Our Quest in the North State
Why we are supporting the creation of an independent MD-granting medical school for the North State—and why this long-term investment can strengthen not only health care, but the wider future of the region we call home.
Our quest in the North State begins with something simple.
This region and its people are worth building for.
The North State is rich in natural beauty, strong communities, and a way of life that many people deeply value. Its coast, mountains, farms, towns, and regional centers give this part of California a character all its own. People are drawn here for good reason. They see the beauty. They feel the space. They recognize the possibility of a fuller, more grounded life.
To help this region live more fully into that promise, we want to build institutions that match its worth.
For a place to thrive over time, it needs strong institutions. It needs confidence in its future. It needs the kind of backbone that tells families, physicians, teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and retirees alike that they can build a real life here—not only visit, not only pass through, but stay.
“This region and its people are worth building for.”
That is one of the deepest reasons behind Emundi.
It also reflects something important about this moment: the North State is coming together to grow more of its own workforce, strengthen its own institutions, and shape its future from within rather than waiting for that future to arrive from elsewhere.
We are supporting the creation of an independent, nonprofit, MD-granting medical school because the North State needs more than short-term answers to long-standing health care shortages. It needs a long-view institution—one that can strengthen care, grow talent, widen opportunity, and anchor a stronger future for the region as a whole.
This is not only about training doctors.
It is about helping build the kind of region where doctors, scientists, students, families, and aligned industries can imagine a future.
That matters because a health care shortage is never only a clinical problem. Over time, it becomes a regional problem. It shapes whether people feel secure living here, whether young talent returns after training, whether families can grow and stay, whether investment flows in, and whether the North State is seen as a place of lasting possibility.
A strong MD-granting medical school changes that equation.
An MD-granting school belongs fully to the tradition of academic medicine. It is not only a place of instruction. At its best, it becomes part of a larger ecosystem of clinical excellence, biomedical discovery, research, public health, innovation, and professional formation. That kind of institution does not sit on the sidelines of a region’s future. It helps shape it.
That is why this quest has always been about more than opening a school.
“It has been about helping create an institution that can matter for generations to come.”
It has been about helping create an institution that can matter for generations to come.
A school like this can strengthen the physician workforce, of course. But it can also do something equally important: it can create confidence. It can tell a talented student in the North State that medicine is not a path that begins somewhere else. It can tell a faculty member or researcher that serious academic work can happen here. It can tell a physician considering where to build a practice that this region is moving forward. And it can tell families and future retirees that the North State is becoming a place with a stronger health care backbone and a wider horizon.
That signal matters.
Regions rise not only because of scenery or good intentions, but because they develop institutions that create gravity—institutions that attract talent, generate ideas, support confidence, and help other sectors gather and grow around them.
That is what a medical school can do.
It can become a regional anchor and, over time, a real economic engine.
An academically rigorous MD-granting school attracts faculty, students, researchers, clinical partners, and philanthropy. It creates jobs directly through teaching, administration, simulation, academic operations, and research. It also creates jobs indirectly by increasing demand across housing, hospitality, transportation, professional services, and related sectors. Beyond that, it can help attract the kinds of businesses and partnerships that follow strong medical and scientific institutions: biomedical research, clinical trials, medical technology, diagnostics, digital health, translational science, and other future-facing areas of medicine and care delivery.
That is how a school becomes more than a school.
It becomes part of the region’s confidence structure.
And in the North State, that matters deeply.
Many people are already drawn to this region because of its climate, natural beauty, community life, and quality of place. But attraction alone is not enough. People also ask practical questions. Can my family and I get excellent care here? Can I raise a family here with the confidence that there will be healthcare for us when we need it? Is there momentum here?
A strong medical school helps answer those questions in a different way.
It does not only improve care. It changes the atmosphere of possibility.
It brings new energy, new partnerships, and new reasons for optimism. It creates a more vibrant civic and intellectual life through lectures, conferences, visiting scholars, research activity, innovation programs, and deeper links between education, health care, and regional development. It helps expand what the North State can become.
That broader future also depends on pathways.
If the North State wants to grow more of its own physicians, then the path into medicine has to become more reachable, more visible, and more intentional. That is why this work includes not only the vision for a medical school itself, but also stronger relationships with colleges and universities, deeper premedical development, and earlier pathways into medicine—including a bachelor’s-to-MD track that can help qualified students move more efficiently toward becoming physicians while staying connected to the communities that need them most.
That matters because talent is already here.
“The path into medicine has to become more reachable, more visible, and more intentional.”
What has too often been missing is the infrastructure to help that talent rise, remain connected, and return with purpose.
This is why growth matters—but the right kind of growth.
The North State needs an institution built around quality, purpose, and inclusion. One that begins with thoughtful design, grows with discipline, and earns trust over time. A school like this should be built carefully and built to last.
That is part of what it means to take the long view.
And the long view is exactly what this moment calls for.
The North State deserves more than admiration for its resilience. It deserves investment in its future. It deserves institutions that improve care, widen opportunity, create mobility for local students and families, and make the region more attractive to the kinds of people and sectors that can help it thrive. It deserves a stronger health care backbone, a fuller academic presence, and more reasons for talented people to stay, to return, and to build their lives here.
That is the future we are working toward.
And we are not working toward it alone.
One of the most encouraging things about this effort is the way people across the region have begun to come together around it. High schools, colleges, and universities in and beyond the North State have an opportunity to uplift one another, collaborate more intentionally, and help build the educational ladder that a medical school requires—from early aspiration, to college preparation, to premedical development, to physician formation. Community and critical access hospitals, regional health systems, clinics, and local leaders also have a role to play. Alongside that regional collaboration, we have also assembled an excellent team to help guide the work with experience, judgment, and staying power.
That coming together matters.
Institutions do not thrive in isolation. Regional progress depends on alignment—when educational institutions, health care institutions, and community partners recognize shared purpose, they strengthen one another and expand what becomes possible for the region as a whole.
This work also needs resources.
Visions of this scale do not become real through good intentions alone. They require serious investment, serious partnership, and serious belief in what a region can become when it is given the institutional tools to grow stronger. Early support does more than fund a plan. It helps make the plan viable. It helps move a long-view institution from aspiration toward reality.
That is why this moment matters.
The North State has an opportunity not only to address a workforce challenge, but to help shape its future in a larger way—to create an institution that improves care, grows opportunity, draws research and investment closer to home, and makes the region more compelling for those already here and for those who want to build a life here.
That is our quest in the North State.
It is worth building.
