Children's Hospital Medical Center Retirement Plan

Children's Hospital Medical Center Retirement Plan

The Children's Hospital Medical Center Retirement Plan was founded in 1961 alongside Cincinnati Children's, the academic pediatric medical center that now employs over 17,000 people. The defined-benefit plan covers eligible employees of the hospital, providing retirement, disability, and death benefits. It sits inside a broader financial ecosystem that includes the Cincinnati Children's Research Foundation and a supporting foundation, both of which maintain separate investment portfolios. Steve Davis has led the hospital as President and CEO, while Paul Jenny, as Senior Vice President of Finance and CFO, holds fiduciary oversight of the retirement assets. Strategy and deployment lean unusually broad for a mid-sized corporate pension. The plan allocates across buyout, growth equity, venture capital, distressed debt, secondaries, natural resources, and private credit — effectively running a multi-strategy private markets program. Early-stage and seed venture exposure suggests a willingness to accept illiquidity and J-curve dynamics that most similarly sized plans avoid. Fund-of-funds commitments appear alongside direct co-investments, and the plan has historically accessed CLO and mezzanine strategies. Public record confirms the hospital's total enterprise assets exceed $3 billion, giving the retirement plan's investment team leverage when negotiating fee breaks and co-investment allocations alongside larger institutional LPs. Amanda Vonderhaar serves as Plan Administrator, handling day-to-day operations, while COO Evaline Alessandrini manages the broader operational framework. J. Scott Anderson, the former Senior Vice President and CFO, previously shared fiduciary responsibility before Paul Jenny assumed the role. The plan does not publicly disclose headcount dedicated solely to investments, but the hospital's finance leadership appears to oversee asset allocation. Total plan assets, estimated at roughly $1.3 billion by Altss, place it in the mid-tier of US hospital-affiliated pension funds — large enough to access top-quartile managers, small enough to remain under the radar in co-investment syndicates. A genuine structural differentiator is the plan's embedded position within an operating hospital system. Unlike a standalone corporate pension, the plan benefits from Cincinnati Children's brand, its non-profit status, and the adjacent philanthropic assets of its supporting foundation — collectively creating a capital base that extends well beyond the retirement pool alone. This architecture allows the investment team to behave like a hybrid pension-endowment, blending the liability-driven conservatism of a defined-benefit plan with the opportunistic private-markets posture more common among university endowments.