Voices of RPIA
26
In Our Community
QUINN FAMILY FUTURE FOUNDATION Mike Quinn is the Co-Founder of RPIA and is currently a Principal and Senior Advisor at the firm after 13 years as the firm’s Chief Investment Officer. To help give back to the community in a more organized and thoughtful way, Mike and his wife, Francisca, set up the Quinn Family Future Foundation. The foundation is guided by these four focus areas: poverty relief, access to education, improving the natural environment, and building strong communities.
At the heart of all the work they are doing through the foundation, Mike and Francisca believe that education is the key ingredient for effecting change in every other area. They believe there is a huge need for equitable access to education and closing that gap is crucial for lifting youth out of poverty and enabling them to have equal footing. Mike recounts how years ago, he and his friends were able to pay for their university education just through summer jobs. Today’s education costs make this almost impossible even with the best of summer jobs, which just widens this gap and makes it harder for young people below a certain income level to have the time and money to pursue their goals.
Quinn Family Summer Internship Program
Through Sinai Health’s SciHigh Program at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, the Foundation has set up the Quinn Family Summer Internship Program, which aims to connect high school students with one of the best biomedical research institutes. The program is open to students who are at least 16 years old in grades 11 and 12 who have completed grade 11 Biology and Chemistry. Students accepted into the program get a paid, full time summer job at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute for eight weeks where they get hands-on lab experience and access to world-leading researchers and mentors. Over the years, students from this program have gone on to become the first members of their family to attend university and some have even gone ahead to attend prestigious medical schools such as the Temerty Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto and Harvard Medical School. For these students, having this experience in high school helped pave the way for them to continue on a path to success bolstered by the access they got to professionals in the fields they wanted to pursue. Not only will these students change their own lives with their professional contributions, but also the lives of their family members, their community, and the world of medicine.
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