In naming Mills-Peninsula Hospital Foundation as a beneficiary of her estate, Teresa
McIntosh shows the impact the generosity of one person can make in our community.
A Bay Area native, McIntosh was a child of the Great Depression. Her mother, Frances Grossman, was born to Hungarian and Polish immigrants in San Francisco during the late 1800s and lived through the 1906 earthquake. Grossman married Theodore Sevilla, an immigrant from the Philippines, in the mid-1920s and their family settled in San Bruno.
McIntosh spent many years working her way through school at the University of California, Berkeley as a single parent. She pursued her education while raising her daughter, Laura, who was born at Mills Memorial Hospital in San Mateo. McIntosh received a Ph.D. in education in 1967 and for a short time was an assistant professor at San Francisco State University until she married Arthur McIntosh in 1971.
McIntosh wanted philanthropy to be a central emphasis for her estate planning. As part of this plan, she donated some of the property she and her husband had owned to the University of California, Berkeley in honor of her father-in-law. He had been a physician in Berkeley and was acquainted with the registered nurse, Alta Bates, for whom the Sutter hospital was named.
McIntosh and her husband also owned three adjacent tract houses built in 1918 in San Bruno. She was proud of her connection to this neighborhood and was instrumental in forming a neighborhood association to work with BART in determining the rapid transit route through San Bruno.
The Foundation was touched to learn that McIntosh generously gifted all three of these homes to Mills-Peninsula Hospital Foundation as part of her estate planning.
“Every day at the Foundation we are impressed and honored by the generosity of our community members,” says John Loder, president of Mills-Peninsula Hospital Foundation. “We were astonished by this major gift. Teresa had been a faithful donor to Mills-Peninsula for many years. Including us in her planned giving was something extra and will do so much to help us continue to excel in delivering high-quality care close to home.”
Estate Planning Benefits
“We are so honored when donors like Teresa generously include Mills-Peninsula in their estate plans,” says Peter Gielniak, regional director of gift planning at Mills- Peninsula. “When our team learns of a donor’s desire to leave a legacy gift that will benefit the health of the community, we work with them to ensure that their philanthropic and financial goals are achieved. This includes collaborating on various gift options, connecting the donors to the physicians and programs that matter most to them, as well as formally honoring these incredible acts of generosity through naming opportunities that the donor will find meaningful.”