The Wright Center Tribute Dinner

A tribute dinner in honor of pioneering physician and longtime community leader Dr. Robert E. Wright and his late wife, Carole, will be held this fall to benefit one of the couple’s favorite charitable causes: the tuition-free NativityMiguel School of Scranton.

Event sponsorships and reserved dinner seats are currently available for the school’s 2022 Tribute Dinner fundraiser, which is set for 5:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 27, at the University of Scranton’s DeNaples Center.

Donations honoring the Wrights by those who are unable to attend the dinner are also being accepted. Proceeds from the campaign will support the school’s mission of “breaking the cycle of poverty, one student at a time.”

The Wrights left an enduring legacy on Northeast Pennsylvania’s educational landscape by, in part, helping to establish the NativityMiguel School of Scranton, an independent Catholic co-educational middle school for students of greater economic need in the Scranton and Wilkes-Barre areas. The school began instructing its first class of fifth-graders in 2015. Today, the small but impactful institution educates more than 60 students in grades five through eight.

Dr. Wright, a Lackawanna County native, also founded and led the Scranton-Temple Residency Program, forerunner of The Wright Center for Graduate Medical Education, and was instrumental in the startup and ultimate success of The Commonwealth Medical College, now known as the Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine.

Carole Wright supported those monumental projects, which collectively serve the region as a physician workforce pipeline to help meet the ongoing need for primary care doctors and other health care practitioners. A practice manager, Carole Wright also was vital to the establishment and growth of her husband’s hematology/oncology practice – the first of its kind in the region. And she was a consistent servant-leader, aiding many area nonprofits as a volunteer, a board member and a benefactor.