The overall
focus of the Foundation’s efforts is “to provide funding for
programs and projects designed to improve, preserve or restore
the health and health care of the people in Miami-Dade County,
Florida, with priority given to projects in the Coral Gables
community.”
As the board of directors of the Dr. John T.
Macdonald Foundation continues to do its work, we again reflect on
our history and the Foundation's relatively short existence as
a grant-making institution. We are gratified that our
significant efforts have been fruitful and that our foundation is stable.
We again reaffirm our commitment to our core mission to improve
the health and well being of children and families in our
South Florida community. With confidence in our worthy purpose,
we have concluded that we could, and should, continue to
accomplish more. We have evaluated the success of our two
large-scale visionary initiatives, now in their eleventh year, and have watched
as each has met its goal of seeding evolutionary and
revolutionary initiatives. We continue our commitment to
community based organizations in our county and to provide
nursing scholarships in three local schools of nursing. We
continue to be vigilant and appropriately responsive to the
unexpected needs that do occur in our community.
The Dr. John T. Macdonald Foundation School Health Initiative originally
created clinics in a single feeder pattern, consisting of three
elementary schools, one middle school, and a high school, in
Miami-Dade, providing a dedicated staff offering basic health
care, health promotion and disease prevention education, and
psychosocial services for the medically underserved children in
those schools. Comprehensive primary health care including wellness
education and support services has been available within these
school settings to all students. Since 2005, after the completion of
a five year, $6.25 million
commitment, the Foundation has awarded an additional $3 million to
the project, providing services to over 8,000 children in the
North Miami Beach school feeder pattern. In 2010, we expanded
the project to include North Miami High, North
Miami Middle and Booker T. Washington, increasing access
to our services for 15,000 children. We
are proud of our other partners, including The Children's
Trust and the Batchelor Foundation, who also very much contribute to
the success of this extraordinary project. We believe we
have created an innovative, comprehensive model for school health. It
is also our hope that one of the outcomes of
our initiative is the increase of academic performance of the students in our
target schools by improving their health status, attendance and ability to focus
on academics.
The Dr. John T. Macdonald Foundation Department of Human
Genetics was created in 2007 at the University of Miami
Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine. This came as a result of
the Foundation’s long running commitment in the field of
genetics at the medical school. Three years after the Human Genome
Project successfully mapped the more than 20,000 genes in human
beings, the Foundation identified genetics as a probable disease
prevention tool worthy of support. The global medical community
had recognized that genetics has a dramatic effect on health
care by vastly improving diagnosis, thus enabling intervention,
and ultimately prevention of the disease. Genetics reach into
every area of human health and disease as every single human
condition has a significant genetic component. The first mission
of the Foundation was to create The Dr. John T. Macdonald
Foundation Center for Medical Genetics at the University of
Miami Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine “to establish an
international center of excellence at the University of Miami
for the discipline of Medical Genetics that will advance
research, offer education, and provide service." We originally
committed $6.25 million to this project. In 2005, we made a
further $5 million investment to create the Miami GeneCure
Diagnostic Laboratory. We
were proud of its efforts to detect curable diseases in newborns with
the use of genetic screening. We knew that both of
these projects served as catalysts to attract further research, and
in 2007, our hopes were realized with the recruitment of
two of the world’s premier geneticists, Dr. Jeffery Vance and Dr.
Margaret Pericak-Vance, the creation of the Dr. John T. Macdonald
Foundation Department of Human Genetics, and the
implementation of a Foundation-funded endowed chair at The
Miami Institute for Human Genomics.
This year, we continue our commitment to the field of genetics by
establishing the Dr. Skip Elsas Scholarship Fund to support an
endowed lectureship in biochemistry/genetics.
The Foundation also remains very committed to our smaller,
one-year grants. Since the inception of the Foundation in
1992, we have made grant awards and commitments totaling
$30,126,845. $9,934,936 has gone to our one-year grants and
scholarships. Contributions and commitments to our signature
programs total $20,191,909. It is a great pleasure for us to
serve our community by funding both our signature programs and
our smaller grants. The overall focus of the Foundation’s efforts is
“to provide funding for programs and projects designed to
improve, preserve or restore the health and health care of the
people in Miami-Dade County, Florida, with priority given to
projects in the Coral Gables community.”
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Priorities of the Foundation
OUR PRIORITIES:
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Projects that promote health
education, prevention and early detection of
diseases.
-
Health-related projects that
assist children and the economically
disadvantaged.
-
Projects that target medical
rehabilitation.
WE DO NOT FUND:
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National projects which would
result in funding leaving Miami-Dade County,
Florida
-
Projects that request multi-year
funding (except by invitation)
-
For-profit organizations
-
Support of political candidates
or campaigns
-
Purchase of tickets to dinners or
fundraising campaigns
-
Projects that promote a religious
faith
-
Direct support of individuals
-
Other grant-making foundations
For information on how to apply for a
grant or to learn more about the Foundation,
contact:
Kim Greene
Executive Director
1550 Madruga Avenue, Suite 215
Coral Gables, Florida 33146
Telephone: (305) 667-6017, Fax: (305) 667-9135 |
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