Leonard Lauder Donates $125 Million

Leonard Lauder is the gift that keeps giving. The chairman emeritus of The Estée Lauder Companies donated $125 million to The University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. The gift will establish a tuition-free program to recruit, educate and deploy nurse practitioners in underserved communities across the county. The donation, according to Penn, is the largest gift ever to a US nursing school.

Lauder is a Penn alumnus. Former Penn President Amy Gutmann, in a statement, called the gift “unprecedented in its potential to address America’s most critical need of providing primary health care to all who currently lack it by investing in nurses.”

Penn is establishing the Leonard A. Lauder Community Care Nurse Practitioner Program at a time when hospitals across the US are struggling to recruit and retrain nurses while the Covid-19 pandemic has many medical centers operating at or near capacity levels.

“Now more than ever, the country needs greater and more equitable access to quality primary care — and highly-skilled nurse practitioners are the key to making that happen,” said Lauder, in a statement provided by Penn. “The program will ensure that more Americans receive the essential health care services that everyone deserves, and I’m so pleased to be working with Penn Nursing on this initiative.”

Nurse practitioners are nurses with advanced degrees who receive advanced clinical training to enable them to serve as primary caregivers with the skills to supervise and manage critical aspects of care.

Under terms of the program, Penn Nursing will select 10 fellows to begin classes this fall, growing the program enrollment through 2026 when it will reach its annual target enrollment of 40 fellows, continuing in perpetuity.

The selected Leonard A. Lauder Community Care Nurse Practitioner Fellows will enroll full-time in a two-year, rigorous primary care nurse practitioner program at Penn Nursing. Fellows will complete at least 50% of their clinical education at Penn community partner sites and/or comparable sites that provide direct patient care. Among Penn's community partners for the program is Independence Blue Cross. Every fellow will be expected to commit to practice or service in an underserved community for two years after graduation.

Lauder is a champion of philanthropy. He and his brother, Ronald, co-chair the Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation, which has awarded over $150 million to fund trials in 19 countries. He has endowed museums with hundreds of millions of dollars and donated his $1.1 billion Cubism collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Estée Lauder Companies Breast Cancer Campaign has raised more than $90 million since 1993.

 “If you don’t transform something, you’ve left footprints in the sand that the surf will wash away. You need to leave some kind of an impact that outlives you,” he told Wharton magazine in an interview last year.