$25 million latest gift is earmarked for cancer research from the Larry and Judy Tanenbaum Family Foundation, led by Julie Tanenbaum-Albert
The largest gift in the Terry Fox Foundation’s history comes from a family foundation now led by the next generation.
Under its president, the family’s long faith in open science is becoming a strategy.
Julie Tanenbaum-Albert has always been a storyteller.
Before she became president of the Larry and Judy Tanenbaum Family Foundation, she wrote four bestselling cookbooks with her sister, started a digital marketing agency, and earned a graduate degree in journalism.
So it seems fitting that the foundation’s most historic gift so far was announced at the premiere of a film.
The Terry Fox Foundation launched “Powered by Terry,” a handcrafted film and the second chapter of its Finish It campaign.
It also announced a $25 million gift from the Tanenbaum Foundation, the largest single donation in its 45-year history.
Matching funds from the Government of Canada double the gift to $50 million for cancer research.
The gift carries the names of Julie’s parents, Larry and Judy Tanenbaum. They spoke for the family this morning, and their decades of generosity made the moment possible.
But it also comes at a time when their daughter is steering the foundation they created in 1985.
Over the past two years, the family’s giving has followed a recognizable thread. It goes to institutions that agree to share what they learn.
The money will support the Marathon of Hope Cancer Centers Network, led by the Terry Fox Research Institute.
The network brings 57 member institutions across Canada together around precision oncology, matching treatment to the genetic makeup of each patient’s cancer. It has already built a national store of genomic and clinical data from more than 16,000 patients.
The network has funded treatment guided by genomic sequencing for more than 1,500 people.
The Tanenbaums said the attraction lay as much in how the network works as in what it studies.
“We believe deeply in open science whereby collaboration and sharing knowledge is for the greater good in accelerating discovery,” they said.
They added that they hope their commitment “encourages others to join us in building something that can benefit Canadians for generations.”
Michael Mazza, the foundation’s chief executive, said the gift mattered “not simply because of its size, but because of what it makes possible.”
He described it as an investment “in knowledge being shared rather than held within walls.”
That phrase could almost serve as Julie’s own mission statement.
She has said the recurring theme in her parents’ giving is open-access research.
She traces it to the Tanenbaum Open Science Institute, founded with a $20 million gift in 2016 at the Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital at McGill University, her own alma mater. Since then, she has helped carry the idea further.
Earlier this year the foundation established the Tanenbaum Open Science Fund in perpetuity at Tel Aviv University’s Sagol School of Neuroscience, the institute’s first international partner.
“Open science only works when great institutions are willing to do research differently, sharing openly rather than competing in silos,” she said at the time. The goal, she said, was to “move discoveries from the lab to patients faster than ever before.”
The same thinking shaped the family’s most recent commitment to sport.
This fall, the foundation and the University of Toronto created a $5 million chair in science for women’s sport, half funded by the family and half matched by the university.
It builds on the Tanenbaum Institute for Science in Sport, which the family founded in 2022 with $20 million.
Julie described the chair as “an opportunity to evolve and develop female sports and athletes” and said she hopes the lessons will be shared internationally.
Her father said he did not want the findings “printed in a journal and stuck in a silo.”
Larry credited the strong women in his family, among them six granddaughters, and said: “The focus needs to be on the athlete.”
Julie also sits on the Canadian advisory board of Right To Play, where the family supports the power of play for children in Canada and abroad.
She inherits a remarkable record.
Her parents gave $25 million to Mount Sinai Hospital in 2006 and $35 million in 2013, when its research institute was renamed the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute.
They established the Tanenbaum Centre for Pharmacogenetics at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, now an international leader in gene-guided treatment for mental illness.
They gave $50 million in stock to the endowment of the UJA Federation of Greater Toronto.
The family also honored its own roots at the University of Toronto.
It endowed the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies, named for Larry’s mother, and the Sam and Alice Lieberman Professorship in Hebrew Studies, named for Judy’s parents.
The family has long looked after its elders’ legacies, and Julie now carries that tradition forward for a third generation.
The record also shows how naturally she can build on it.
The foundation names its priorities as health and medical research, Jewish culture and identity, education, and community initiatives for vulnerable people.
Under Julie, those priorities increasingly share one way of working: gifts that link institutions instead of standing alone, matching funds that bring in more money, and results meant to travel.
The Terry Fox gift may be the clearest example yet.
The movement Terry started has been sustained for more than four decades by school runs and neighborhood volunteers, and it recently passed $1 billion raised.
Today, a family foundation, guided by a daughter who knows the power of a good story, added its own chapter.
John Kearsey, the foundation’s chief philanthropy officer, hopes it will draw in others.
“Larry and Judy Tanenbaum have done something catalytic,” he said.
“We want other families, foundations, and business leaders across the country to see themselves in this mission.”