A legacy for South Australia

There are few South Australians who could claim a stronger philanthropic legacy than James and Diana Ramsay.

With a history of giving spanning 50 years, the Ramsay's generosity is estimated to exceed $120 million. This includes their bequest of $38 million to the Art Gallery of South Australia, at the time the single biggest gift to any art gallery in Australia’s history.

“James and Diana’s philanthropic journey was driven by a profound sense of social responsibility, deeply rooted in their upbringings and a shared desire to improve the lives of others,” said Kerry de Lorme, Executive Director of the James and Diana Ramsay Foundation.

“Their wealth came later in life and as their funds grew, so did their generosity. They had more than they needed and wanted to share it with others.”

Both James and Diana had medical professionals in their families, which fuelled their commitment to advancing medical research.

In 1927 James’s father Sir John Ramsay, a renowned surgeon, was a founding Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons and later chairman of the Launceston General Hospital.

Reflecting this continuing spirit of advancing medicine, SAHMRI is today one of the largest beneficiaries of the James and Diana Ramsay Foundation, receiving nearly $2 million in committed support to date.

The Foundation’s first major investment at SAHMRI was seed funding for Resilient Futures, a project aimed at building life-long resilience and wellbeing skills in young people aged 16-20.

This program resulted in the development of evidence-based approaches to support mental health, which matured into a SAHMRI-supported commercial entity Be Well Co. After reaching more than 40,000 people across 50 organisations, Be Well Co was sold to The Oranges Toolkit to continue evolving its services on a national scale.

The other major area of support is the Ramsay Bioinformatics Fellow, established in 2015 and dedicated to analysing vast amounts of biological data to advance research, precision medicine and improving patient outcomes.

“The James and Diana Ramsay Foundation has been a critical partner in the tremendous success of bioinformatics at SAHMRI, and in founding the South Australian Genomics Centre in 2020,” said the Centre’s Scientific Director Professor David Lynn, who’s also Director of the Computational & Systems Biology Program at SAHMRI.

“Genomics data can now be generated at huge scale but the complexity is in the analysis, otherwise the data is essentially useless. The Ramsay Bioinformatics Fellow plays a crucial role in supporting the advanced data analysis and interpretation demands of our large user base, whose requirements are only going to increase in the coming years.”

Kerry says there’s no question that James and Diana would be proud to see the wide-reaching impact of their philanthropy.

“I think they would be glad that their funding has taken a risk on early projects like Resilient Futures, which has paid off and become an independent commercial entity, and seeing how far bioinformatics has come in a short space of time. Very proud indeed.”

If you'd like to know more about giving to SAHMRI please contact hazel.jourdin@sahmri.com.

Portrait of James and Diana Ramsay by Anna Platten, 1993