-justice nonprofits, foundations, transportation experts, and leaders from the corporate and financial worlds, according to Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.

Dr. Benjamin credits Dr. Lavizzo-Mourey with enlarging Robert Wood Johnson’s focus from health care and health insurance to a broader view of overall wellness.

“She transformed our thinking on health,” he said.

Robert Ross, chief executive of the California Endowment, agreed. Dr. Lavizzo-Mourey moved the foundation “from a relatively narrow health-care frame to a broader wellness and health-equity frame” in dealing with childhood obesity, he wrote in a statement.

Dr. Ross praised her “leading edge” work on health reform and children’s health insurance and said others in philanthropy should emulate her integrity, transparency, and humility.

“With Risa, it was never about her ego,” he wrote. “It was always about the work.”