Welcome to the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation’s 2024 Annual Report—I am glad you are here.
Last year was challenging for so many of us in so many ways—across the globe and at home, in our country and communities, and also in our health care institutions and health professions schools. But gratitude and optimism are powerful forces, and there is much to buoy us as we move into a new year with new challenges and new opportunities. At the Macy Foundation, we enter 2025 more committed than ever to our three priority areas: promoting diversity, equity, and belonging in clinical learning environments; increasing collaboration among future health professionals by fostering learning in and from high performing interprofessional teams; and preparing future health professionals to navigate ethical dilemmas.
And, as we close out 2024, we are exceedingly grateful for you: our friends and colleagues who are working to improve patients’ lives by optimizing the educational experiences of the future health professionals who will care for them, and, indeed, for all of us. Your efforts are critical to ensuring that our health care workforce is prepared to deliver high-quality patient care in a rapidly evolving health care system. We are continually inspired by the innovative ways you and your colleagues are enhancing the education and training of our current and future health care workforce.
One of the ways we try to help leverage the work we support is by sharing the details of those efforts broadly, hopefully to inspire others. To that end, I encourage you to keep reading for a brief overview of some of the exciting ways we advanced our priority areas in 2024, and the impact that we expect to continue in 2025 and beyond.
Our New Grantmaking Approach
Before I spotlight the work of some of our grantees, I would like to explain an important change the Foundation has made regarding the way we work. In 2024, we transitioned from an open call to a solicited approach to grantmaking; in other words, we now design and develop grant initiatives based on our priorities and criteria, and issue formal requests for applications (RFAs) within the parameters of each initiative.
We made this change to our grantmaking because soliciting grant applications as part of a well-designed initiative creates more intentionality in our grantmaking and enables us to direct attention, build momentum, and be even more strategic in supporting efforts within our three priority areas. This approach aligns with those used successfully by other foundations, and we believe it will help us to amplify our priorities for health professions education.
Examples of work funded under this approach are described below, including the Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Medical Education Program, the Disability Inclusion in Nursing Education Program, and the Catalyst Awards for Transformation in Graduate Medical Education (GME).
AI in Medical Education: New Grant Opportunity Announced, Conference Recommendations Forthcoming
In November 2024, the Foundation hosted 45 technology experts, medical educators, and other health professions education stakeholders at the Macy Conference on AI in Medical Education in Atlanta. The three-day conference came together with leadership from Dr. Robert Wachter, chair, department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and a planning committee of several others who are deeply engaged in intentional efforts to safely, ethically, and equitably harness the potential of AI in medical education. At the conference, planning committee members worked with invited conferees to review the current landscape of AI in medical education and create a shared vision for what AI-enhanced medical education should look like in the coming years. The consensus recommendations for the field, which are currently being refined, will be published in a special issue of Academic Medicine in 2025.
As a follow up, we launched a new RFA entitled AI in Medical Education: A Grants Program to Advance Innovation in Medical Education, which will support three demonstration projects seeking to describe, implement, and evaluate the use of AI to enhance medical education and prepare current and future physicians to use AI to improve patient care. The selected projects will each receive up to $200K total over two years.
Grants Will Advance Disability Inclusion in Nursing and Nursing Education
In January, in partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Macy Foundation announced that six institutions will receive our new Disability Inclusion in Nursing grants. Congratulations to: Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, Linfield University, Pace University, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. As part of the two- to three-year, $1.2 million grant program, these institutions will explore ways to dismantle barriers for nursing learners with disabilities in their nursing schools and affiliated clinical practice sites. An important goal of the funded projects is to create lasting institutional change and exemplars that other institutions can draw from to make their own learning environments more inclusive.
Catalyst Awards Promote Transformation in Graduate Medical Education
In February 2025, we will announce the recipients of the 2025 Catalyst Awards for Transformation in GME. For this third round of the Catalyst Awards program, launched by Macy in 2023, we have partnered with the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) to provide selected projects up to $100K over 18 months. Successful proposals will design, implement, and evaluate innovative strategies to equip learners with tools, skills, and approaches to help them thrive in the clinical learning environment.
The first two cycles of the Catalyst Awards program demonstrated its potential to both facilitate positive changes in participants’ clinical learning environments and create models and exemplars that can be adapted and used by other institutions to help their residents and fellows thrive. The inaugural cohort of seven Catalyst Awardees, for example, were focused on strategies to help their learners manage microaggressions and other forms of mistreatment in the clinical learning environment. They each produced a case study detailing their efforts, which are featured, along with six commissioned papers, in the December 2024 special supplement of Academic Medicine on fostering belonging in GME. We believe the supplement will be a valuable addition to the medical education literature.
Update On Our Board of Directors
The programming described above would not be possible without the hard work and dedication of our Board of Directors, who are charged with ensuring that the Foundation’s mission—to improve the education of health professionals for a healthier public—is carried through with integrity. We are grateful to each of them for their commitment to our mission, and would like to acknowledge, in particular, those whose Board service has ended and those whose service is just beginning. First, we extend our sincere appreciation to Mr. William H. Wright II, who is retiring from the Board after 24 years, including 13 years served as Board Chairman. Also retiring from the Board are Dr. Howard Koh and Mr. Gregory Warner, who served for 9 and 12 years, respectively. I am deeply grateful to Bill, Howard, and Greg for their invaluable contributions to the Macy Foundation over their many years of service. They will be greatly missed.
As we wish our departing Board members well and thank them, we are just as pleased to welcome three new Directors: Mr. Paul Johnson, Mr. Jason Lamin, and Ms. Donna Snider.
- Paul Johnson is a Senior Vice President and Senior Portfolio Adviser in Northern Trust’s Greater New York region. He also serves on the Rising Leaders Council of New York, and is a member of Northwestern University’s Leadership Circle and the Central Park Conservancy’s Greensward Circle, among other community organizations.
- Jason Lamin is Founder and CEO of Lenox Park Solutions, a financial technology firm providing collaborative software, data aggregation tools, and analytics geared toward fair and democratized access to financial opportunities. He also has been an active Private Sector Delegate of the United Nations, and he founded the non-profit Nyawa Funding Group to improve living standards in Sierra Leone.
- Donna Snider is senior vice president and chief investment officer for Hackensack Meridian Health (HMH), New Jersey’s largest integrated care network. Donna is building an investment office to support HMH’s mission to transform health care. She also serves on the Global Fund for Women’s investment committee and is an active member of Impact 100 Jersey Coast.
Finally, and once again, thank you to all of you, the colleagues and friends who comprise our growing community. We deeply appreciate all of you—educators, learners, administrators, executives, providers, researchers, professionals, advocates, and others—and welcome your collaboration in transforming health professions education to serve the public’s needs and improve health care. We look forward to engaging with you and to continuing our commitment to health professions education in 2025.
