Celebration of Philanthropy

Jamy Ard, MD

We had a really grateful patient who had a tremendous treatment success with our program and to the point where this gentleman was doing triathlons and Ironman competitions. It's just sort of an extraordinary story of just his evolution with the care that he received here in our weight management program. And as a result of his success, he wanted to pass that forward. So he basically provided enough funding to allow another patient to come in and take a program slot and be able to experience the same thing that he did.

W. Hafton Lefler Jr., MD

I attended undergraduate school at Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina. My grades were good, so I thought I would get in at Carolina. So I didn't apply to any other schools immediately. But when I found out about the inaudible scholarships at Wake Forest, I applied to Wake Forest. So I called the dean of admissions at Carolina and told him that I was going to go to Wake Forest because of the scholarship. Since the scholarship I got was so important to me, I think it would be important to other students. We were financially able to do something in the way of scholarships, and so we have done it. It was something that my wife Katty and I wanted to do to pay back to Wake Forest what they had given us. You give to your church, you give to your cities and towns, and you certainly ought to give to the entity that educated you so you could be successful.

Anthony Atala, MD

When you're doing research, you're really innovating all the time because you have to come up with these new solutions. There's a problem, you have to solve it, and you use everything you can to make it happen. By using research dollars from philanthropy allows us to go into areas that you never expect to go because you have those funds available.

Jeff D. Williamson, MD, MHS

The seed corn for the science that we're doing is actually sown by philanthropy. That's the initial capital investment that helps us have those ideas that are ready on the shelf so that we can then respond to large organizations, like the Alzheimer's Association, or the federal government, like the National Institutes of Health. All of those big grants we get start with philanthropic support to help us develop the idea and the team so that we can start right away when we get the funding.

Goldie Smith Byrd, PhD

We have been able to engage the corporate community and the outstanding work that really our community has done. We've been supported through philanthropy in a number of ways that give us an opportunity to get into communities in ways that perhaps a traditional NIH-funded grant would not.

Ashley Kohlrus

Our legacy's mission is to help our members make smart financial choices, and what's important about our vision is to positively impact lives. We look for areas of philanthropic priorities that align to our members' desires and passions, our employees' passions, and where we can align our efforts to support the causes in the communities. So as we think about those story of our partnership with Wake Forest Baptist Health and the many years that we have had partnership around cancer patient support, it is pretty impactful what we've been able to do together in partnership.

Cathy Pace

This started about 25 years ago with my predecessor, and we had 12 women who were actually stricken with breast cancer. We actually lost a couple of our employees, and this was very personal to us as an organization. At that time, we started working closely with a lot of the nonprofits here in Winston-Salem, but particularly with Wake Forest Baptist Health. I will tell you, we wanted to be the sponsor of WinterLark long before we even got the opportunity. So once that did happen, it aligned so much with our overall philanthropic marketing message of really helping those individuals to eradicate anything to do with cancer. Understanding that WinterLark actually started out as an opportunity to provide support to family members and to cancer patients through the Cancer Patient Support Program was extremely another reason why it was easy for us to take on this mission. As part of who we are, we had passion behind it, and it was not ever about putting our name on a sponsorship. It was about feeling the real need behind where that money was going and how it was going to be distributed and how it's going to help those individuals so that no one faces cancer alone.

Ashley Kohlrus

As we were embarking on our second year of the partnership and the pandemic struck, we knew we needed to find ways to ensure we could still help the operating budget of CPSP. So we reimagined what we could do. We did it first with just all fundraising online because 2020 was not a year that we could all come together as we had hoped. And then as we progressed and we've learned and thought through new ways to do things, SummerLark has come forward through the concert experience, which is now a community effort and really impactful to what we can do to continue to raise funds for the Cancer Patient Support Program.

Cathy Pace

We have actually taken the energy out of the four walls of Graylyn, which I know many people miss, but now we've taken that energy out to the entire community, and we have just opened up the whole opportunity for more people and to create awareness about the CPSP program and the significance and the support that it really and truly needs. But we have to recognize the other needs that Wake Forest Baptist Health can provide through Brenner Children's, through Cheers!, through all of the many, many different research projects that are going on there, scholarship opportunities. Please find your passion. Please support our community. We are very fortunate to have a caring facility like Wake Forest Baptist to take care of all of us here.