The chief executive of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, discusses her organization’s work advocating for health-care changes, fighting childhood obesity, and pushing for social change in a profile by the Financial Times.

Ms. Lavizzo-Mourey earned a medical degree from Harvard University and an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania; she is the first female and first African-American to lead the $10-billion foundation, the largest health-care philanthropy.

“We want to create transformative social change that improves the health of people and the health care they get, so we’ve got a very clear, focused mission,” she says. “We don’t have to deliver results quarter to quarter, we have to deliver results decade to decade, and that makes us have a very different mindset than corporations or, for that matter, governments that can have a much more short-term horizon than we do.”

In 2007 the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, created by the heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, gave away $487.8-million. It also pledged $500-million to lower the rates of childhood obesity by 2015. Ms. Lavizzo-Mourey says that philanthropy is strengthened by collaboration among different types of groups working for different but related causes, like health and education or poverty.