The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's mission is to improve the health and health care of all Americans. Remaining faithful to our mission means keeping our commitment to the American people in everything we do from encouraging healthier living and the conditions that promote better health to promoting positive changes in the way health care is delivered in this country.

In our first 25 years, we have provided more than $2.6 billion to organizations and institutions across the country working on finding solutions to our nation's health and health care problems. This sounds like a substantial sum, but compare it to the nearly $3 billion that the United States spends on health care every day.

The projects we fund have reached across the life span, from making early child health care more accessible to improving the care that patients receive at the end of life.

In addition to Promoting Excellence in End-of-Life Care, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation established a myriad of other initiatives to improve the provision of palliative care, including two additional national program offices:

• Community State Partnerships
• Center for the Advancement of Palliative Care

Our strategies transcend any single perspective; we and our grantees explore many possible solutions. Our greatest strength must be in recognizing the good ideas of others and in developing our own. The common element in all our work is its reflection of the Foundation's mission: to improve the health and health care of all Americans.

CURRENT OPERATIONS
An independent Board of Trustees governs the Foundation. A staff of about 150, including physicians, nurses, economists, lawyers, social scientists, and specialists in public health, communications, and administration, oversees operations at our offices in Princeton, New Jersey. But it is out in communities across the country that RWJF funding is helping dedicated people carry out the work, project by project, that is improving health and health care. Because most of our grants are multi-year awards, in any given year we are supporting about 2,300 projects. Still, the volume of applicants is so great that competition for funding is keen.

Grantees are as varied as the challenges they tackle. They include: hospitals; medical, nursing, and public health schools; hospices; professional associations; research organizations; state and local government agencies; and community groups.

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Promoting Excellence in End-of-Life Care was a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation dedicated to long-term changes in health care institutions to substantially improve care for dying people and their families.