$10 million latest gift from Sprott family helps build a new hospital—the family’s foundation has donated more than $337 million to worthy causes
When Juliana Sprott took on her family’s philanthropy, she began with a banker’s box. Her mother, Vizma, handed it to her, full of The Sprott Foundation’s records, along with a hand-kept check log.
She suggested Juliana spend some time with it and decide whether she wanted the work and whether running the foundation was even a real job. Juliana had come from sports broadcasting, with time on Hockey Night in Canada and in the media department of the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars.
Since then, she has become the foundation’s Chief Giving Officer, a member of the Order of Ontario, and one of the people most responsible for how the Sprott family gives today.
That approach is behind the family’s newest gift. Her father, Eric Sprott, has given $10 million to the Huntsville Hospital Foundation’s Raise Muskoka Campaign to help build a new Huntsville Hospital. He has also challenged everyone who loves Muskoka to help finish the campaign.
The gift takes Raise Muskoka past $63 million, close to its $70-million-plus milestone. It also adds to a family giving record of more than $337 million over the years, including Eric’s personal gifts and those of the foundation he and Vizma started in 1988.
“Muskoka has been a very important part of our family’s life, and supporting the hospital was always important to us,” Eric Sprott said. “We are proud of what our family and The Sprott Foundation have helped make possible over the years. Now we have an opportunity to build on that legacy with a new hospital. I’m very pleased to make this gift and to challenge everyone who loves Muskoka to be part of it.”
Huntsville is a family place for the Sprotts. They have a cottage on Lake of Bays and have spent summers there for years, among the people who share the same docks, roads and hospital. Eric and Vizma’s first $1 million gift to the Huntsville Hospital Foundation replaced the hospital’s nuclear medicine camera, which doctors use to diagnose strokes, stage cancers, and check how a heart is working.
In return, the hospital named its imaging department The Sprott Foundation Diagnostic Imaging Department. A second $1 million followed and helped launch a campaign to modernize X-ray, mammography, CT and cardiac ultrasound. It brought a new SPECT-CT camera and helped Muskoka get its first MRI. Huntsville now performs up to 2,000 nuclear medicine procedures each year, close to home.
When they made that second gift, Vizma and Eric gave two reasons. First, to help their local hospital provide advanced treatment and care for the whole community. The second was to inspire other families who could make a difference. This week’s challenge comes from the same instinct. The gift is also an invitation.
That combination of generosity and partnership is close to how Juliana describes the family’s philanthropy. In the foundation’s early years, she has explained, donors usually wrote checks and stayed in the background, often anonymously. The foundation cared deeply about its causes but had little day-to-day contact with the groups it funded. After taking over, Juliana enrolled in The Philanthropy Workshop.
She left with a different model, one she calls trust-based philanthropy. It means getting to know grantees closely, listening to what they need, and being willing to move quickly. Her sister, Larisa, now the foundation’s vice-chair, took the same course and backed the change.
“We love funding new, untested ideas that push the limits of what traditional charities have typically done, and we love risk,” Juliana has said. “We believe that philanthropy should be nimble and fast, should try new things, and not be afraid to fail. That approach inherently requires trust.”
That trust has paid off when it mattered. When the pandemic hit and Eric needed help reaching people right away, Juliana turned to the leaders of Second Harvest and Community Food Centers Canada.
Both were longtime partners, and she knew them well. Within a week, the foundation committed $20 million: $12 million in grocery gift cards distributed across the country and $8 million for hamper delivery and frontline programs.
The foundation was an early funder of a FoodShare truck that brings fresh, discounted produce into neighborhoods without grocery stores. It helped launch the Indigenous Peoples Resilience Fund with $4 million, and it now directs about a fifth of its annual giving to Indigenous-led and Indigenous-serving organizations.
The family’s values go back to Vizma’s own story. She was born in a Red Cross camp in Germany to a Latvian family displaced by the Second World War. They came to Canada as refugees “with nothing but each other,” Juliana has said, and struggled for years to get settled. Vizma came to believe hope carries a person from simply surviving to thriving, and that good food and a safe home make it possible.
Before her death last year, she made sure that belief would pass to the next generation. She led a renewal of the foundation’s board, bringing in a niece and two nephews as directors.
The family also created a Next Generation Giving Fund, through which children as young as six choose causes that matter to them and see small grants go to the charities they pick.
The same idea of passing things on is behind the hospital the Sprott gift will help build. It will be named for Bob Hutcheson, now in his 100th year, whose family has been part of Huntsville since 1896. He returned from the University of Toronto to work in the wood products business his grandfather founded.
Over his career, he ran businesses in real estate, fuel, Christmas trees, and aggregates. He also produced a beach volleyball sand good enough to be ordered for the Summer Olympics, went heli-skiing 40 times, and served as a technical delegate at three Winter Olympics. He and his family helped raise money for three generations of Huntsville hospitals.
The new hospital will go up next to the current one on the same site. It is designed for a growing, aging population and for services the current building can’t easily support.
Plans include a Level 3 intensive care unit, a dedicated stroke unit, more acute care beds, inpatient and outpatient general surgery, labor and delivery, and a center of excellence for rehabilitation and reactivation. It will partner with a new hospital in Bracebridge as part of one connected healthcare system for Muskoka.
“Eric, his family, and the Sprott Foundation have stood behind this hospital for years,” said Katherine Craine, CEO of the Huntsville Hospital Foundation.
“Their generosity has already touched the lives of so many patients and families. This gift continues that commitment and will help shape the future of healthcare in Muskoka.”
Cheryl Harrison, president and CEO of Muskoka Algonquin Healthcare, called it “an investment in the patients and families who rely on MAHC’s Huntsville Hospital and in the dedicated healthcare teams who care for them.”
The campaign began with a $20 million gift led by Jack Cockwell’s family, joined by Bob Hutcheson’s family and ten others, the largest gift in Muskoka’s history.
Donors across the community fully matched its $17.5 million challenge.
Since then, gifts have ranged from children’s birthday money to seven-figure pledges, along with dock-party fundraisers, a matched Radiothon, and pledges from local businesses. In Huntsville, the community pays for about nine out of every ten hospital technology purchases rather than the government.
Tom Anselmi, the campaign’s co-chair, summed it up. “Eric just did something incredible, and he sent us all an important message: this is our hospital, and this is our moment,” he said. “Eric just raised the bar. Now it’s on all of us to keep the momentum going.”
“I’m a great believer that people who have the ability to give should give,” Eric Sprott has said. His daughter shares the same idea. She encourages families to give out of gratitude rather than guilt, to give where they can help best, and to build a reputation as thoughtful, reliable donors, because that encourages others to give mindfully too. In Muskoka, father and daughter are both being proven right.
The Sprotts gave generously, and now their neighbors are being asked to join them.