From Recovery to Resilience: Investing in Collaborative Infrastructure for Health and Equity

After the 2018 Camp Fire – the most destructive and deadly wildfire in California’s history – the California Accountable Communities for Health Initiative (CACHI) understood that the community needed more than programming to recover. In response, the region’s Accountable Community for Health (ACH) was created – a community-rooted, cross-sector collaborative that invests in local leadership to shift systems, influence policy, and address both long-standing inequities and urgent crises.

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Broken Triangle: A Framework for Reparative Philanthropic Relationships

Traditional philanthropic practices have often created imbalanced power dynamics and barriers for Black-led, Black-serving organizations. When the REACH Healthcare Foundation performed a portfolio review in 2018 that revealed this same exclusion within the foundation’s grantmaking investments, REACH committed to reshaping their funding approach, which aims to repair previously neglected —and in some cases, damaged —relationships.

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Reports

REACH Healthcare Foundation and United Methodist Health Ministry Fund: May 2025

The United Methodist Health Ministry Fund and REACH Healthcare Foundation recently partnered with experts from Manatt Health to shed light on the potential impacts of $880 billion in cuts to the Medicaid program on Kansas.

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Funding Biomedical Research: A David in Goliath’s Field

When it comes to funding biomedical research, there is a
perception among health grantmakers that only the Goliaths
of the world can make a difference. A foundation must be as
large as the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, for instance, to hire
a sophisticated staff that can comprehend complex scientific
protocols. It must have the deep pockets and staying power
of a Howard Hughes Medical Institute to afford the notoriously expensive equipment and salaries, and to take a gamble on a payoff that may be long in coming, if ever.

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Ad Venture Philanthropy: Creating the Community Campus: A Work in Progress

In late 1999, the Foundation for Seacoast Health celebrated
the grand opening of a noble experiment: The Community
Campus, home to health-related nonprofits, public programs, and the Foundation. The road that led to this
decision to build and share space with grantees was long
and winding, leading us to question if we’d ever get there.

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Don’t Call Us “Conversion Foundations”… Please

A hot topic of discussion in philanthropic circles in recent
years has been the phenomenon of sizable new foundations being created as the result of nonprofit health care organizations converting to for-profit status.

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Grantmakers Are from Mars; Policymakers Are from Venus: Is There Hope for This Relationship?

How can health grantmakers and state policymakers collaborate and when does it make sense to try? What does it take to develop and sustain these relationships? This piece is based on Smith’s plenary remarks given at Grantmakers In Health’s 2000 Washington Briefing, The Intersection of Health Policy and Philanthropy.

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Partnering with State Government: Lessons from a Local Funder

After passage of federal legislation creating the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, the Rose Community Foundation stepped in as the private partner in a public-private partnership to ensure its implementation in Colorado. Van Dusen and Nash share six key lessons learned about engaging government as a collaborator.

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