STFM Charts Course to Replace Title VII Funding

As federal funds for family medicine education programs dwindle, the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine is urging teaching organizations to turn to philanthropic sources for funding.

The philanthropic pot is huge, said veteran fund-raiser and family medicine faculty member William Mygdal, Ed.D., of Waco, Texas, who also is president of the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine. Mygdal spoke to about 190 participants at the STFM Families and Health Conference on March 3 in Austin, Texas.

Federal funds for training family physicians have just about dried up, said Mygdal, noting that section 747 of Title VII of the Public Health Service Act, the federal program that has supported training in primary care (including family medicine), recently was reduced from $88 million for 2005 to $41 million for 2006.

The appropriations bill that shrunk the funding "also ruled out new funding cycles," Mygdal said. "Currently funded Title VII projects can thus complete their project activities -- with some cuts -- but no new requests for proposals will be forthcoming. Projects many of us have spent 10 or 20 years nurturing will no longer be funded," he said.

But, "let's put this (loss of federal funds) in context," said Mygdal. "The U.S. philanthropic community donated almost $250 billion to worthy causes in 2004. … That's 3 billion times as much as the feds were putting into … the primary care disciplines. We have been setting our sights too low. The time is here to dream big."

"We must keep our spirits up, and we must persevere," said Mygdal, drawing on a quote from Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. "… it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair."

Family medicine could think of its current predicament as a "season of Darkness," a "winter of despair," said Mygdal. That would be easy to do, he added, "but unproductive. We've got to be tough-minded. Learning to raise money is not in our set of skills. It is a different skills set and attitude set -- that we can master."

In order to master those skills and attitude sets, STFM established the New Partners Initiative last year to train family medicine faculty who are responsible for fund-raising. The initiative is presenting an academic fund-raising workshop called "How Leaders Turn Dreams Into Reality: Successful Fund-Raising in a Changing World" April 25-26 in San Francisco. To register or obtain more information, go online or e-mail STFM Executive Director Roger Sherwood, C.A.E.