The Washington Square Health Foundation, Inc. grants funds in order to promote and maintain access to adequate healthcare for all people in the Chicagoland area regardless of race, sex, creed or financial need. The Foundation meets this goal through its grants for medical and nursing educa-tion, medical research and direct healthcare services.

As a guide to other foun-dations and other service providers and as a part of the Board’s stewardship of charitable funds, the Washington Square Health Foundation, Inc. has developed a grant evaluation system to ensure that the objectives of various projects are carried out in the manner prescribed by the approved grant.

The Foundation wishes to impress on the philanthropic community that the careful evaluation of the outcomes of grant projects is as important as the appropriate selection of grant recipients.

Washington Square Health Foundation held a most successful 2 ½ day retreat in 1999 wherein we had an in-depth analysis of our first dozen years as a philanthropic organization concentrating on funding grants for the Chicagoland Health Community.

The purpose of the retreat was to allow our Board members uninterrupted thinking time in order to review our work and, more importantly, to have at least two respected and well-known individuals in philanthropic endeavors address our forum and critically --- objectively evaluate our performance in date and help us modify our future endeavors or develop changes in our mission, if necessary.

It may come as a surprise that an excellent attendance by such a heterogeneous group of Directors, along with our three consultants, our legal counsel and Executive Director, was 100% throughout the 2 ½ days, all working diligently on the extensive agenda prepared for us --- and that nobody played golf, nor tennis, nor spent the day in a spa! That you must agree is serious dedication!

What did we learn and what will be our mission for at least the next decade? We were pleasantly surprised to learn that we have an unusually focused group which has spearheaded a type of health care philanthropy that fills a serious void in the health grants field. Our function has resulted in our being an effective catalyst, to be most helpful to institutions and organizations not privy to elaborate funding by the larger bodies of philanthropy, such as government agencies or funders of basic research, to strike a comfortable balance between education, cutting edge research and community health services, and to create a unique grant program known as a program related investment wherein support monies are provided for capital improvement on a low interest loan basis, enabling struggling organizations to proceed with their health projects. A self administrated program related investment foundation activity is extremely unusual for a foundation of our size. Normally, such programs are found in much larger organizations.

Surfacing in much of our discussions was the need to continue and possibly expand our interests in programs such as our study of Emergency Room use and services and the study relating to the large death toll experienced by Chicago in the great heat wave of the summer of 1995. These projects created a large interest in the health community and the E.R. report, for example, stimulated a faster development of E.R. triage support systems by a number of hospitals that greatly reduced the inappropriate use of E.R. facilities and thereby reduced health care costs.

We concluded our retreat with a renew vigor that we have initiated a new pathway in grant giving, that it has been successful, and that we must continue to focus on that initial mission and continue to fine tune it. We have been rewarded with the thought that we have found a most comfortable and workable niche --- and that we need to continue to cultivate it.

We thank all our grantees for their most successful projects which serve to support the obvious --- that our mission has had an emphatic meaning to the community. We look forward with confidence as we proceed in our second decade and hope to equal or exceed our accomplishments to date.