The MetroHealth Glick Center, MetroHealth’s new hospital on  West 25th Street, opens in the fall of 2022.

Kate Brown

“And that everyone was committed to ensuring that our community, no matter your financial status . . . had access to the finest care. That was really motivating for me.”

The groundbreaking ceremony for the Glick Center, 2019.

A key piece of his re-energizing effort was the creation in March 2001 of The MetroHealth Leadership Institute, a months-long course in how to raise money. The partnership with Case Western Reserve University and its Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences featured a faculty that included some of the city’s most successful fundraising experts. Those experts taught teams of MetroHealth doctors, nurses, administrators, and members of both the System and Foundation boards to develop strategic plans to raise needed funds. Each of the eight teams selected a MetroHealth project that needed financial support. Then, based on what they learned, team members built their best case for donor support. After the final Leadership Institute class, their projects became MetroHealth fundraising campaigns that raised money to support many important priorities. Among the most effective outgrowths of the Institute were meetings in which doctors and nurses made personal appeals for donations, telling real-life stories in face-to-face meetings with foundation leaders and individual philanthropists. Physician leaders and their team members were now involved in meeting with prospective donors, explaining how contributed funds would be used to have a positive impact on the broader community.⁷

“The Leadership Institute’s team members now understood that people give gifts to support the work of people who are doing something important,” Mr. Unger said. “At that time there were very few discussions between prospective donors and doctors about their work. It was important to make people aware of how important MetroHealth is to the community.”⁸

Mr. White and Mr. Unger also met two to three times a week with prospective donors. Using hospital tours and a slide show presentation, they pitched the hospital’s greatest needs. One of those was the goal of raising $2.5 million—more ambitious than any other goal—for the nursing home. The Elisabeth Severance Prentiss Foundation responded first, in 1998, with a gift of $1 million, stating that the project was consistent with the goals set forth by Ms. Prentiss when she created the trust in 1939.⁹ Those goals included aiding hospitals organized and operated exclusively for public, charitable purposes.¹⁰ MetroHealth’s development staff leveraged that $1 million grant to raise additional funds from the Kresge Foundation and the Jacobs Family Foundation and, with those funds, the Elisabeth Severance Prentiss Center for Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation opened in 2000.

Nothing begets success like success, especially in the world of philanthropy. The seal of approval from those foundations convinced others that MetroHealth was worth investing in. From there, institutions such as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the country’s largest public health philanthropic organization, looked for reasons to include—rather than exclude—MetroHealth for consideration.

“What Fred was really doing was building a culture of philanthropy,” said Kate Brown. “He was helping the organization understand it deserved philanthropy and that they could do it, they could raise the funds.”¹¹

In 2001, Mr. Unger hired Kate Brown away from the Cleveland Clinic and enrolled her in the second session of the Leadership Institute. But her MetroHealth story began decades earlier, at MetroHealth’s main hospital. Her grandmother worked in the laundry room in the 1920s and ‘30s and her mother was born at the hospital in 1933.

Ms. Brown grew up in Shaker Heights, earned degrees from Miami University and Cleveland State, and worked for three years at the Cleveland Clinic, where she learned from what she called “the best-in-class philanthropy program.”

She was drawn to MetroHealth by the excitement of helping build something new and by the MetroHealth mission, which seemed ingrained in every employee. “It was this overwhelming sense you had from everyone you met that access to healthcare was a right and not a privilege,” she said. “And that everyone was committed to ensuring that our community, no matter your financial status . . . had access to the finest care. That was really motivating for me.”

One of the early projects Mr. Unger and Ms. Brown worked on together was raising money to open community health centers in inner-city neighborhoods. In addition to filling the healthcare gap created by the closing of Saint Luke’s and Mt. Sinai, the centers were to replace the Kenneth W. Clement Center for Family Health Care, which was closing in 2004 because the neighborhood around it had become less residential and more industrial.¹² Mr. White wanted to make sure MetroHealth continued to care for the underserved by providing healthcare closer to where people lived—in strip shopping centers, for example—that were convenient and offered parking and easy access to bus stops.

Mr. Unger went first to the Cleveland Foundation to secure a grant to study where best to open the new centers. When locations were selected, MetroHealth invited the Saint Luke’s Foundation for input on the kinds of healthcare local residents needed most. With that input, MetroHealth developed a variety of programs at its new Buckeye neighborhood location, including classes to help residents quit smoking and manage their diabetes, weight, and asthma. A Senior Forum offered a health and wellness lunch-and-learn program for older residents. And the Nutrition, Education, and Wellness Program helped school-aged children build good health habits.

That ability to help shape services led the Saint Luke’s Foundation, in 2005, to award MetroHealth what was, at the time, the biggest donation in the health system’s history—$10 million.

“Fred deserves all the credit for this,” Ms. Brown said. “He talked to them about how we were coming to the neighborhood that they had served. He made clear in the grant proposal that the Buckeye Health Center would serve as a bridge from the Saint Luke’s Medical Center mission of healing the sick to the Saint Luke’s Foundation mission of creating healthy communities, that this would be the legacy of Saint Luke’s.”

From his start in 1998 until he retired from MetroHealth in 2005, Mr. Unger found great satisfaction in fundraising.

“Every time somebody would say to me, ‘Isn’t that awfully hard work? I hate fundraising,’ I would tell them, ‘No. There are good people giving away money every day, all you have to do is find them. And it’s joyous when you do.’”¹³

In his seven years with the health system, Mr. Unger helped raise $72 million in charitable and public funding, and The MetroHealth Foundation’s assets grew from $2 million to $25 million. In addition, Foundation grants to support patient care, scientific and clinical research, and medical education totaled $10 million.¹⁴

The MetroHealth Foundation had truly been re-energized.
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In 2006, with a $500,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The MetroHealth Foundation teamed up with an impressive list of local law firms and others to greatly expand the three-year-old Community Advocacy Program, a partnership with The Legal Aid Society of Cleveland that provided legal services to help patients stay healthy. “Imagine a mother lives in a duplex home,” Ms. Brown noted, “and as a result of the mold, the child is having asthmatic issues. . . . The doctor can [then] say, ‘I need you to speak to Mary, the legal aid attorney.’ That legal aid attorney had a lot more teeth to deal with the landlord to say, ‘You need to clean up the mold in this house.’”

The Glicks’ initial gifts to MetroHealth included two years of support for SAFE and for the MetroHealth Autism Assessment Clinic (MAAC).

Programs like SAFE also benefit from the fundraising efforts at MetroHealth.

Alfred F. Connors Jr., MD, and Mildred Lam, MD

In 2018, longtime MetroHealth physicians Alfred F. Connors Jr., MD, and Mildred Lam, MD, made what was then the largest gift in the health system’s history to establish endowed research and teaching fellowships.

The Middleburg Heights November Family Health Center opened in July 2013.

MetroHealth staff at the former Deaconess Hospital.

The program also helped patients obtain government benefits, for example, or escape domestic violence. With the new funding, the Community Advocacy Program grew from one attorney who served only pediatric patients at the main campus to four, including one who spoke Spanish. It also added a paralegal who worked exclusively with those re-entering the community after being incarcerated and expanded to three additional health centers. Thompson Hine LLP served as the lead local funder, and others followed, including Benesch, Friedlander, Coplan & Aronoff LLP; Calfee, Halter & Griswold LLP; the Eva L. and Joseph M. Bruening Foundation; the Callahan Foundation; the Cleveland Foundation; the George Gund Foundation; the Saint Luke’s Foundation; and the United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland, Inc. In the end, the program raised more than $1.27 million for the first medical-legal partnership established in Ohio and the fourth in the United States. In the years since, the Cleveland Clinic and University Hospitals have developed their own programs, which now exist in hundreds of cities across the country.¹⁵

The Community Advocacy Program—with its diverse group of high-profile supporters—allowed The MetroHealth Foundation to step outside its traditional portfolio of healthcare-only supporters. It also provided the opportunity to collaborate with another nonprofit to jointly fundraise for a project, instead of competing for dollars.

That same year, MetroHealth’s Senior Health and Wellness Center at the former Deaconess Hospital took that collaborative spirit to the next level. In partnership with Benjamin Rose, Concordia Care, and the Visiting Nurse Association’s Hospital and Palliative Care Partners of Ohio, MetroHealth designed and delivered a synergistic array of services to help older adults maximize their health and independence across a complete continuum of care. Together, the four organizations raised $7.3 million to make their compelling vision a reality.

Then came another $1 million gift in 2012 from Iris and Mort November and Linda and Larry November to improve access to healthcare for residents of southern Cuyahoga County. The Middleburg Heights November Family Health Center, which opened in July 2013, was named in their honor.¹⁶

Donations ramped up again that same year, Ms. Brown said, after the arrival of Akram Boutros, MD, as President and CEO. With media attention and his initial appearance at The City Club of Cleveland, MetroHealth shed its status as “Cleveland’s best-kept secret”—a common description, even by people in the community working in healthcare.

“There was confidence in leadership again,” Ms. Brown said. “The community knew that Akram was going to be around, that he was bold. And he liked to meet with donors. He liked asking them to support the organization.”

And they seemed to like saying yes.
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Over the next few years pivotal gifts came in, including more than $1.6 million in 2015 from Bay Village entrepreneur Miguel Zubizarreta and his wife, Denise, to build a home away from home for out-of-town spinal cord patients who come to MetroHealth to receive groundbreaking electrical stimulation treatment to restore movement. In 2018, longtime MetroHealth physicians Alfred F. Connors Jr., MD, and Mildred Lam, MD, made what was then the largest gift in the health system’s history to establish endowed research and teaching fellowships.

There were other major donations, too, for the School Health Program, for example, and the Nurse-Family Partnership Program, which sends visiting nurses into the homes of pregnant women and those with young children to ensure proper development and reduce the area’s alarming infant mortality rate.

All the while, JoAnn and Bob Glick were paying attention. They read about Dr. Boutros’s first 90 days on the job and his 5:00 a.m. appearances in the emergency department. They talked to friends who were physicians who had worked at MetroHealth and about MetroHealth’s initiatives addressing the social determinants of health.

In making donations, the Glicks looked for programs that were proactive, had clear objectives, and could be sustainable over time. Ms. Brown introduced them to Lisa Ramirez, PhD, Director of Community and Behavioral Health, and the staff of the Students Are Free to Express (SAFE) Project. “You can’t help but fall in love with the passion of those who developed and run these programs and what they achieved,” Mr. Glick said.

The Glicks’ initial gifts to MetroHealth included two years of support for SAFE and for the MetroHealth Autism Assessment Clinic (MAAC).

In these programs, the Glicks saw an alignment between their values and the MetroHealth doctrine of hope, health, and humanity. Those values were instilled by Mr. Glick’s work as the founder and CEO of Dots, a retail clothing chain, and Ms. Glick’s work as a nurse. Dots’ primary customers were urban women and girls and the Glicks wanted to ensure their philanthropy reached them and their families. Likewise, Ms. Glick has a master’s degree in community health nursing and was attracted to MetroHealth’s focus on the social determinants of health such as housing, transportation, and healthy food.

On December 1, 2020, MetroHealth announced another gift from the Glicks, a historic $42 million donation, the largest in the health system’s history by far. It was believed to be the third-largest donation from individuals ever made to an essential hospital in the United States and landed them on The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s list of the top 50 US donors in 2020.¹⁷

That gift was an act of tzedakah, from the Hebrew word “tzedek,” which is the closest word in Hebrew for philanthropy and is seen as a form of social justice. “It’s about doing the right thing because one wants to, not because one has to,” Mr. Glick added. The purpose of the gift was threefold: first and foremost, the gift was to help the underserved members of the community. Second, it was to recognize the dedication and hard work of MetroHealth’s staff. And last, the gift reflected the Glicks’ desire to give to institutions often overlooked by most benefactors. Ms. Glick noted, “We both felt strongly that we give where others don’t give and hopefully encourage others to consider supporting MetroHealth in their 185-year mission.”

“It would’ve been really easy for them to go to one of the other two institutions where a lot of people have made large gifts,” Ms. Brown noted. The Glicks, though, were not swayed by doing what other donors have done. “They told me, ‘We want to give where we can have the greatest impact, one that reflects our values and vision,’” Ms. Brown said. “It was just their way of being who they are.”

The MetroHealth Glick Center, MetroHealth’s new hospital on West 25th Street, opens in the fall of 2022. “The new center,” Mr. Glick said, “offers an environment to best provide respectful and quality healthcare for all.” And, under the leadership of Kate Brown, The MetroHealth Foundation continues to play a critical role in supporting education, research, and patient care at MetroHealth.

“The future looks very promising,” Ms. Brown said in 2022, “because The Foundation board undertook the writing of a new strategic plan under the leadership of Brian O’Neill and Gareth Vaughan, past and present board chairs, respectively.”

That plan reaffirmed The MetroHealth Foundation’s purpose and reorganized and re-energized the staff once again.
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“Now, we have the great stories of MetroHealth,” Ms. Brown said, “and the undergirding to move philanthropy forward.”

And no matter how hard the work, she said, she could not agree more with Mr. Unger: “There are good people giving away money every day, all you have to do is find them. And it’s joyous when you do.”

There were other major donations, too, for the School Health Program, for example, and the Nurse-Family Partnership Program.