The Phillip Hallen Chair in Community Health and Social Justice is a product of one family’s 85-year commitment to human rights, civil liberties, anti-discrimination work, and a struggle for the elimination of health disparities in today’s health care system and medical education. Leon Falk Sr. and his brother Maurice Falk were visionary in creating a foundation to specifically examine these issues.
The early work of the Falk Foundation came into focus during the great depression of the 1930s, funding significant studies to understand the root causes of economic disparity and solutions to the crisis in the economy. In the 1930s, two seminal publications were published, America’s Capacity to Produce and America’s Capacity to Consume, and those volumes led to initial support of the fledgling Brookings Institution, sometimes know as the “house that Falk built.”
Landmark research, supported by the foundation through the Social Science Research Council and the AJC, led to publication of executive suite studies examining patterns of antisemitism in the 1950s. In the early years of the State of Israel, the foundation initiated research into the emerging economy, leading to the creation of the Falk Institute of Economic Research at Hebrew University.
By 1960 this history of grant making directed at issues of prejudice and discrimination across the spectrum of the American civil rights landscape provided a perfect platform for the foundation’s focus on racism, civil rights disparity in health care delivery, minority enrollment in medical schools, gender inequality, and a broad portfolio of grants for LGBTQ issues. The foundation was one of only a few American foundations working almost exclusively in race relations and minority affairs.
Phil Hallen became president of the foundation in 1963 at the height of the civil rights movement in this country. It was also the culmination of a national inquiry into the state of mental health and mental retardation policy, called for by President John F. Kennedy, which led to the Community Mental Health Act of 1963. Because of Hallen’s strong links with the Kennedy White House and the fledgling National Institute of Mental Health, the foundation was able to synthesize a new field of inquiry and policy, resulting in extended research and action in the field of racism and mental health. In the early 70s, a landmark book, Racism and Mental Health, was published, outlining much of the foundation’s work over the next three decades.
Throughout this period, both the civil rights movement and an increasing tendency to shift mental health care from an institutional or state hospital-based system provided a joint framework for the foundation’s work.
Beginning in 2001, the foundation turned its attention to the criminal justice system as en extension of the continuing work in civil rights and mental health policy.
A few highlights of the foundation’s local, national, and international grant making initiatives illustrate the convergence of minority focused grant making and the mental health policy of the early 60s:
- Creation at Yale University School of Medicine of the first endowed chair in child psychiatry held by an African America
- Falk fellows in community psychiatry at Meharry Medical College and University of Pittsburgh
- Falk minority fellowships at the American Psychiatric Association
- First known documentary on the AIDS epidemic
- First funding for Alpha House, PERSAD, Pittsburgh AIDS Task Force, Prevention Point Pittsburgh, Shady Lane School, Hill District Development Fund
- Creation of Freedom House Ambulance Service
- Creation of Falk Institute for Mental Health Research in Israel
- First funding for Women in Philanthropy, and the Association of Black Foundation Executives of the Council on Foundations
- Participation in the Ford Foundation’s Fulfilling the Dream project
- Multi-foundation racial justice collaborative
- Allegheny County Collaborative Jail Project
- Pittsburgh community benefits agreement
- Publication of more than one hundred books and scholarly publications
- Support of more than ninety independent documentary films and video productions, including two Academy Award Best Documentary nominations
The foundation has had three executives: J. Steele Gow, 1930–65; Phil Hallen, 1963–2000; and Kerry O’Donnell, 2001–14. The foundation terminated its charter and grantmaking in 2015.