$10 million to inspire care: Jordan family expands neurosciences frontier
For Deloris P. Jordan, healthcare has always been deeply personal and profoundly global. On Saturday, her decades-long advocacy for health access and education was recognized with the dedication of the Deloris P. Jordan Neurosciences Institute at New Hanover Regional Medical Center.
The event marked both a new chapter for Novant Health and a fresh testament to the Jordan family’s enduring legacy of giving.
The renaming follows a $10 million gift from Wilmington native and NBA legend Michael Jordan, who made the donation in honor of his mother’s lifetime commitment to improving lives through compassion and opportunity. The contribution brings his total giving to Novant Health to $27 million, continuing a philanthropic partnership that has helped transform healthcare delivery across the Carolinas.
Though winter weather prevented Michael Jordan from attending the ceremony, the focus remained firmly on his mother’s vision and voice. Family members shared heartfelt stories about Deloris’s unwavering strength and perseverance, traits they credited with shaping their own sense of purpose.
“From a young age, my mom would always say: ‘Can’t is not in the dictionary, and if you find one in there, tear it out,’” daughter Roslyn Jordan told the audience. “She has lived that every single day.”
Novant Health CEO Carl Armato led the dedication, naming Deloris Jordan a Global Health Ambassador in recognition of her decades of advocacy and global health leadership. He presented her with a handcrafted glass bowl by local artist Elena Wright and announced the creation of a permanent Global Health Ambassador recognition area near the institute’s entrance.
The display, curated to celebrate her accomplishments, will serve as an ongoing source of inspiration for patients, physicians, and future healthcare professionals.
The newly renamed institute has already achieved extraordinary outcomes since its opening three years ago.
Under the leadership of Neurosciences Medical Director Dr. Jeff Beecher, the center has saved more than a thousand lives from stroke and neurological emergencies, treating patients faster than 95 percent of peer institutions nationwide.
Before the institute opened, patients suffering from brain aneurysms had to be airlifted two hours away; today, advanced robotic systems and fluorescence-guided technologies allow local doctors to perform complex brain and spinal surgeries on-site.
Beecher called the new gift “transformative,” noting it will accelerate expansion plans, including nearly doubling the size of the neurocritical care unit and introducing cutting-edge research and treatment programs.
For Deloris Jordan, the day was both a milestone and a continuation. In her remarks, she spoke with characteristic clarity about her lifelong belief that healing begins with prevention and education, extending across borders and generations.
“We do have goals in place and things that we want to achieve,” she said. “More than anything, it’s about research, prevention, and reaching out across the globe.”
That global vision is reflected in her work with the Kenya Women and Children’s Wellness Centre in Nairobi, an organization she founded nearly twenty years ago to address the lack of specialized care and to support victims of gender-based violence.
What began as a small effort to supply local hospitals with medical equipment evolved into a multi-building medical and educational campus that now serves thousands every year. At Saturday’s dedication, Novant Health announced a new partnership with the center to support exchange programs, clinical training, and outreach missions for Kenyan healthcare providers.
Armato emphasized that for Novant, global health is an extension of local responsibility. “We are committed to delivering world-class care everywhere, to every person and every zip code,” he said.
“It’s not only world-class care—it’s compassionate, transformative care that helps people live healthy lives.”
In Wilmington, the Jordan family’s philanthropic reach has continued to widen. The Michael Jordan Family Medical Clinics — one in the Greenfield neighborhood, the other in East Wilmington — now serve uninsured and underinsured residents, providing integrated mental and physical healthcare.
In its first nine months, the Greenfield clinic treated nearly 1,800 patients, offering an alternative to emergency room visits and strengthening community trust in accessible medicine.
By the close of the ceremony, as the glass bowl caught the afternoon light, there was a quiet sense of continuity in the room — the recognition that this moment was not an endpoint, but an evolution of a lifelong mission.
The $10 million gift and the institute that now bears Deloris P. Jordan’s name are as much about innovation as they are about influence: the power of one family’s belief that health, compassion, and opportunity belong to everyone.