Jonas Philanthropies

Address: P.O. Box 705, New York, NY 10032
Web: jonasphilanthropies.org
Email: lendrip@gmail.com

For the United States’ most vulnerable citizens—its children, veterans, under-resourced and marginalized communities, and those challenged by chronic or debilitating illness—quality health care is too often out of reach. Jonas Philanthropies exists to address this growing and urgent need by investing in innovative health care solutions designed for scalable impact that are rooted in equity and racial justice.

Founded more than a decade ago by Barbara and Donald Jonas, a respected psychiatric social worker and leading retail executive, Jonas Philanthropies brings together their professional expertise and personal passions to advance the most critical ways we care. Among these is addressing one of the largest health care needs in the world, a shortage of quality professional nurses, a shortage that still continues 15 years since they started the organization.

Program Information:

Jonas Philanthropies is growing its commitment to address high-need populations and issues with high-impact solutions and has expanded its focus beyond nursing and veterans’ health care to include investments in children’s vision care and access, as well as children’s environmental health and climate community health as it relates to tree growing and reforestation.

Financial Information:

Amount Dedicated to Health-Related Grants: $850,000 (FY22)

Special Initiatives and Health-Related Grantmaking

Jonas Nursing—Jonas Nursing is the signature program of Jonas Philanthropies. It addresses the growing and urgent need for support in the nursing and veterans care sectors. It is one of the only philanthropic programs in the country dedicated to the nursing profession. Jonas Nursing supports nurses on the front lines of patient care, as well as nurse scientists, scholars, and policy experts who are innovating health care behind the scenes and nurse-led research that can have broad ranging impacts. Over the past 16 years, Jonas Nursing has invested $27 million in more than 1,400 scholars across the 50 states, including 350 focused specifically on veterans’ health care. In addition, Jonas Nursing has seeded impactful grants to scalable programs addressing nursing safety during COVID 19, interventions to address the mental health of nurses, videos to attract more nurses to the profession, and special nurse-related research projects that focus on preventative care, assessment, access, and enhanced quality of care that can be replicated and scaled.

Jonas Scholars 2021 – 2023 Cohort—This cohort of Jonas Scholars consists of 76 of the nation’s most promising doctoral nursing scholars addressing some of the country’s most pressing health care challenges. More than half (51 percent) of the cohort is representative of Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color. Among them, focus areas include environmental health, mental health, veterans care, vision health, rural health care, oncology, minority health, holistic nursing, and emergency response and disaster relief.

Children’s Environmental Health—The Jonas Philanthropies Children’s Environmental Health portfolio is dedicated to identifying and combating the pervasive and unnecessary use of many commonly used toxic and harmful substances that have negative effects on the health of children. This initiative provides educational materials and resources to parents and health providers such as Tips for a Toxic Free Home and the Healthy Families Best Practices Checklist. In addition, the foundation funds scientific research related to prenatal and childhood exposures and education and advocacy efforts by scientists, health professionals, communities, and families pushing for policy changes to eliminate the worst toxic chemicals and substances from everyday use. An example is The Jonas Initiative at the Children’s Environmental Working Group, which aims to become the premier online source of information for parents searching for credible, science-based, actionable information about the impact of toxic chemicals, contaminants, and toxic exposures on children’s health.

Trees for Climate Health—As an urgent response to the global climate emergency and to support the resilience of frontline communities in the world, Jonas Philanthropies expanded its commitment to health care in 2019 to include its Trees for Climate Health initiative. The goal is to direct $10 million in funds to tree-growing initiatives that focus on frontline community health and resilience by 2025. This initiative aims to increase global forest cover and provide solutions for a plethora of other issues, including food security, clean water, education, workforce development, empowerment of women and girls, and more, by partnering with organizations across the world to achieve these efforts.