Health-Care Philanthropy Executive Talks About Foundation's Efforts

July 21, 2008

Health-Care Philanthropy Executive Talks About Foundation's Efforts

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.

Comments

Congratulations to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Lavizzo-Mourey. In the field of community services we have a long way to go. Part of the problem of obesity is the food supply. It is easier to shut a mouth with a Hug than it is to buy food for which you don’t have the money. There needs to be a more direct way to reach the 32 million children and adults in the United States who go hungry each day. As you say, education is one way. Check out Myra Msibi of NCNW in New York and Sunneytown in Gloucester New Jersey. There is a dearth of poverty in nearby Pennsylvania, but you kbow that already. I have been a fundraiser for over ten years and there’s still a lot of people to reach. Attitudes by the recipients themselves must be challenged and changed,
As the late MLK said: “You can’t pull yourself up by the bootstraps if you haven’t got the shoes.” And he should have known since he left his family without the shoes. Collaboration between actors and others enabled his family to have shoes. Your assistance to local community groups will began to buy the shoes.

— doris scott Jul 22, 08:17 AM #

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