Coleman Foundation Blog

New Outpatient Infusion Center at Mount Sinai Hospital

Mount Sinai Hospital is a 431-bed teaching, research and tertiary-care facility providing health services to Chicago's West Side Community. 

In February 2008, a $75,000 grant was made to the hospital which was used to refurbish its outpatient infusion center, the facility in which patients of the Sinai Cancer Care Center receive chemotherapy treatments.  The project integrated the hospital's inpatient and outpatient services, allowed for additional chemotherapy patient privacy, substantially increased outpatient capacity and enhanced aesthetics of the physical space.

On June 20, Mt. Sinai Hospital held a ribbon-cutting ceremony marking the opening of the new Sinai Cancer Care Center.  At right, Beth Hayden, RN, Director, Oncology Patient Care, makes remarks to a group including Michael Hennessy; Alan H. Channing, President and CEO, Sinai Health System; and Dr. Pam Khosla, Medical Director, Oncology.

Misericordia Breaks Ground on New Homes for Disabled

Founded in 1921 as a maternity hospital for women of meager means, Misericordia now supports more than 550 children and adults with developmental disabilities.  Misericordia's campus includes residences as well as several supportive programs.  The organization maintains a waiting list for services numbering over 600 individuals.

In November 2006, a matching grant of $900,000 was made for the construction of one of several planned Intermediate Care Facilities for the Developmentally Disabled, housing twelve individuals and located on the Misericordia campus on Chicago's north side.   Foundation funds, matched by both Misericordia's organizational endowment and new funding sources, additionally will provide furnishings for two homes and landscaping of the property; bring electricity and plumbing to the site from existing lines; and construct new parking lots and roadways.

On June 17, 2008, Misericordia broke ground on the construction of four new homes.  At right, Sister Rosemary Connelly, Executive Director of Misericordia, presents Michael Hennessy and Clark McCain with a commemorative plaque marking the Foundation's gift for The Coleman Foundation Home.

A Fast Start at Canisius College

As part of its 1998 EAEG program, the Coleman Foundation provided support to Canisius College to establish a small business support center.  In 2004, a grant was made to develop an undergraduate internship program which placed students in community economic revitalization roles.  In October 2005, the Richard J. Wehle School of Business at Canisius developed a strategic plan which positioned the revitalization of its Entrepreneurship program as a high priority.

In the fall of 2006, Dr. Ji-Hee Kim joined the college as the lead Entrepreneurshp faculty member and director of its Entrepreneurship major.  In May 2007, a grant was made to support the "Tomorrow's Entrepreneurs Program."

Core Activities:

1. Four courses were developed and institutionalized
   • Experiential Entrepreneurship:  Creativity, Innovation, Opportunity and Idea Generation
   • Entrepreneurial Marketing
   • Entrepreneurial Leadership
   • International Entrepreneurship
2. A CEO club was established
3. The Canisius Empire Creativity Competition was initiated

Outcomes:

1. 105 students were enrolled in the four courses during the first year
2. The CEO club is the fastest growing club on campus with over 60 members (16 of whom attended the 2007 CEO National Conference)
3. 48 students participated in the business idea pitch and team creativity challenges in the competition

Key Lesson Learned:   Lever Existing Institutions on Campus to Accelerate Growth

New to Canisius, Dr. Kim engaged four organizations and nurtured them as champions and partners for growing her Entrepreneurship program on campus.  Empowering them to support her cause resulted in a faster-growing program.

• The Center for Teaching Excellence, a resource for faculty development, helped identify and recruit faculty to support Entrepreneurship activities.
• The Office of Campus Programming & Leadership Development, which encourages and promotes student involvement and enhances learning through co-curricular programming and leadership development opportunities, promoted Dr. Kim's undergraduate extra-curricular activities, and co-sponsored the creativity competition.
• The Career Center encouraged students to pursue entrepreneurial career opportunities and co-sponsored career workshops with entrepreneurs, alumni networking events, and an alumni entrepreneurs speakers series with the Entrepreneurship major program and CEO club.
• The Office of Undergraduate Admissions promotes and recruits local high school students for Dr. Kim's Youth Entrepreneurship initiatives

Key Lesson Learned:  Getting Senior Level and Development Function Support is Hard

Even with a fast-growing program, converting upper level administrators into champions of Entrepreneurship willing to fund the cause requires much effort.  This is particularly the case when there are large, competing development projects on campus.

• Dr. Kim proved to the Administration that Entrepreneurship is attractive to alumni donors.  Along with another faculty member in Entrepreneurship, she proposed "entrepreneurs on campus" initiatives which brought supportive entrepreneurs into the program and showed the Administration that the program had alumni entrepreneurs poised to support it.  20 entrepreneurs will be part of a membership model to support the program this year.   
• Subsequent to the Coleman Foundation grant, Canisius received a $1 million gift from local philanthropists to establish a professorship in entrepreneurship, innovation and economic development.

Terms of Use

Welcome to the Coleman Foundation Blog.  We look forward to this space becoming a forum for sharing ideas.  We welcome comments to posted items.  However, we do require that all users act responsibly and abide by a few rules.  With credit to the Pioneer Blog Team of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, we have adopted these guidelines to govern the responsible posting of content on this site.

All users agree to act responsibly on this site.  Although we do not censor the content being posted, we reserve the right not to post, or to remove after its posting, any content which in our sole discretion we deem to violate our guidelines.  Such content may be removed immediately and without prior notice, and further postings by the individual may be blocked.

Postings to this blog are subject to these rules:

Political Actity.  As a private foundation, the Foundation is prohibited from supporting attempts to influcence the outcome of any election for public office or engaging in lobbying activity.  Accordingly, these types of content are prohibited:

1. That which expressly or implicitly endorses or opposes any candidate for public office; and
2. That which encourages others to contact a government official to express support for, or opposition to, any legislation, including a specific legislative proposal that has not yet been introduced.

Additionally, hyperlinks to web site pages that contain these types of content, or which direct users to such materials, are also prohibited.

Other prohibitions. Do not post:

1. Anything anonymously.  Always post under your name so that dialogue can continue offline.  Do not falsely state or otherwise misrepresent your identify, affiliation with the Foundation, or any person or other entity;
2. Content that is unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harrassing, defamatory, vulgar or sexually explicit, obsene or pornographic, libelous, invasive of another's privacy, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable;
3. Confidential business or personal information, or content that infringes on any trademark, trade secret, copyright or other prioprietary rights of any party;
4. Content that makes available unsolicited or unauthorized advertising, promotional materials, sweepstakes, "junk mail," "spam," "chain letters," "pyramid schemes," or any similar form of solicitation;
5. Content that is fraudulent, false, inaccurate or misleading; or
6. Content that violates any law, ordinance or regulation; that promotes illegal activities, or that is harmful to minors.

If you do not agree to the Terms stated above, please do not participate.

The views expressed on this blog do not necessarily reflect the Foundation's positions, strategies or opinions.  The Foundation cannot and does not verify or warrant the accuracy or completeness of the content.

Updated May 6, 2008

Welcome to the Coleman Foundation Blog

This purpose of our blog is to share the work of the Foundation as it creates change through the support of practical, results-oriented, sustainable initiatives.

In this space, we'll provide an introduction to selected grantees and explore what they have done that works and how they are achieving success.  We'll also focus on simple lessons we and our grantees have learned which, we hope, will inform future efforts on behalf of those who share our goals.

We also hope to encourage an exchange of ideas which relate to our program areas.  We welcome visitors to leave comments relating to our posts which share best practices and otherwise advance the collective effort to reach Foundation goals.  All visitors are expected to abide by our terms of use which we detail in a subsequent post.

Given our size, we have no expectations of posting on a daily basis.  But we'll try to report often enough to make an occasional visit to our blog worth the trip.  Thanks for joining us.