Impact
Building on the University’s long history of civic-mindedness, the Penn Compact 2022 seeks to bring Penn knowledge and practice to bear on key local, national, and global issues in order to help more people lead healthy, prosperous lives.
To illuminate the prominent place that civic engagement holds at Penn, Dr. Gutmann established the President's Engagement Prizes, which provide unparalleled support for prizewinning seniors as they design and undertake public service projects after graduation. The prize also reinforces Dr. Gutmann’s unwavering belief that a university is, as Penn’s founder Ben Franklin believed, “first and foremost, a social undertaking to create a social good.”
At the local level, Penn's top priorities include direct support of schools such as Penn Alexander, which was one of just 279 public schools nationwide to be named a U.S. Blue Ribbon School for its success in closing the achievement gap. The Penn Connects 2.0 Campus Plan includes improvement of facilities and growth of green spaces on Penn’s contiguous university and medical campuses.
Major investments in the Perelman School of Medicine and UPenn Health System infrastructure—which together form a $6 billion enterprise—include the Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine; the Roberts Proton Center, the largest such facility in the world; and the Smilow Center for Translational Research. These and other recent campus projects have added more than 2 million square feet of renovated and new space at a cost of nearly $1.5 billion. The momentum continues with the New Patient Pavilion breaking ground in 2017.
In these facilities and locations throughout the community, Penn Medicine improves health through a variety of programs and activities. In 2015, these initiatives benefitted our community with $253 million in physician training support, unfunded care to Medicaid patients, and related research support.