The Sontag Foundation, established in 2002, is a private family foundation strategically focused on brain cancer. Founders Rick and Susan Sontag were motivated to form the Foundation due to Susan’s experience with this poorly understood disease. Healthcare grants center on brain cancer research as well as allied fields which relate to brain cancer. The Foundation’s first initiative, the Distinguished Scientist Award (DSA), is a career development grant which is awarded to the best and the brightest early career scientists in the USA and Canada who are conducting research related to this intractable disease. DSA grantees have had great career success as evidenced by academic promotions and/or appointments to leadership positions within their institutions or professional societies since receiving their DSA grant. The Sontag Foundation is also a founding member of the Brain Tumor Funders Collaborative (BTFC). BTFC is a consortium of brain tumor research funders who pool their financial resources to award research grants for collaborative projects involving multiple international academic research centers. The Foundation’s mission also encompasses certain social causes addressed by small, locally focused nonprofits. To date over $10 million in grants have been awarded to these causes in Northeast Florida. A current program involves a new approach for providing dental care for the indigent. This unique initiative uses the dental resources of The Sulzbacher Center of Jacksonville (a federally qualified health center for the homeless) working in conjunction with Community Health Outreach, a small local provider of social services. Since its inception three years ago several thousand needy patients have received dental care through this initiative.