We have established the Emergency Fund to make grants to economically disadvantaged patients from any part of India who need expensive treatment urgently. Sometimes the family has been able to gather most of the amount needed, but are still short of the total - our grant can take them the rest of the way. Grants can be from Rs.5,000 to over Rs.1 Lakh.
The Person to Person Fund (PTP) gives smaller grants of up to Rs.10,000 to a large number of deserving patients. But this is multiplied in a unique way by the institution making available a further concession of up to Rs.40,000, so your donation is effectively multiplied by five (if you claim income tax relief the multiplier becomes even greater!). You will be sent a report giving information about the person(s) helped with your gift, thus creating a personal link. We plan to help about 3,000 patients a year through this scheme, which means we need about Rs.3 Crores of donations in the year to maximise the institution’s matching scheme.
The Centenary Endowment Fund was established in the year 2000, one hundred years after Dr. Ida Scudder started her medical work in Vellore. It helps patients in two ways:
• Grants of up to Rs.2 lakhs for the treatment at CMC of economically disadvantaged patients living close to Vellore who need expensive operations.
• Unexpected Complications Grants of up to Rs.1 lakh to help deserving patients from any part of India who have been treated at CMC Vellore, but for some unforeseen reason or complication their treatment has come out significantly more costly than expected.
You can donate any amount to add to the corpus of the Centenary Endowment Fund, and your money will be invested and the interest used to help patients for years to come. If donating to any endowment fund, please send a covering letter or email including a sentence that this amount is a gift to the Corpus of the Centenary Endowment Fund (or other fund name) of the Christian Medical College Vellore Association.
Other purposes / Restricted Gifts
Gifts can also be designated for a particular department, project, type of patient (eg for children/people with cancer etc) or other activity, but it is always helpful to discuss this with us first (occasionally people give us restricted gifts that may be difficult for us to apply). Please feel free to ask for further details and we will be happy to provide them.
Endowments
An Endowment Fund is a way of creating a permanent stream of income for a specified charitable purpose (lying within the objectives of CMC Vellore). We invest the capital and use 2/3rds of the interest earned each year according to the purpose designated by the donor. The other 1/3rd of the interest is reinvested as part of capital; otherwise the real value of the fund would be quickly eroded by inflation. In this way the original gift continues to provide help year by year, rather than being used up in the year given. The donor can of course add to the capital at any time if they wish to, and others wanting to support the same cause may also add to it.
We administer various such funds, for example for student scholarships, to fund facilities for particular types of patients (such as children with cancer) and to provide funds for the treatment of economically disadvantaged patients. Often people set up an endowment in memory of a loved one, and this ensures that there is a permanent memory of their name.
For amounts less than about Rs.5 lakhs of capital we normally discourage people from setting up a separate endowment fund. From our point of view the administration involved in keeping a separate account outweighs the annual benefit. For example Rs.1 lakh will produce interest of 9 to 10% of which say 3% goes back to the capital leaving only around Rs.6,000 to help the beneficiaries each year. Rather we would encourage the donor to either give the money for use in the current year, which will make a big impact on those who benefit from it, or else to add their gift to an existing endowment fund - such as our Friends of Vellore Endowment or the Nursing Students Scholarship Endowment. Depending on the purpose of the gift we can often recommend a suitable Fund. However I appreciate that this means that you wouldn't be able to have a particular name associated with the fund.
Named Gifts
Another way to give something a little more permanent is a "named gift". For example it may be possible to purchase an item of equipment for a particular ward or department, or to help fund a ward bed, or a room or other facility in a new building. In these cases we can fix a sign to the item saying something like "Gift of XYZ" or "Thanksgiving gift for the birth of our daughter" etc. Please contact us to discuss this.