Chestnut Hill Benevolent Association

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The institution now known as the Chestnut Hill Benevolent Association was established in 1916 as the Christian Science Benevolent Association, a department of The First Church of Christ, Scientist, known as The Mother Church, realizing Mary Baker Eddy's own vision of a place where those relying on Christian Science for healing could find care outside a conventional medical setting. Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, had died in 1910, six years before her vision took this specific institutional form.

For its first six and a half decades the institution operated as a department of The Mother Church itself, its governance folded directly into the church's own administrative structure rather than run as a separate entity with its own board. That arrangement held until 1981, when the Christian Science Board of Directors transferred it to an independent board of trustees, and it was renamed the Chestnut Hill Benevolent Association.

The organization became tax exempt as a separate entity in 1982, one year after the governance transfer, completing a shift from an internal church department to a legally independent nursing care institution that nonetheless continues to provide specifically Christian Science nursing care rather than conventional medical treatment, the same distinction Eddy's original vision was built around in 1916.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Chestnut Hill Benevolent Association's own IRS Form 990 filing for the fiscal year ended 31 December 2024, read via ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer, reports total revenue of 10,572,124 US dollars against total expenses of 10,114,369 US dollars for its Christian Science nursing care operations at Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, a modest surplus of roughly 458,000 dollars for the year.

Reading a federal tax filing rather than a promotional figure gives this entry a form of verification the organization's own marketing material would not: a Form 990 is filed under penalty of perjury and made public specifically so an outside reader can check a nonprofit's finances independently, which is exactly the route this figure took, through ProPublica's public database rather than through the Association's own website.

The scale those numbers describe, revenue and expenses both above ten million dollars, is substantial for a single nursing care facility, consistent with an institution that has operated continuously since 1916 and has run as an independent, tax-exempt organization since 1982, more than four decades of continuous operation under its present governance structure.