$50 million gift from Farmer family writes a new chapter for hospital
The room already knew the Farmer name.
It is carved over the doors of a business school in Oxford, Ohio, soon to stand in lights above a new riverfront amphitheater, and has been quietly attached to cardiac suites, neuro-ICUs, organoid labs and inner-city classrooms across Greater Cincinnati for nearly four decades.
Still, when the Christ Hospital Health Network rose at its Illuminate the Path Gala on a recent Saturday evening to announce a $50 million commitment from the Farmer Family Foundation, the number landed with real force.
It is the largest gift in the hospital’s 137-year history, one of the largest healthcare gifts the region has ever seen, and more than three times the record the same family set barely a year ago.
The money will modernize and expand the facilities on the hospital’s historic Mount Auburn campus, the hilltop medical center that has watched over the city since the nineteenth century.
The goal is spaces built around patients and the people who love them: rooms and care settings that improve access, ease the experience of being sick and match the caliber of the medicine practiced inside.
It is not the kind of gift that names a single wing or funds a single machine.
It is an investment in the bones of the place, meant to keep a nationally ranked hospital ready for medicine that has not been invented yet.
“We believe exceptional institutions must prepare to meet the needs of the next generation,” said Amy Farmer Joseph, a trustee of the foundation and daughter of its founders, Dick and Joyce Farmer.
“The Christ Hospital Health Network has an important role in that future. We are honored to make this investment in its continued excellence.”
Her words carry the family’s signature: confidence in institutions, patience about results and an insistence that world-class care belongs to everyone in the community, not only to those who can travel for it.
Debbie Hayes, the network’s president and chief executive, called the commitment a defining investment in the future of the health system, one that will let the hospital improve the experience for patients and families, support the clinical excellence of its physicians, nurses and caregivers, and meet the region’s growing needs for decades.
Steve Rosfeld, president of The Christ Hospital Foundation, spoke of the gift in more intimate terms, describing comfort, hope and healing for families during some of life’s most important moments.
For a hospital that welcomes newborns, mends hearts and replaces worn joints by the thousands, those moments happen every hour.
To understand why a family would make the largest gift in a hospital’s history twice in fourteen months, it helps to begin with a laundry on Ridge Avenue.
When Richard T. “Dick” Farmer joined his family’s Acme Uniform and Linen Company after Miami University and a tour in the Marine Corps, it employed twelve people. He saw that the industrial workers of postwar America needed clean, professional uniforms, struck out on his own, and built the company that became Cintas, now the country’s leading uniform supplier and a household name in American business.
He took it public, guided it for four decades and, in a gesture that said much about him, created an employee ownership plan so that the people who wore the company’s colors also shared in its success.
Beside him the entire way was Joyce Barnes Farmer, a Miami classmate who earned her degree in elementary education and married Dick shortly after graduation.
Friends liked to tease him that Joyce was the best decision he ever made. He never argued. Together they did something deliberate and rare: they shaped a family mission, a set of values they wanted to pass to their children and grandchildren.
Concern for each family member and for those less fortunate. The worth of hard work. Honesty and integrity.
A commitment to making their community and their country better. In 1988, they and their children turned that mission into the Farmer Family Foundation, and it has functioned ever since as a family enterprise in the truest sense, with daughters, a son, spouses and now grandchildren sitting at the trustee table.
Since Dick’s passing in 2021, Joyce has led a foundation that has grown more ambitious, not less.
Around her sit Scott Farmer, executive chairman of Cintas, and his wife, Mary; Amy and George Joseph; Robert Coletti, alongside Brynne Farmer Coletti, now trustee emerita; and granddaughter Kendell Coletti Mountain, a sign that the third generation has already pulled up a chair.
Several of them share Miami diplomas with their parents, and all of them, along with the foundation’s longtime executive director, Mary Beth Martin, have helped turn a private family’s values into public goods.
The trustees serve without pay.
The giving is the point.
Miami University was the first great canvas.
In 1992, Dick and Joyce made the cornerstone gift to the university’s business school, which now bears his name.
In 2005, a $30 million leadership gift from the foundation underwrote the construction of Farmer Hall and supported faculty; it became the first building on campus to earn LEED certification. Then in 2016, on the day Miami inaugurated a new president, the family stunned the audience with $40 million more, the largest gift from any individual or foundation in the university’s two centuries.
“We have such wonderful memories here, Joyce and I, as do our children and grandchildren,” Dick said at the time.
Since then, the support has continued year after year, a steady current of scholarships, faculty support and programs that has helped make the Farmer School one of the country’s leading undergraduate business programs.
Medicine became the family’s other great love, and their approach to it reveals a particular kind of philanthropic intelligence.
At Cincinnati Children’s, the foundation backed a young, audacious field before most donors had heard of it: organoids, miniature human organs grown from stem cells that could one day repair damaged tissue or replace transplants.
A $1 million gift for tissue engineering in 2016 helped launch the Center for Stem Cell and Organoid Medicine.
A $5 million challenge grant two years later established and named its Accelerator Lab, filled with robotics that manufacture organoids at scale.
A second $5 million challenge grant followed in 2023. Hospital leaders have said, without hedging, that organoid research would be years behind without the family’s help.
Just as telling is the design of those gifts: challenge grants that asked the rest of the community to rise alongside them.
At the University of Cincinnati, the family has invested roughly $14 million in the UC Gardner Neuroscience Institute, helping build its outpatient home, renovating the neuro-ICU where the region’s most critically ill brain and spine patients are treated, and completing a campaign to modernize the entire neuroscience floor.
Last year they looked past bricks to people, creating the Farmer Family Fund in Neuroscience Nursing, which reimburses the full tuition of University of Cincinnati nursing graduates who commit to building their careers in neurology at UC Health.
It is a practical answer to the national nursing shortage, and a deeply human one, since few things matter more to a frightened family in an intensive care unit than a skilled, steady nurse. The family’s commitment to brain health runs deep and personal; the foundation also funds Parkinson’s research, including support for the Michael J. Fox Foundation.
Their relationship with The Christ Hospital is more than a decade old and has followed the same pattern of patient, escalating trust.
The foundation was among the transformational donors behind the Joint & Spine Center, the first of its kind in the region and one of only a few in the nation, and it helped transform the hospital’s Cardiovascular Intensive Care Unit.
Then in 2025 came $15 million for the Heart & Vascular Institute, at the time the largest gift the network had ever received. That investment is building a state-of-the-art cardiac operating suite with a broadcast center that lets Christ Hospital surgeons teach colleagues around the world in real time, and it is bringing the next generation of MRI, CT and PET imaging to Cincinnati so that diagnoses come faster and patients can stay close to home for lifesaving care.
“This meaningful gift represents our commitment to ensuring Cincinnatians have expanded access to state-of-the-art technology and world-class physicians,” George Joseph said then.
This $50 million commitment builds directly on that promise, extending it from one institute to the whole Mount Auburn campus.
What makes the Farmers distinctive is how wide the circle has become.
Since 1989, they have supported the Catholic Inner-City School Education Fund, helping children in some of the city’s most stretched neighborhoods attend schools that might otherwise close.
That conviction grew into Accelerate Great Schools, the citywide effort the foundation helped launch in 2015 to recruit, create, and replicate excellent schools for Cincinnati’s underserved children, and to which the family has since given more than $25 million.
They helped open the Children’s Museum at Cincinnati Museum Center in 1998, with Dick describing the goal as unlocking young minds with new experiences.
They gave $3 million to Great Parks of Hamilton County and offered $2 million more as a match; the community answered in full, producing $7 million for new trails, a blueway, and better access to the county’s natural places.
And last year, the family’s $60 million gift to the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra made possible The Farmer Music Center, a 20,000-seat amphitheater rising on the beloved former Coney Island grounds and set to open next spring, with its net revenues flowing back into the orchestra’s education and neighborhood programs.
“Music and live entertainment have long played an important role in bringing people together,” Scott Farmer said.
Dick Farmer’s years in the Marine Corps never left him either.
He and Joyce were early champions of wounded service members, and Dick served on the board of the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund, which built centers across the country to treat traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress.
Closer to home, the foundation established and funded the Cincinnati VA Guest House, giving families a place to stay while their veterans receive care, and donated a mobile health unit that brings medical care to veterans in remote corners of the region.
Through a long partnership with Matthew 25: Ministries, Cintas and the foundation have also sent fabric, clothing, first aid supplies and soap to people living in deep poverty around the world.
The headline gifts tell only part of the story.
In a single recent year, the foundation made more than 150 grants and gave away nearly $50 million, and the typical grant was about $15,000, the kind of support that keeps a child advocacy program, a neighborhood nonprofit or a home repair ministry running.
The family that can write a $50 million check is the same family that shows up, year after year, for the small organizations doing patient work out of the spotlight.
That is what made a recent Saturday night at the gala feel less like a surprise than a culmination.
A family that began with a twelve-person laundry and a simple set of family values has become one of the defining philanthropic forces in the Midwest, and it continues to choose its hometown.
Somewhere on the Mount Auburn campus in the years ahead, a patient will be wheeled into a bright, modern room, a worried family will find space to sit close, and a nurse will have what she needs to do her best work.
Most of them will never know the Farmers by name.
Joyce Farmer and her family seem entirely at peace with that.
Their mission was never about the name over the door. It was about the people inside.