Leonard Lauder Gifts $52M to CUNY’s Hunter College Nursing School for Staff Shortage
By: Hellen Zaboulani
The nursing school in Hunter College received a $52 million donation to help with the nursing shortage, which was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
As reported by the NY Post, billionaire philanthropist and Estee Lauder heir, Leonard A Lauder, pledged a $52 million gift to the nursing school in Manhattan. This is the largest donation the college has ever received in its history. Part of the City University of New York system, Hunter said it will use the newly acquired bounty to enhance its graduate-level program for nurse practitioners. “We all know there’s not enough doctors and the care that they provide gets supplemented by nurse practitioners,” Hunter’s President Jennifer Raab said. “So training more nurse practitioners and working with [NYC] Health + Hospitals is truly a gift not just to Hunter, but also to the health of our great city,” she told The Post.
Lauder, 89, chairman emeritus of the Estée Lauder companies, made the generous donation in honor of his late wife Evelyn Lauder, who had been an alumna of Hunter College. Evelyn had lived her life by the college’s motto of “mihi cura futuri” — the care of the future is mine, Raab said. “She always wanted to think about how to help people. And this gift not only helps nursing students in the nursing school, but it allows them to do more for more New Yorkers,” Raab said. “So it truly is the gift that keeps giving.”
The philanthropic gift is not just the biggest Hunter has ever received, but also the largest donation ever given to any single CUNY college. As per the Post, the donation will pave the way to create a new community care nurse practitioner program, which is to be named after Evelyn Lauder. The new program will pay $30,000 stipends annually to 25 students, to help them complete their training early if they are working full-time and going to school. Also, the donation will enable Hunter college to build new state-of-the-art simulation labs, hire more faculty members and expand the curriculum.
Evelyn Lauder, who passed away in 2011, had been born in Vienna, Austria, to a Jewish family. She married Leo Lauder in 1959. She is well known for having created and popularized the pink ribbon as a symbol for awareness of breast cancer, during her tenure as co-founder of The Breast Cancer Research Foundation. She had also served as Senior Corporate Vice President of the Estée Lauder Companies and additionally was a member of the board of overseers at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. She passed away at the age of 75, from complications of nongenetic ovarian cancer. She and her husband had two sons– William P. Lauder and Gary M. Lauder.
Mr. Lauder was CEO of Estee Lauder until 1999, and the company went public under his tenure. He currently has a net worth of roughly 20.4 billion, as per Forbes. He is a well-known philanthropist, who in 2013, promised to gift his collection of Cubist art, valued at over $1 billion, to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, marking the largest gift ever for the museum. He has written a memoire entitled, “The company I keep: My life in Beauty”.
