5 years journey - Brief History

Initial phase – the task was daunting

To understand Medhospital Foundation as to how and where it stands today, an outline of events that led to its creation is necessary. When I first started using the Internet, I relied heavily on it to gather information for my research. As a professional in the field of health and medical research for so long, and being involved with teaching, I knew what is important. I was naturally drawn towards taking up this task of bridging this gap. This was the year 1998.

As a novice, I decided to write letters and communicate to these information providers what was missing. As anyone can guess, I got no response. The most disheartening of them all was when I did not get any replies from other well-known organizations to which I had written to draw their attention to the problem.

The more I faced resistance, the more I was convinced my efforts are worth the while. After a few years of failed attempts, I contacted my friends and enrolled them to join me. Since Internet was the best choice of media to publicize our efforts, we decided to create an information portal. In the year 2003, I created the website and hooked it up on a free available web space and became it's Webmaster.

We started to gather information and prepare articles dealing with all kinds of issues and presented them in form of essays. We started having regular visitors who often wrote in to us asking very diverse questions, some of them way beyond our scope. We realized if we were to continue that way, we would never be able to create an impact we were looking forward to achieve. We had to be organized with our priorities well framed and declared. Also with the increasing number of articles we prepared, we had to have a greater web space and presence that involved money.

Birth of a Foundation

In 2004-2005, I decided to transform Medhospital into a foundation by creating an endowment fund that would be used to finance it. We were working on its legal registration, and giving shape to the well-defined rules and regulations that will govern its functioning. We also had plans to raise funds and fund projects at that time.

While I was preparing the required legal documents, many of the members encouraged me to drop the idea, for obvious reasons. So together we structured the foundation in a different way than most conventional foundations. Two aspects make it unique: one, the endowment is purely used to run and maintain all its research and created materials completely free for use as long as it is for non-commercial purposes; and two, it does not function by giving or raising money, neither does it claim any tax benefits whatsoever. These decisions allowed us with more productive time, sufficient funds to broaden our impact, and operate independently and remain unaffected by administrative or political restrictions. We started to formalize our initiatives based on what was important to us.

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