$75 million: new gift to hospital lifts Ernest and Evelyn Rady’s philanthropy beyond $400 million for health, education and community services

Ernest and Evelyn Rady’s latest act of generosity began, in many ways, decades ago, long before the new North Tower at Scripps Memorial Hospital La Jolla opened its doors.

It began with a physician father in Winnipeg, a young son watching medicine up close, and an immigrant family that understood how fragile health can be and how powerful it is when a community has access to excellent care.

That history is woven quietly into the news that the Radys have committed $75 million to Scripps Health, a gift that will permanently put their name on the hospital’s eight‑floor North Tower, now to be known as the Rady Tower.

This commitment is not a one‑off gesture, but the latest expression of a lifelong belief that if you have been fortunate, you have a responsibility to make sure others can get the best possible care when they need it most.

The newly named Rady Tower is a striking symbol of that belief put into bricks, mortar, and state‑of‑the‑art technology.

Open for only about ten months and already operating as an advanced inpatient hub, the tower is built around what modern patients and caregivers need: comprehensive mother‑baby services, advanced operating rooms designed for complex procedures, and large private rooms that can hold sophisticated lifesaving equipment without crowding out family members or a sense of calm.

The building’s layout and details were shaped through careful conversations with physicians, nurses, hospital leaders, architects, and support staff, all focused on one question: what would truly help patients heal and help staff deliver their best work? It is the sort of thoughtful, evidence‑based design that costs money to create and to sustain, and it is exactly the kind of long‑term infrastructure the Rady family likes to support.

For Scripps Health, the gift arrives at a pivotal moment. The La Jolla campus has been undergoing a 25‑year transformation since 2010, a master plan to turn it into the region’s premier destination for complex care.

Over the past decade and a half, the campus has added the Prebys Cardiovascular Institute tower, the Scripps Clinic John R. Anderson V Medical Pavilion, a centralized energy plant, and a multi‑level parking structure. The Rady Tower is the next major step in that evolution, not just adding beds but elevating the experience of care. With San Diego’s population growing and the medical needs of the community becoming more complex, gifts at this scale are the difference between merely keeping up and truly leading.

Ernest Rady is clear about why his family stepped forward. Supporting health care in San Diego, he has said, has always been a priority. He knows that Scripps’ physicians, nurses, and staff have spent decades building a reputation for care that ranks among the best in the nation, and he wants to ensure that reputation is not only protected but extended well into the future.

In his public remarks about the gift, there is less self‑congratulation than a sense of shared project: the idea that Scripps and the community are doing important work together, and the role of his family is to provide the resources that allow talented people to imagine and build the next generation of care.

When Scripps President and CEO Chris Van Gorder thanked the Radys, he framed their gift as part of a continuum stretching back to founder Ellen Browning Scripps more than a century ago. It is philanthropy as stewardship, a relay race in which each generation picks up the baton.

This new $75 million commitment would be impressive on its own. What makes it profound is how it fits into the larger story of Ernest and Evelyn Rady’s giving, which now comfortably exceeds $400 million across health care, education, and community services to date.

In San Diego, their name is already synonymous with children’s health. In 2019, they made a historic $200 million gift to Rady Children’s Hospital–San Diego, the largest in the hospital’s history and one of the largest ever made to a children’s hospital in the United States.

That gift has been powering a sweeping redevelopment of the pediatric campus, updating and expanding facilities so that infants, children, and teens receive cutting‑edge care in spaces deliberately designed for young patients and their families. It is the same philosophy that now shows up in the Rady Tower at Scripps: invest in permanent, flexible infrastructure that will serve people for generations.

Their commitment to health is not limited to one city or one country. In 2016, the Radys made a landmark $30 million donation to the University of Manitoba, Ernest’s alma mater, specifically to support its Faculty of Health Sciences and medical school.

The faculty was renamed the Rady Faculty of Health Sciences, and the medical school became the Max Rady College of Medicine, in honor of Ernest’s father.

The endowment generates roughly seven figures a year to support student scholarships, research, equipment, and capital projects.

In very practical terms, that means more aspiring physicians and health professionals can train, more research can move from idea to reality, and the facilities in which care is learned and delivered can keep pace with modern needs. It is a quiet but powerful way of honoring family history while investing in the next generation of caregivers.

The Radys’ giving also extends deeply into community and social service work. In partnership with The Salvation Army in San Diego, they have committed $30 million—and pledged an additional $5 million once community fundraising goals are met—to create a permanent operating endowment for a major new service hub often referred to as the Rady Center.

The design is straightforward and deeply practical: use endowed philanthropy to underwrite ongoing programs for vulnerable children, families, and adults, ensuring that critical services are not constantly at the mercy of short‑term budget cycles. Just as in their hospital and university gifts, the Radys look for ways to create durable platforms that will still be standing and still be serving many years from now.

Education and leadership are another recurring theme. At UC San Diego, Ernest Rady has been instrumental in building the Rady School of Management, first with a major founding gift and then with continued support that helped the school grow from an idea into a nationally recognized center for business and innovation.

While the university has not attached a single round number to every gift he and Evelyn have made, public accounts describe tens of millions of dollars in cumulative contributions.

The impact is easy to see: thousands of graduates trained in management and entrepreneurship, many of whom go on to build businesses, nonprofits, and civic organizations that shape the region’s future. When you look across their portfolio, a pattern emerges: heal people, educate them, and support the social fabric around them.

All of this giving is organized and amplified through the Rady Foundation, which serves as the couple’s primary vehicle for large‑scale philanthropy. It largely focuses on San Diego and Southern California, with targeted support for national and Canadian institutions that hold personal meaning for the family.

The foundation tends to make invitation‑only grants, quietly but consistently providing support to hospitals, youth programs, Jewish community organizations, universities, and social service providers.

They are signatories to the Giving Pledge, committing the majority of their wealth to charitable causes, and their public statements about philanthropy are unusually personal.

They speak not in abstractions about “social good,” but about gratitude, opportunity, and their belief that success comes with the obligation to leave institutions stronger than you found them.

When you add up the numbers—the $200 million for Rady Children’s Hospital–San Diego, $30 million for the Rady Faculty of Health Sciences and Max Rady College of Medicine at the University of Manitoba, $30 million plus a $5 million challenge for The Salvation Army’s Rady Center, tens of millions for the Rady School of Management at UC San Diego, and now $75 million for the Rady Tower at Scripps Memorial Hospital La Jolla—you arrive at a conservative total well north of $400 million in lifetime commitments and contributions as of April 30, 2026.

The exact figure is almost certainly higher, given the many additional grants and initiatives that have not been publicly quantified in detail. But the precise number is less important than the pattern it reveals.

The Radys have chosen to use their success in insurance, financial services, and real estate to build, in very literal ways, the hospitals, schools, and community institutions that will serve thousands of people they will never meet.

Seen from the perspective of a patient walking into the newly named Rady Tower in La Jolla, or a student entering a lecture hall at the Rady School of Management, or a child receiving care at Rady Children’s Hospital, this philanthropy is not measured in monetary totals.

It is measured in a mother’s relief that her newborn is in a modern intensive care unit, in a young doctor’s ability to attend medical school because of scholarship support, and in a family finding shelter and services at a Salvation Army center made sustainable by an endowment.

The $75 million new commitment to Scripps Health is the latest and very visible expression of a long-held family conviction: that the true legacy of wealth is not the fortune itself, but the healthier, better-educated, more resilient community it helps build.