Jan 01 1913Jerome D. Greene, secretary of the Foundation and former secretary of Harvard, writes “a memorandum on principles and policies” for an early meeting of the trustees. An influential document, it establishes a rough framework for the Foundation's work. It's major points are: exclude individual charity and relief, exclude local enterprises, make sure when going into a community with a gift that the community has “its own will…and its own resources, both material and spiritual” to meet the need, avoid gifts in perpetuity, and focus on problems that “go to the root of individual or social ill-being and misery.”
Jan 01 1913The first meeting of the board of trustees is held May 22. John D. Rockefeller Jr., age 39, is elected president. Though a trustee, “Senior” does not attend this or any other future meeting of the Foundation's board, following a pattern he established with previous philanthropies. He explained, “I have not had the hardihood even to suggest how people, so much more experienced and wise in those things than I, should work out the details even of those plans with which I have had the honor to be associated.”
Jan 01 1913On December 5, the Foundation's board makes its first grant: $100,000 to the American Red Cross to purchase property for its headquarters in Washington, DC. and for “a memorial to commemorate the services of the women of the United States in caring for the sick and wounded of the Civil War.”
Jan 01 1913Influenced by Abraham Flexner’s landmark study, “Medical Education in the United States and Canada,” the Foundation makes a grant to Johns Hopkins University to extend its model “full-time” system of basic medical education to clinical departments of medicine, surgery and pediatrics. Other specialties are added later.
Jan 01 1913Health becomes a Foundation priority at the first meeting of the board when Frederick Gates, longtime advisor to John D. Rockefeller, Sr., argues that “disease is the supreme ill in human life.”
Jan 01 1913Aware of the domestic success of the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission for Eradication of Hookworm Disease and desirous of expanding that work overseas, the board of trustees in June appropriates its first funds for work outside the US—$25,000 to create the International Health Commission (later called a board), which launches the Foundation into international public health. This pioneering work establishes the pattern of modern public health services.
