Area resident donates $16M to support Sarasota cancer institute

A gift of $16 million has been received by the Sarasota Memorial Healthcare Foundation from Susan Milman to support the Brian D. Jellison Cancer Institute on Sarasota Memorial Hospital’s Sarasota campus. 

The facility, which will offer comprehensive outpatient cancer services, is currently under construction and scheduled to open in late 2025, according to a statement. 

“Susan has been a generous supporter and friend of the Healthcare Foundation for nearly a decade and was one of the first to recognize the importance of providing comprehensive cancer care close to home,” Healthcare Foundation President Stacey Corley says in a news release. “Her latest transformational gift is testament to her commitment to SMH and the health of our entire community.”

Milman was born on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and later moved to Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, according to a 2020 foundation story on her philanthropy. She earned an undergraduate degree from Rutgers University and her graduate degree from NYU. She first visited Sarasota in 2003. “My late father and I came down here to look at purchasing a Walgreens drugstore. I had never been to the west coast of Florida,” she said in the story. “I fell in love with Sarasota. Something just made me feel at home.”

Her family’s successful commercial real estate business gave them the means to be philanthropic, the foundation story states. “It is my honor and privilege to support the Cancer Institute,” she said. “And I want to see the good that my gifts can do.”

In 2020 Milman donated $5 million to name the lobby in the new oncology tower in memory of her brother, Alan, who died in 1987, and her parents, Natalie Kover Milman and Morris Milman.

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Susan Milman's latest gift will be used specifically to support planning, construction and operations of the new Brian D. Jellison Cancer Institute pavilion, which will house an expanded breast health center with the latest mammography, ultrasound, stereotactic and nuclear medicine technology. 

Additional services will include outpatient surgery, advanced HDR brachytherapy, radiation oncology, infusion and diagnostic imaging, plus oncology physician practices and integrative care clinics.

The new facility will be named the Milman-Kover Cancer Pavilion.

“I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to have a state-of-the-art cancer center with the support and compassionate care of a top-notch cancer team in our community,” Milman says in the release. “It will not only bring peace of mind to cancer patients and families but will also helps advance SMH’s ability to develop new treatments and possibly cures for cancer. I hope others will join me in supporting this important initiative.”

Combined with her previous donation, Milman has now given more than $21 million to the foundation.