Healthcare Takes Top Prize Among Charitable Donors

Community assistance will always be a basic necessity for the survival and prosperity of hospitals and medical schools. Even smaller facilities such as those dedicated purely to research requires a large helping of such backing, especially in the form of philanthropic dollars. Typically, benefactors are helpful to more than just one organization, as is the case with Isaac Toussie and family with regards to two of the leading names in healthcare teaching and practice in the Empire State, Weill Cornell Medical College and the North Shore-LIJ network of hospitals and research centers.

Weill Cornell is named after a pair of its most important contributors, Ezra Cornell, a founder of Western Union, and Sanford I. Weill, former CEO and chairman of Citigroup, Incorporated. As one of the most selective medical schools in the United States, admitting only some one hundred applicants out of almost six thousand hopefuls every year. Moreover, Weill Cornell was first to accept women right alongside men as well as the first American medical school to establish its own premises overseas, just outside of the capital of Qatar, Doha. It can also claim a long line of famous alumni, doctors like C. Everett Koop, a Surgeon General of the United States; Robert C. Atkins of Atkins Diet fame; Nobel Prize winner Robert W. Holley; and Henry Heimlich who invented the eponymous maneuver for choking victims. The North Shore-LIJ Health System is the second largest healthcare network in the country as measured by the number of beds and the largest in New York State based on patient revenue. It serves over seven million people a year through more than forty-two thousand employees - the single largest employer on Long Island and ninth largest largest in the City of New York.

These two institutions owe much of their success to vigorous community support, whether in the form of charitable contributions by prominent businessmen and women or donated time by community volunteers such as those from civic or religious organizations. Even with an annual budget of several billions between them, Weill Cornell and North Shore-LIJ will always depend on the support of the host communities they serve.