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| Philanthropy |
Commercial Concerns
Samantha Marshall
05/03/2004
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On a recent weekday afternoon, a woman of indeterminate age sauntered out of
Iris Cantor Women’s Health Center on the East Side of Manhattan and climbed into
a Rolls Royce waiting across the street. “She comes here at least once a month
for touch-ups,” a security guard noted.
 A woman dropping by for her monthly
shot of Botox may seem like an odd beneficiary of a health-care facility founded
by a philanthropist. But Iris Cantor believes that attracting a paying clientele
is crucial to the survival of her health center. In order to survive at all, not
to mention make a long-term impact, she and her partners realized they must
first endeavor to make it financially self-sustaining.
When she founded the
Iris Cantor Center for Breast Imaging at the UCLA Medical Center in 1986,
Cantor, the widow of B. Gerald Cantor (who founded the brokerage firm Cantor
Fitzgerald) and a veteran of giving in both health care and the arts, was
determined to make the facility available to poor and underserved women, which
she did by providing a mobile mammography unit. The center in New York, which
opened in April 2002 after Cantor provided most of its $14 million in start-up
capital, accepts impoverished patients, but has not yet reached out to encourage
them to visit. “There is a tricky balance in health care that one has to try to
achieve these days,” says Douglas Bauer, vice president of Rockefeller
Philanthropy Advisors, a New York-based advisory firm. “That is an unfortunate
reality in the business of health-care philanthropy. Donors like Mrs. Cantor
have to be nimble to serve people in a meaningful way and still keep the lights
on.”
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