Posted on September 26, 2012

Cleveland, Mt. Sinai Health Care Foundations Award $10 Million Each to Case Western Reserve School of Medicine

The Mt. Sinai Health Care Foundation and the Cleveland Foundation have each announced a lead gift of $10 million to launch a campaign for a new medical education and research building that will serve as headquarters for the School of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University.

The gifts, the largest ever awarded by either foundation, will help fund construction of a 160,000-square-foot five-story structure that incorporates the most modern technology, teaching, and laboratory techniques. Estimated to cost about $50 million, the new building will be located on CWRU's West Campus, a fourteen-acre parcel where Mt. Sinai Medical Center once stood. The facility will include technologically advanced anatomy labs, seminar rooms designed for the school's acclaimed Western Reserve2 educational model, and community health research and outreach programs.

Cleveland Foundation president and CEO Ronn Richard said the foundation's gift was made possible by four Cleveland families who left charitable gifts to the foundation in the 1960s and '70s earmarked for medical research and education. "By pooling these funds, we are able to make this powerful gift," said Richard. "How pleased these donors would be to know that their gifts are helping to create a new twenty-first century medical school for Cleveland, a cause unimaginable fifty years ago." The gift to the university is the first in a series of commitments the foundation is planning to announce to mark its centennial in 2014.

"This major commitment to the future of the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine continues the mission of medical excellence, teaching and research that were the hallmarks of Mt. Sinai Medical Center for nearly a century," said Marc C. Krantz, board chair of the Mt. Sinai Health Care Foundation. "Much of its lifesaving, groundbreaking work took place in partnership with the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine. With the construction of the new medical school building on the site of the Mt. Sinai Hospital, we are thrilled to continue the legacy of a special hospital and return the land to a useful medical purpose that will improve the human condition. "