Jennifer Lopez Aims to Improve Health Care Through Her Foundation

Williams+Hirakawa for Variety

Andrew Barker

Senior Features Writer @barkerrant

Sisters Jennifer and Lynda Lopez had planned to launch a charitable organization since Jennifer was first vaulted into the public eye. Their talks grew more tangible when both were pregnant, and as Jennifer recalls: “We were sitting around doing a lot nothing, thinking about what to do with the world.
But it was after a health scare in 2008 that the mission of the Lopez Family Foundation was finally born.
“Very early after my twins were born, my daughter (Emme) developed this bump on the back of her head,” Lopez says. “So I rushed to the hospital, and it was the middle of the night and the doctor met me there. And I had all these privileges, which wasn’t lost on me. I went back that night and thought, what if I didn’t have that? What if something was really wrong with her?”
Launched in 2009, the sisters’ foundation aims to help improve healthcare for women and children, and first paired with Los Angeles Children’s Hospital to support the telemedicine program.

Williams+Hirakawa for Variety

Recently their work has expanded to facilities in Panama and Puerto Rico, with brands Samsung and Best Buy providing further sponsorship, and this year the org created the Center for a Healthy Childhood at the Montefiore Medical Center in the sisters’ native Bronx borough of New York.
On the Montefiore partnership, Lynda says: “Our focus is improving the well-being of women and children, and not imposing some idea of what that is, but really looking at the community and seeing what do they need? What improvements are they lacking? There are huge issues with obesity, nutrition and childhood health in the Bronx, and we knew that pretty well from our own lives. It was just a matter of sitting down with everyone there and figuring out what we could really do to improve lives.”