Translations: December 2008

December 15, 2008

As we enter this holiday season, I would like to wish the GUMC community and each of your families good health and cheer. I would also like to thank those of you who have spent long extracurricular hours since April helping us design our strategic plan for the medical center. The work product of all this effort is now under review, and the implementation phase of the Strategic Planning Initiative will begin after the first of the year.

Yesterday I attended a very positive meeting with faculty and Medical Center Advancement during which many issues and challenges about fundraising were discussed. As you know, Bill Bishop has assembled a superb team of development professionals, but they are a new team taking the field at a particularly rough time in our nation's economic history. I was gratified to observe that in spite of this our spirit is undaunted. At the end of this exchange of ideas, the faculty asked their colleagues in Advancement, "How can we help?"

The answer to that question begins with the acknowledgement that we are indeed a community, and that we are all in the same position. As Advancement seeks to identify and assess the capacity and interests of donor prospects to contribute to our research and educational missions, we increasingly will be called upon to help them build a compelling case for support.

As these opportunities arise, I would hope that all of you who are doing outstanding work will say yes when asked to participate. I hope that you will do so because you want to help the institution with the understanding that the resulting support may not necessarily come back directly to your program. That is not always easy, because we all have demands on our time and we find ourselves triaging requests based on our own sense of priorities. Advancement cannot guarantee which program a prospective donor will support, of if indeed that support will be sufficient and timely. However, the one thing I can guarantee is that when we put together the multidisciplinary programs we are now planning, the intention is that we will be able to fund multiple investigators and educators, not just those who excel at presenting.

I'd like us all to agree that this is the right approach, because we are a community and I would like us to proceed as a community and fundraise as a community. Some will be better at writing the science and others at presenting in person, but to succeed in communicating effectively for support, all of us will have to contribute our time and talent accordingly and unselfishly.

As always, I welcome your comments and questions at gumcexecofc@georgetown.edu.

Howard J. Federoff, MD, PhD



From the Desk of the EVP

Browse recent items in this category.