The hospital sales that became foundations — and an eight-million-dollar gift to a high school

1995 and 1998 — the conversions; 2025 — the Lutheran Foundation's lead gift

The gifts: Twice in the 1990s Fort Wayne converted a hospital into an endowment. When Lutheran Hospital was sold in 1995, the proceeds formed The Lutheran Foundation, which by its own history has disbursed more than 162 million dollars to faith and health causes across a ten-county area and still held assets above 200 million dollars in 2016. When St. Joseph Medical Center was sold in 1998, part of the proceeds — an initial investment of about 20 million dollars — created the St. Joseph Community Health Foundation, which has since granted more than 30.6 million dollars. Neither was a gift in the personal sense; both were conversions, in which a community asset built by generations of small giving was sold and its value locked into permanent charitable funds. They are ranked in the table labeled as conversions, because in scale they belong there.

The downstream gift: The Lutheran Foundation's largest single documented grant is recent: an 8 million dollar lead gift to Concordia Lutheran High School's "A Bold Step" campaign, announced as the springboard gift for the school's roughly 50 million dollar campus rebuilding, which broke ground after the campaign crossed its threshold in September 2025. In 2025 the foundation also donated the eleven acres of the former Lutheran Hospital site on Fairfield Avenue to the Boys & Girls Clubs of Fort Wayne for a park — a land gift whose dollar value the record does not state. The foundations' grantmaking records are in the Nonprofits leg.

Sources:

1. St. Joseph Community Health Foundation and The Lutheran Foundation — institutional histories, as compiled in the Nonprofits and Hospitals sections of this history.
2. Interest Time, "Reimagining a Campus Beyond Repairs" (2026) — the Lutheran Foundation's 8 million dollar lead gift to Concordia Lutheran High School.
3. Boys & Girls Clubs of Fort Wayne (June 2025) — the foundation's gift of the former Lutheran Hospital land.