The Kapnek Charitable Trust is named for its founder James Kapnek, who emigrated from Russia to Zimbabwe in 1905. After a successful business career in southern Africa, James and his wife, became philanthropists and were key in establishing the University of Zimbabwe.
When he died in 1966, Kapnek willed the majority of his fortune to a trust for education and medical research. He left the Kapnek Trust in the hands of family and friends from the medical community.
Between the late 1960s and the early 1980s the Trust, headed by his sister Edith Robbins, gave medical research grants primarily in the United States. In 1983, Dr. Rebecca Robbins Polland, James Kapnek’s niece, encouraged a broader vision that included activities in the newly-formed country of Zimbabwe. The Trustees initiated a program in Zimbabwe, with Dr. Robbins Polland as the administrator. Dr. Robbins Polland helped give the Kapnek Trust both energy and new direction, drawing on her experience as a professor of political science and her years on the Board of International Food and Agricultural Development. She also saw the importance of women’s health and education to Zimbabwe’s movement toward sustainable development.
In 1998 Dr. Polland passed away and the trust came under the leadership of Daniel Robbins , James Kapnek’s great nephew. The offices were relocated to California where Dr. Robbins began exploring avenues for the trust to play a role in confronting the effect of the AIDS pandemic on children. As a pediatrician, Dr. Robbins was profoundly affected by his first visit to Zimbabwe in 1988. During that time the growing impact of AIDS on the people of Zimbabwe was becoming overwhelmingly apparent.
Dr. Robbins began exploring current programs and developed relationships with Dr. David Katzenstein at the Stanford AIDS Research Center and Dr. Art Ammann at Global Strategies for HIV Prevention From Mother to Child. Through these relationships a plan to facilitate the development of a national Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission of HIV (PMTCT) began to take shape.
Today, the Kapnek Trust is the leading provider of PMTCT programs in Zimbabwe.
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