Commonwealth Fund

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The Commonwealth Fund is a charitable foundation established in 1918 by Anna Harkness (wife of one of the original Standard Oil investors, Stephen Harkness) with her initial gift of $10,000,000. She placed her son Edward Harkness as its first president. Through additional gifts and bequests between 1918 and 1959, the Harkness family's total contribution to the Fund's endowment amounted to more than $53 million.

The Fund is one of the major philanthropic foundations in the United States and one of the few established by a woman. It has given support over the years to medical schools, to the building of hospitals and clinics in rural areas. In New York City, it was the Commonwealth Fund that was the major contributor to Columbia University for the building of a new Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center of the College of Physicians and Surgeons and Presbyterian Hospital in 1922.

The Fund administered a number of fellowships including the Commonwealth Fund Fellowship later renamed the Harkness Fellowship, which allowed academics and artists from outside the United States to travel and study there for two years.

Today, The Commonwealth Fund is a private foundation that aims to promote a high performing health care system that achieves better access, improved quality, and greater efficiency, particularly for society's most vulnerable, including low-income people, the uninsured, minority Americans, young children, and elderly adults.

The Fund carries out this mandate by supporting independent research on health care issues and making grants to improve health care practice and policy. An international program in health policy is designed to stimulate innovative policies and practices in the United States and other industrialized countries.

[edit] External links

• Commonwealth Fund