Children’s Health and UT Southwestern Medical Center have secured a nine-figure financial donation, the organizations announced on Tuesday, as they work toward constructing a $5 billion pediatric campus in Dallas that will span nearly 5 million square feet.
The new campus, which broke ground in October and is scheduled to open in 2031, will replace the existing Children’s Medical Center Dallas, a facility that was completed in 1967 and ranks among Texas’ largest pediatric hospitals.
The institutions did not disclose the exact figure, but the most recent grant comes from the Moody Foundation and exceeds $100 million, the donation amount the project received on two previous occasions.
The exact amount is being withheld “out of respect for the wishes of the parties involved,” a representative for the Moody Foundation told The Dallas Morning News in an email.
Still, “it was extraordinary to have two $100 million gifts independently committed to the project,” Brent Christopher, president of the Children’s Medical Center Foundation, told The News in an interview.
“This third nine-figure gift that is even larger — and the largest gift received to date for the project — really moves this into uncharted waters,” Christopher added.
In a statement, Frances Moody-Dahlberg, president and CEO of the Moody Foundation, called the project “a once-in-a-generation opportunity to change the trajectory of children’s health care in Texas.”
In recognition of the new donation, Children’s Health and UT Southwestern will name the project’s centerpiece hospital as the Moody Children’s Hospital, a gesture that reflects the “deep trust and shared vision” between the parties, Moody-Dahlberg said.
The Galveston-based Moody Foundation, one of Texas’ preeminent philanthropic groups, has been a longtime financial backer of both organizations, previously contributing a combined $400 million to them.
‘Inside the tent’
The new gift, along with the two prior nine-figure donations the project received, was intended to buttress initial financial support for the ambitious project before it kicks off a more public money-raising campaign.
“If you’re starting at zero and you don’t have any support for a project of this size, that is a tough hill to climb,” Christopher said. But bringing in key early financial backers can be a “game changer” for building a broader fundraising momentum, he added.
“So we went to the Moody Foundation before the plans were public, and we said, ‘Can we bring you inside the tent?’” he said.
The new facility is intended as both a major expansion to keep pace with a surging demand for care driven by the Dallas–Fort Worth area’s explosive population growth. North Texas’ pediatric population is expected to reach 5 million, double its current size, by 2050, UT Southwestern estimates, and the modernization aims to provide the booming region with world-class pediatric services.
“I think the polite way to say this is, what we’re doing here is bigger than anywhere else in the country that is either planned or underway,” said Christopher Durovich, president and CEO of Children’s Health. “And that’s not a point of pride — it’s simply a reality as we seek to stay on pace relative to the growth that we’re experiencing here.”
The new campus is slated to take up almost 5 million square feet across 34 acres, and include two 12-story towers and one eight-story tower, with enough space to significantly scale up research and expand physician and specialist counts.
A bridge is also being designed to connect it to the nearby William P. Clements Jr. University Hospital, to make transferring newborns easier between the facilities.
The project’s centerpiece, the Moody Children’s Hospital, will be about 2 million square feet with 552 inpatient rooms, about 150 more beds than the current hospital. It will also more than double the number of Level IV Neonatal Intensive Care Unit beds, which are used for the most serious infant medical conditions and surgeries.
Also, the facility is being designed to incorporate numerous technological upgrades that have reshaped pediatric medicine since the late 1960s, such as updated radiology, endoscopy and catheterization laboratories.
“When the current Children’s was built, you only needed, notionally, a foot above the ceiling — IT virtually didn’t exist,” UT Southwestern President Dr. Daniel Podolsky said.
Now, modern hospital designs include ceiling space for hundreds of cables. “There have been so many new developments that require a different actual environment for those to be deployed.”
The Moody Foundation donation comes after the partnership landed one $100 million donation toward the campus last May, from Jean Pogue and the late Mack Pogue, the founder of Lincoln Property Co., and another $100 million donation in October, from Jan and Trevor Rees-Jones, the fracking pioneer who founded Chief Oil and Gas.
The three donations, along with multiple other donations, equal half the funding the project will seek from community donations, Christopher said. The remainder of the project’s financing will come from a combination of debt and incoming revenues from both medical institutions.
