The FINANCIAL -- The Atlanta-based Lettie Pate Whitehead Foundation recently gave $212,000 to the Georgia State University Byrdine F. Lewis School of Nursing and Health Professions, its latest gift in a long legacy of support. In the past 31 years, the foundation has given more than $2.7 million to GSU.

According to the Georgia State University, the school offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in nursing, nutrition, and respiratory therapy as well as the Doctor of Physical Therapy and Doctor of Philosophy in Nursing. In the past 40 years, the school has prepared more than 5,000 nurses, nurse practitioners, educators and researchers to serve in Georgia and beyond.

Lettie Pate Whitehead had a keen sense of duty to those in need, which prompted her youngest son to establish the foundation in 1946. Their family helped develop the business of bottling Coca-cola , which previously had been a fountain beverage.

As a philanthropist, her gifts benefited several colleges and universities in Georgia and Virginia, as well as overseas during World War II. After she remarried, she established the Lettie Pate Evans Foundation. Her generosity also influenced her other son to create the Joseph P. Whitehead Foundation as a memorial to his father.

The foundation devotes most of its resources to scholarship grants to schools and colleges for deserving female students in nine southeastern states.

Byrdine F. Lewis was a registered nurse in south Georgia. Divorced and raising two children on her own, Lewis often worked double shift to support her family, according to a 2003 GSU news article. She had worked as a registered nurse for 46 years, mostly caring for postoperative patients.

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