Humana Foundation Advances Equity Through Community-Engaged Research Practices

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Grantmakers In Health’s Maya Schane spoke with Heather Hyden and Soojin Conover of the Humana Foundation about the Foundation’s recently published report, Strengthening Science and Community Impact Through Equitable Research Practices. The report examines innovative research methods adopted by the Foundation’s partners to promote health equity in public health research through community-engaged research practices.

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Collaborating for Impact: Providing Trust-Based Grantmaking and Technical Assistance to Support Local Resilience to Extreme Weather Events

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In the last few years, there has been an increased number of extreme weather events, including wildfires, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods and heatwaves in the United States. In 2023, the United States experienced 28 disasters that cost at least $1 billion, the largest number of billion-dollar disasters in a single year on record (Smith 2024). While some areas of the country are more susceptible to these threats, there are no regions immune to disasters. According to a recent Gallup poll, 37 percent of adults in the United States report they have been personally impacted by at least one extreme weather event in the last two years, which is higher than the 2022/2023 survey result at 33 percent.

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Working Through Challenges to Sharing Power With Community: Highlights from a session at Grantmakers in Health’s Annual Conference

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The people closest to the issue best know the solutions. For health funders, sharing power with community could mean giving residents a voice in shaping your grantmaking priorities or where grant dollars are spent. Many funders understand that solutions are more likely to be successful when the people who are most affected have a voice in shaping them. But when it comes to including that voice, the work often stalls before it starts.

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Better Health Through Better Philanthropy - Grantmakers in Health

Integrative Medicine Offers Opportunity for Shared Learning and Collaboration

There is growing interest in the field known as integrative medicine. A 2007 national survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 38.3 percent of all adults, up from 36 percent in 2002, accessed some form of complementary and alternative medicine through visits to acupuncturists, chiropractors, massage therapists, among others.

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Health Reform: Time for a Paradigm Shift

There is no question that health reform is crucial. To attain true health reform, however, we need to focus on keeping Americans healthier in the first place and not just treating them after they become sick. If we want to improve the health of the communities we serve, of an entire state, or of the entire nation, we need to act upon the fact that our health is shaped far more by the places we live, learn, work, and play than by what happens in clinics and hospitals (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation 2008).

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HIV/AIDS and Women of Color: Changing the Conversation

For the past decade, HIV/AIDS-related conditions have been the leading cause of death for African-American women ages 25-34 in the United States (CDC 1999). Over the past two decades, our local foundation has seen this national epidemic take root in our local community in Washington, DC, where we now have 10 times the rate of HIV/AIDS per capita compared to the rest of the country.

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Better Health Through Better Philanthropy - Grantmakers in Health

Shifting Paradigms in Promoting Oral Health for Young Children

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Tooth decay remains the single most prevalent chronic disease of America’s children, affecting 44 percent by age six (Dye et al. 2007). Grantmakers, government, and the professions have long focused energy and resources on getting children into dental care to repair the ravages of this preventable disease and to eliminate associated pain and infection.

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Honoring Community Voices to Enhance Health Grantmaking

In philanthropic circles we spend a lot of time discussing the importance of how foundations can meet the needs of and strengthen communities. We expect our grants and program support will prompt change and improve lives, but how often do we end up doing things “to” a community as opposed to working “with” a community to achieve common goals?

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We Must Promote Health Equity in Spite of Current Economic Challenges

When the Whitehall Studies were first published, they identified not only a social gradient that correlated the relationship between social status and life expectancy, but new variables to consider when predicting population health outcomes. These variables included the economic, social, and physical environments in which people live.

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