Evaluating the impact of your gift
Evaluating the impact of your gift
Cheryl and Rob McEwen began their philanthropy in 2003 after two deaths in their family, both due to cancer, caused them to reflect on what they could do to help. According to Cheryl, “Dealing with the hospitals and the treatment for our relatives was a real eye-opener. We saw the stress on our hospitals while we were there with our loved ones. We wondered how they would ever be able to cope with the baby boom generation entering the doors. We were aware that almost half of the Ontario budget goes to health care and wanted to do something that would help bring new treatments, reduce hospital stays and ultimately bring down some of the costs associated with health care. We already had a relationship with the Toronto General and Western Hospitals and we met with them to find out what we could do. They told us about the four platforms for the strategic plan for the hospitals and one of them, ‘Regenerative Medicine’, was clearly the most transformational. We met with key researches in the field and learned about the potential for the body to repair itself through regenerative therapies and stem cell research. In 2003 very few people knew much about this field. We learned about the strength of scientific talent in Toronto moving into this area of research and how a gift from us could accelerate this research.
“We became very excited that regenerative medicine was the right cause. But we also realized that to make a real impact, we needed to focus on two key things: collaboration and strategic funding.”
“In order to foster the collaboration between the great talent that was already in Toronto, we knew we needed to find the best stem cell scientist to run the McEwen Centre. We needed a world recognized leader to pull these great minds together in a collaborative format. So we developed an advisory board of internationally renowned scientists to help us develop a strategic plan and recruit Dr. Gordon Keller from New York City’s Mount Sinai Hospital. Fifteen top researches from five hospitals in Toronto were chosen to join the McEwen Centre. Through all of this we had moved from being philanthropists to active philanthropy.” .
The McEwen Centre for Regenerative Medicine was established at University Health Network in 2003 with a generous $10 million donation from Rob and Cheryl McEwen, which they matched in 2006 with a second donation. The McEwen Centre’s vision is to be a world-renowned centre for stem cell biology and regenerative medicine. To achieve this ambitious goal, the team of McEwen Investigators is working together to accelerate the development of more effective treatments for conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, respiratory disease and spinal cord injury. The McEwen Centre is based in the heart of Toronto’s Discovery District at the MaRS Centre/Toronto Medical Discovery Tower
Cheryl explained that, “Along with offering funding to these top scientists we felt that commercialization was another key to success. We wanted to provide seed funding to support research projects of great merit, assessing the risks. If we could commercialize this research we could change the model to help the centre ultimately become self funding.
“Monitoring and evaluating our Doctor’s results is critical to our ongoing success. We hold quarterly meetings with Dr. Keller and review the Doctor’s research results. We also hold an annual McEwen retreat where all the Doctors and researchers come together to present to one another: By sharing both their accomplishments and their unexpected findings the team establishes a great synergy and sharing of information. The old mindsets of protecting information are removed because the researchers feed off each other’s presentations. Scientists want to advance their research and they get really excited when they learn how their colleagues have solved a problem or suggested a different approach. These group discussions are incredibly stimulating and productive.
“We are still in the early days of this research, but our results speak for themselves. Our researchers are learning to harness the power of stem cells to repair, regenerate or replace diseased cells, tissues and organs. We are working toward the reversal of the devastating effects of cardiovascular disease, allowing children with diabetes to live day to day without insulin injections or pumps. Far from a science fiction scenario, these are realistic goals. The tremendous therapeutic potential of stem cells lies in their remarkable ability to generate a variety of specialized cell types that could provide a renewable and virtually unlimited source of cells for cellular therapy and tissue engineering to treat diseases such as Cancer, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s diseases, spinal cord injury, heart disease, diabetes or osteoarthritis.
“My advice to anyone contemplating a large gift who wants to ensure they are effective is: Decide the area you want to be involved in; learn about how your money will be spend and don’t be shy about asking questions. One you make your choice, set up the parameters for how your funds will be used and meet regularly with your charity to review progress.
“Our work in philanthropy has been extremely rewarding. We have had the opportunity to meet brilliant and committed people who are working on behalf of all of us for the betterment of our health. It has really broadened our perspective and we are truly honoured to be in a position to help these extremely driven scientists.”
