The charter of the Rebecca L. Cooper Medical Research Foundation is to promote medical research by advancing, promoting and encouraging medical research into all fields of the medical sciences, including but not limited to research into physiology, psychology and psychiatry, research into all fields of the biological sciences including research into microbiology, genetics, biochemistry, molecular and cellular biology and such other areas of medical research throughout Australia.

The Foundation meets its obligations by providing annual research grants within an ever widening group of research categories that it decides to support.  Currently, these include; Brain Sciences, Diabetes, Geriatrics, Lung Disease (other than cancer), Rheumatology, Vision Sciences and Genetic research.

Business of the Foundation is conducted by a Board of Directors.  The original board comprised five directors.  This number was increased in 1999 to seven board members, whose particulars are described elsewhere in this site.

As the Foundation does not directly conduct medical research, but promotes it through the system of providing annual grants, it requires a cash flow for such funding.  This is achieved through the income derived from a large portfolio of properties bequeathed by the Foundation’s benefactor, Mrs Rebecca Lillian Cooper.

This portfolio of 109 properties comprises primarily older style terrace houses in the inner Eastern Suburbs of Sydney.  The endowment of Mrs Cooper’s estate comprised mainly properties  in derelict or dilapidated condition.  The Foundation works tirelessly in an effort to improve the properties in order to maximise the rental returns and therefore the amount available for medical research grants.