By Kelley Morris
When people think about hospital volunteers, they picture fundraising walks, patient companionship or a familiar face in a hospital lobby handing out directions. What’s easy to miss is the work happening one floor up, in a conference room and around a table, where another kind of volunteer is putting in just as many hours.
The board members of Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital Foundation and Memorial Foundation are doctors with full patient loads, executives with demanding careers and community leaders who already have more obligations than hours in a day, and yet they keep showing up, because Memorial Healthcare System matters to them. For many of them, it matters in the most personal way possible.
Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital Foundation and Memorial Foundation exist to support care that goes beyond what hospitals can fund on their own. Together they underwrite programs across Memorial Healthcare System ranging from breast cancer diagnostic testing and emergency financial assistance to wigs and prostheses for cancer patients, rehabilitation technology for children and parent education classes for new families.
Beth-Ann Krimsky, who chairs the Foundations’ board and is the national litigation chair and partner at Greenspoon Marder LLP, doesn’t need to look far for her reason. Her son Harrison was treated at Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital for childhood cancer and later came back to Memorial as an adult cardiac patient of Dr. Ralph Levy. Her family credits Memorial with saving Harrison’s life — twice. The decisions she helps make about priorities and funding aren’t abstract to her, they’re personal.
Months after Derek Thornhill moved his family from California to South Florida in 2022, his five-year-old son Charlie was diagnosed with B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia. The treatment was grueling, but at Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital the family found something alongside the medicine they hadn’t expected. Child life specialists, a therapy dog named Freedom, birthday decorations that appeared in Charlie’s room made health challenges manageable. “Everyone treated Charlie like he mattered,” Thornhill said. “Not just as a patient, but as a person.” Thornhill, an Executive Director at J.P. Morgan Private Bank, joined the Foundations’ board in 2025. “If you’re looking for a cause that will change lives,” he said, “this is it.”
Dr. Atif Hussein came to Memorial 25 years ago, recruited from Duke to help build a cancer program with just a handful of oncologists. He has supported its growth into Memorial Cancer Institute, now home to more than 70 physicians and a designation as a Cancer Center of Excellence, one of only a handful in Florida. As Medical Director and Program Director of the Hematology/Oncology Fellowship Program, he trains the next generation of oncologists. To him, philanthropy isn’t optional, since a quarter to a third of what it takes to run modern cancer care must come from donors. “Philanthropy bridges the gap between what is possible and what is truly transformative for patients,” he said.
Dr. Ralph Levy, chief of cardiology at Memorial, has spent seven years building the Memorial Cardiac and Vascular Institute into a program with 60 to 70 physicians and around 120,000 patient encounters a year. He joined the Foundations’ board recently with a clear sense of what’s at stake. The cardiology workforce is shrinking, more than 60 percent of U.S. counties have no cardiologist, and the patients aren’t going away. “It’s about investing strategically in capacity,” he said, “so we can meet the needs of our community over the long term.”
Dara Levan has been on the board of the Foundations for more than a decade, through three terms and three CEOs. When her first term ended, she spoke up immediately. She wasn’t leaving. Since then, she has helped launch the Pink Angels, a group that helps breast cancer patients access wigs, therapy, acupuncture and survivorship support, and pushed for a meditation room inside the Memorial Hospital Chapel. Levan is also an award-winning author, a speech-language pathologist and the host of the “Every Soul Has a Story” podcast. “Patients aren’t just numbers,” she says. “They’re people who are seen, heard and cared for. Everyone deserves to matter.”
Board members often work quietly behind the scenes, in boardrooms and on evenings and weekends carved out of lives that are already full. But each of these individuals is at the table, and every one of them is all in.
Visit Memorial Foundation at mhs.net/give-back/memorial-foundation or Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital Foundation at jdch.com/give-back to learn more about how to give back.
Kelley Morris is President of Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital Foundation and Memorial Foundation.
