Articles and Publications

The Horizon Foundation of Howard County, Maryland believes that everyone in our community deserves to live abundant and healthy lives. But there are barriers standing in the way of some of our residents—particularly people of color—from achieving that vision. We know that for too long, inequitable laws, policies, and practices have held back many of our neighbors. The foundation recently completed a 14-month long strategic planning process to figure out how to address these systemic barriers in a way that centers the voices of our community members who are most impacted. We realized that our work—what we focus on, who we engage with, and how we make decisions—needed to fundamentally change.

Trends in leadership are changing — just take the Terrance Keenan Institute as an example. When the program started in 2010, it focused on general leadership tactics with topics that ranged from leveraging resources and building partnerships to board dynamics. Since then, the Institute’s curriculum has moved towards a recognition that leaders possess individual strengths that can be embraced to make our organizations and the broader field of health philanthropy more effective.