$10 million donation from Mark and Maureen Davitt creates new pediatric emergency department
Every parent in the Finger Lakes knows the drive.
It’s late, a child is feverish or hurt or struggling to breathe, and the only thing that matters is getting through the emergency room doors and finding someone who knows exactly what to do.
Mark and Maureen Davitt have spent more than a decade thinking about those moments. This week they made their largest gift yet to make those moments better.
The Rochester couple has committed $10 million to the University of Rochester Medicine, the university announced.
Nine million dollars will establish the Davitt Family Pediatric Emergency Department at Strong Memorial Hospital, part of the hospital’s sweeping expansion.
The other $1 million will support the Golisano Children’s Davitt Family Integrated Care Center, a dedicated outpatient space for children with serious and complex medical conditions.
Construction on that center will begin once the university reaches $2.5 million for the project.
The gift is part of For Ever Better: The Campaign for the University of Rochester, and Mark sits on the campaign’s steering committee.
The scale of the need is easy to see.
Strong’s emergency department was built for 66,000 visits a year.
It now sees more than 110,000. When the expansion is finished, Strong will be one of the largest hospitals in the country, with more than 950 beds, 200 emergency examination and treatment areas, a nine-story inpatient tower, and an emergency department that grows to 120,000 square feet with room for more than 130,000 visits a year.
Strong is also home to the region’s only Level 1 trauma center and serves as a safety-net hospital for more than two million people across more than 15 counties.
Golisano Children’s, the Finger Lakes region’s only pediatric hospital, cares for more than 85,000 children and their families each year. Within that enormous operation, the Davitts chose to put their name on the place where children arrive at their most frightened.
That choice makes sense once you know Maureen.
Before she was a philanthropist, she was a registered nurse with a background in medical, surgical, and pediatric nursing, working at St. Luke’s Hospital, Northern Westchester Hospital, and Highland Hospital.
She knows what a hospital looks like from the bedside, and her words about this gift sound like a nurse’s.
“We hope the new pediatric emergency department will provide excellent care in a space that feels supportive and nurturing, while the integrated care center will provide children with the specialized care they need,” she said.
“Above all, we hope this gift helps make difficult moments a little easier for kids and their families.”
She has also been honest about how much Rochester means to her, even on the hard days. In a 2019 hospital profile, she admitted that every so often, usually in March when the cold has worn her down, she daydreams about moving away.
When she pictures choosing a new hometown, the first thing on her list is access to good health care.
“Because if you don’t have your health, what do you have?” she said.
She and Mark have stayed, and much of their giving since then can be read as an effort to make sure no family in the region has to leave to find great care.
Mark’s path to this moment began on a college campus, though not as a professor or an alumnus of the school he now supports.
A graduate of Hamilton College, he worked at Rochester Institute of Technology as associate bursar and was an assistant coach for the RIT men’s hockey team when it won its first national championship.
He entered the collections industry in 1979, with assignments that took him to North Carolina, Boston, Cleveland, Dallas, Philadelphia, New York, and South Carolina.
In 1985 he founded ConServe, an accounts receivable management company in Fairport that grew into a significant regional employer serving colleges, government agencies, and lenders.
Over four decades, the university notes, he helped thousands of people work their way out of debt while promoting financial literacy. He went on to lead the industry’s national trade association, ACA International.
Today he is president of Davitt Holdings and a former board member and CEO of ConServe.
His honors include the Rochester Business Hall of Fame in 2015, the Rochester ICON Honors Award in 2018, and RIT Saunders College’s Herbert W. Vanden Brul Entrepreneurial Award in 2021.
What stands out in this week’s announcement is how openly Mark credits another Rochester donor.
“We’ve been very fortunate, and watching Tom Golisano give so generously to this community year after year made us stop and think about what more we could do,” he said.
“Tom’s example inspired us to give more deeply to something we care about, and we hope this gift might inspire others in the same way.”
Golisano’s name is already on the children’s hospital, and he has spent the past year extending his pediatric giving nationwide.
The Davitts are showing what that kind of example can set in motion at home: one family’s generosity encouraging the next.
Hoping to inspire others has shaped the Davitts’ giving from the beginning. Their first major gift to the medical center, $2 million to Golisano Children’s in 2018, helped the university reach its fundraising goal for the new children’s hospital building, and the hospital’s eighth floor became the Davitt Family Patient Floor.
They had originally wanted to give quietly.
They agreed to go public only after hospital leaders told them that sharing the news might encourage others to give.
“We want to do our part to enrich this community,” Mark said then.
“This is where we live. We raised our family here, sent our kids to school here, and worked here. Now, we want to give back.”
He also explained the conviction that still guides them: “We’ve always focused on the most vulnerable populations, and to us that means the people on both ends of the lifespan: children and those late in life who need hospice care.
Families shouldn’t have to move out of the area to find the best care for their loved ones.”
Since then, the couple has turned the children’s hospital’s annual gala into a launch pad for others’ generosity.
As honorary chairs in 2019, they created a challenge that collectively generated $1.3 million, enough for Golisano Children’s to buy two dedicated pediatric ambulances.
For the 2021 gala, they created a $500,000 challenge to help fund a pediatric interventional radiology suite.
That suite opened in December 2024, allowing children to receive minimally invasive procedures in a child-centered setting instead of an adult facility. In 2022 they gave $2.5 million to create the Mark and Maureen Davitt Distinguished Professorship in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and to provide long-term support for the division.
That chair is held by Michael Scharf, psychiatrist-in-chief at Golisano Children’s.
In 2021, the School of Medicine and Dentistry honored the couple with its John N. Wilder Award.
Counting this week’s commitment, the Davitts’ direct gifts to University of Rochester Medicine now total at least $14.5 million, along with the matching challenges that brought many other donors to the table.
Their generosity reaches well beyond the hospital. In 2018, the couple committed $2.5 million to Seneca Park Zoo’s A Wilder Vision campaign, and the new Animals of the Savanna building, home to giraffes, white rhinos, ostriches, and zebras, was named in their honor.
At RIT, the institution where Mark once worked, they created the Mark and Maureen Davitt Graduate Education Endowed Scholarship with $500,000 to help graduates of the Rochester City School District pursue advanced degrees. Its first two scholars earned graduate degrees in 2021. In 2024 they added a $1 million endowed scholarship for students from Rochester’s private city elementary schools who pursue science, technology, engineering, and math.
“Education is a powerful tool for empowering individuals and transforming communities,” Mark said at the time.
Their giving to children in the city continues. A $1.5 million gift helped the Bivona Child Advocacy Center open a second location in Irondequoit, home to the Mark and Maureen Davitt Beacon Place, which offers prevention services, parent and caregiver support, and programs for children and youth.
“By offering support, counseling, and protection, we can help our children to try to reclaim their stolen childhoods,” the couple said. They were lead donors, at $1 million or more, to Hope Hall School’s $18 million. The Hope for Tomorrow campaign, which supports students who learn differently.
They have supported Nativity Preparatory Academy, Rochester’s tuition-free Catholic middle school, and as event chairs at its 2026 spring gala, they matched every paddle-call gift dollar for dollar.
In 2017, a $100,000 challenge match from the couple helped Catholic Family Center’s centennial gala break its record.
Mark’s broader philanthropy has also reached the Irish Children’s Program of Rochester, Lollypop Farm, Genesee Country Village and Museum, ABVI/Goodwill of the Finger Lakes, the Ibero-American Action League, the American Diabetes Association, and palliative and hospice care organizations.
Taken together, the publicly documented gifts amount to well over $20 million, and that figure does not include the many matches, sponsorships, and smaller gifts that rarely make the news.
Much of the money has gone toward the same goal: a sick child cared for near home, a city student starting graduate school, a family finding help after a crisis, and a school building that fits the children inside it.
“The Davitts are visionaries whose deep commitment to children and helping others live healthier and fuller lives is truly inspiring,” said URMC CEO David Linehan.
University President Sarah Mangelsdorf called them “longtime champions of children’s health and community healthcare.” Jill Halterman, chair of pediatrics and physician-in-chief at Golisano Children’s, said the gift lets her team “rethink how and where we provide care, creating spaces and services designed around those we serve.”
Kathy Parrinello, CEO of Strong Memorial Hospital, noted that the first phase of the expansion will open in less than a year.
When it does, a new pediatric emergency department will carry the Davitt name.
The families who rush through its doors at two in the morning will probably never meet the couple behind it.
They won’t need to.
As Maureen put it, “Rochester is where we built our life, raised our family, and watched our children grow. This community has given so much to us, and we’re proud to give back.”