Chan Soon-Shiong Family Foundation
/OVERVIEW: The Chan Soon-Shiong Family Foundation makes grants almost exclusively in the Los Angeles area. It supports research and improving access to health care and health education.
IP TAKE: This funder supports a limited scope of medical projects. It prioritizes Los Angeles organizations, but only those with which Dr. Soon-Shiong is familiar.
PROFILE: The Chan Soon-Shiong Family Foundation was established by Patrick Soon-Shiong, a Chinese-American surgeon, researcher, professor, and businessman, who made his fortune by developing and selling the multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical companies American Pharma Partners and Abraxis BioScience. As a renowned medical researcher and surgeon, he performed the world's first encapsulated human islet transplant and the first pig-to-man islet cell transplant in diabetic patients. Since 2007, Soon-Shiong and his wife, Michele, have supported medical products through the Chan Soon-Shiong Family Foundation. The couple even took the Giving Pledge a few years ago to demonstrate their commitment to lifelong philanthropy.
Grants for Los Angeles and SoCal
The foundation prioritizes grantmaking almost exclusively for funding research and improving access to health care and health education in Los Angeles. The foundation's grants range from $1,000 to $500,000. It only funds about 10 to 15 organizations annually.
Soon-Shiong's grants are targeted, large, and always newsworthy. In the past, he gave $5 million to the University of Chicago for improving patient care technology and $136 million to St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica, California. The underserved population in southern Los Angeles benefited from the foundation's $100,000 grant to the Martin Luther King Hospital, which reopened the facility a few years ago. The Chicago grant was an exception to the rule, because almost all Chan Soon-Shiong Family grants are restricted to California. The foundation made headlines with its $4 million grant to the University of California Global Health Institute to fund research and education programs for a variety of vulnerable global populations, and again with its $26 million donation in 2022 to Access to Advanced Health Institute in Seattle to develop needed vaccines, including for COVID-19.
Important Grant Details
The foundation does not accept unsolicited grant proposals. Soon-Shiong keeps a low public profile and, as a result, does not maintain a website, or public email. Grant seekers are advised to contact the foundation's VP, Charles Kenworthy, who is an attorney, and can be reached at 213-622-5555.
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