With the pandemic as a backdrop, the CUNY SPH Foundation sought to prioritize the health and well-being of the three communities of the school in 2021: the 900+ CUNY SPH students, the 500,000+ current and continuous learners of the CUNY system and their families, and the city where we all live and work.
The commitment to these three communities was illuminated by the total fundraising success of the year—over $2.1 million raised, more than all the prior years of fundraising combined for the foundation—and included funding to address specific and critical needs of these three communities.
Led initially by Dr. Richard Park, co-founder and former CEO of CityMD, and with additional investments from the Josiah R. Macy Foundation and William Randolph Hearst Foundation, the CUNY SPH Foundation Board of Directors expanded its mandate to support students in times of emergency. With the formation of the Student Resiliency Fund, the Foundation expanded beyond emergency grants and scholarship support to include a new area of support: tuition debt relief. This new focus fulfilled on a pledge by Dean Ayman El-Mohandes that no student will be sent to collections if they’ve achieved graduation but could not receive their diploma because of lingering debt. For many students, the inability to take out more student loans or the prevalence of chronic financial struggles due to the pandemic prevented them from paying off their outstanding debt. The tuition debt relief program now ensures that students who can demonstrate financial need and an inability to pay will not be prevented from advancing in their careers to support public health.
Further, this year was marked with the addition of scholarships to support new domains of study, and continuing scholarships for those students who struggled to afford their tuition. Dr. Michael Apa, a cosmetic dentist and philanthropist, committed resources to launch a new area of focus in oral population health. Under the guidance of Dr. Luisa Borrell, Distinguished Professor of Epidemiology, 10 new Apa Scholars will receive full scholarship to study oral health as a public health imperative. The Hearst Foundation continued their support of our student population with a financial need-based scholarship fund which will be launched in the next academic year to award 20 $2,500 scholarship awards to students who cannot afford their tuition despite a commitment to their studies.
Looking outward into our larger CUNY community, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation invested a half-million dollars to form the Campaign for a Food Secure CUNY, a joint initiative of the Healthy CUNY Initiative and the CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute. This new campaign is focused on the evaluation of existing food and income security programs across CUNY’s campuses, and the development of new activities to bolster support for CUNY students and their families. This effort is the continuation and expansion of more than three years of partnerships between the Initiative and Institute’s Director, Dr. Nicholas Freudenberg, Distinguished Professor of Public Health, and the CUNY SPH Foundation, with over $1 million raised to date.
Importantly, the Foundation placed a priority focus on the Covid-19 pandemic and the vaccine efforts in New York City. Collaborating with the CONVINCE USA Initiative at CUNY SPH, $587,000 was committed by the New York Community Trust, the New York State Health Foundation, the Altman Foundation, the Samuel Freeman Charitable Trust, the CDC Foundation, the Community Health Accelerator Partnership and the Danaher Corporation to lay the groundwork for the CONVINCE USA Initiative and to tackle one of our largest projects to date: the New York State Vaccine Education and Adoption Project. The NYS Project, launching summer 2021, will measure vaccine sentiments and visualize sentiment data down to the zip code level in an interactive and publicly available dashboard interface which will merge other data sources with our own. Under the guidance of Dean El-Mohandes and with Drs. Scott Ratzan and Ashish Joshi leading the sentiment surveying and dashboard development respectively, the program will track and display data over an 18-month period. Recent CUNY SPH valedictorian, Hannah Lathan Stewart, will develop and launch a new community engagement effort to help organizations in communities of low vaccine sentiment to build communications tools and campaigns which can provide high quality, timely and accurate information to their neighborhoods and constituencies.
Governing this work is the CUNY SPH Foundation Board of Directors. Chaired by Dr. Lyndon Haviland, this group of dedicated volunteers welcomed three new members during the year for an initial two-year term. Each bring their own passions for public health and appreciation for CUNY SPH as New York City’s public school for public health. Daniel Lowy, Founder and CEO of EMU Health in central Queens, Dr. Robert Lufrano, retired Chairman and CEO of BlueCross BlueShield of Florida, and Dr. Nicole F. Roberts, Executive Director of Feed-A-Billion, a DC-based international non-profit; these individuals each bring a unique commitment to our school and will support the expansion of our efforts in the years ahead. Additionally, Board Secretary Margaret Crotty, CEO and Executive Director of Partnership with Children, a children’s mental health non-profit, and member-at-large Gil Addo, co-Founder and CEO of RubiconMD, both agreed to renew their service with a new three-year term.
The year ahead promises even more ambitious fundraising goals and striving to achieve even more success on behalf of the school, its students and alumni, the CUNY community, and our city.
