Our district health and medical services are built on the generosity of caring members of our community – people like you.
Our legacy donors are a special group of donors that we refer to as our Northern Stars – guiding the future of health care and medical research for years to come. By choosing to leave a legacy gift in your Will, you will become an important part of our journey and join a community of visionaries committed to improving our healthcare services and medical research for generations to come.
Mrs Eva Kolling OBE was our first Northern Star who in 1929 made a generous gift of £5,000 (equivalent to $644,400 in today’s AUD) in memory of her late husband Charles Kolling to fund medical research for the community. This generous donation was used to fund the construction of what was one of the first medical research laboratories in New South Wales – the Charles Kolling Memorial Laboratory. Upon her passing in 1941, Eva generously left a legacy gift in her will to continue and eventually expand the laboratory. The Kolling Institute of Medical Research is now the oldest medical research institute in New South Wales and conducts a wide variety of research focused on tackling some of the greatest medical challenges facing our world today.
Similarly, Ryde Hospital was built as the result of generous philanthropic investment and community support. Although it was originally thought to be too expensive for a hospital to be created in Ryde, the community banded together to advocate and raise funds to purchase Denistone House (then an aged-care facility) to act as the first hospital building. This spirit of advocacy and giving back still forms a strong part of the community spirit in Ryde.
It took incredible foresight, generosity, and passion for these members of the community to make the philanthropic investment that they did – especially during a time when such charity was unheard of. These gifts laid the foundation for the standard of hospital services and medical research available to the community for generations to come.
For this reason, we consider these generous philanthropic pioneers to be our first Northern Stars – guiding the future of health and medical services for years to come.