LOUISVILLE, Ky. — In a move the school called “game changing,” the University of Louisville announced a commitment of $47 million to create a new Health Campus downtown. The record donation came from holistic health advocate Christina Lee Brown.
What You Need To Know
- UofL received its largest financial gift in school history on Wednesday
- The $47 million commitment will create a new UofL Health campus in downtown Louisville
- The Christina Lee Brown Envirome Institute New Vision of Health Campus will be composed of two buildings in downtown Louisville with 133,000 square feet of space
Brown donated $5 million in 2018 to create the Envirome Institute that currently bears her name. Now she’s pledging another $30 million over the next 20 years, plus $17 million in free rent to fund an entire campus to pursue a new vision of health.
“What I think we’re doing here is we’re creating a place of problem solving,” Brown said on Wednesday.
The Christina Lee Brown Envirome Institute New Vision of Health Campus will be composed of two buildings in downtown Louisville with 133,000 square feet of space.
“It goes far beyond the financial support with its impact,” said Lori Stewart Gonzalez, the school’s interim president. “It’s going to allow us to create a campus that becomes a world-class research center.”
Holistic health is a multi-dimensional approach to wellness — focusing on mental, social, intellectual and spiritual factors in addition to the traditional physical ones.
“This is a pursuit that requires a new way of thinking which no longer chases single causes,” Brown explained. “We therefore must acknowledge and be inspired by the complexity of our interdependent world, where history is our shared legacy and health is our shared aspiration.”
The goal is to create resilience to withstand all forms of stress. Director Aruni Bhatnagar explained that those in medicine spend a lot of time understanding and treating disease, but there’s little knowledge about overall health.
“We don’t even know how to measure health. So this is a new initiative in which to understand that health is not just biology, that it is an individual resource that is garnered from living in healthy environments and in healthy communities,” Bhatnagar said.
UofL plans to seek additional funding to make the new campus a world leader in preventing disease and encouraging holistic health.
Editor's Note: A previous version of this story included the incorrect photo of the Christina Lee Brown Envirome Institute. That has been removed and the official rendering has been added.