A Family Focus on Health

A handful of affluent donors seek to improve care

While many family foundations like to support health charities, most focus on the treatment or cure of a specific disease.

“Families fund based

on their passions, and every family has obviously been touched by health issues,” says Karen Green, who works with family philanthropies at the Council on Foundations, in Washington. “People are either grateful to a certain facility or they have experienced tragedies and want to alleviate that tragedy for other families.”

Two family foundations, however, have plunged deeper into their areas of interest, alternative therapy and pain relief, and created a reservoir of research and new programs aimed to better patients’ lives. In the process, the foundation heads have become near-experts in their fields and have sparked the interest of other donors:

• Penny Pilgram George, a Minneapolis psychologist and the wife of the former chairman of the medical-technology company Medtronic, devotes her time and her family’s millions toward getting doctors to broaden their view of traditional medicine and incorporate treatments like acupuncture and Chinese herbs. Ms. George says doctors need to do more to treat not only their patients’ physical ills, but also their emotional and spiritual needs. Among her efforts, Ms. George has persuaded 19 other donors to pool resources to support so-called integrative medicine.
• The three children of the late Shirley Steinman Katzenbach, whose fortune came from her family’s Pennsylvania news-media company, are using the $13-million their mother left them to try to improve the way physical pain is diagnosed and treated. The Mayday Fund, in New York, prides itself on identifying key researchers seeking ways to alleviate the pain patients suffer and providing small grants that can then prompt bigger gifts from other sources.

The key for donors who are affluent but don’t have enough to give billions, says Stephen Isaacs, a philanthropic adviser in San Francisco, is to identify the issues that “get overlooked by the big guys.” He adds: “It is at the local level or small, pilot level that you can find the gems and promote them and publicize them, and then others — larger foundations, businesses, or government — can pick them up.”