Healing Takes Practice: Reaching People Is Only the Beginning
Violence is increasingly understood as a public health problem. That shift has changed the way communities respond—moving the conversation beyond policing and criminal justice and toward prevention, intervention, and the conditions that put people at risk. But treating violence as a health problem also requires us to reckon with trauma.
We Didn’t Stop: Leading with Purpose When the System Stepped Back
The notice came the way these things now tend to come: abruptly, in writing, and without a transition plan. In April 2025, Public Health AmeriCorps programs were terminated nationally alongside about 900 other AmeriCorps programs. Funding halted. AmeriCorps service members who had built their careers and households around a year of community health service were left waiting for answers no one could give them. Organizations across the country scrambled.
GIH Health Policy Update Newsletter
An Exclusive Resource for Funding Partners
The Health Policy Update is a newsletter produced in collaboration with Leavitt Partners and Trust for America’s Health. Drawing on GIH’s policy priorities outlined in our policy agenda and our strategic objective of increasing our policy and advocacy presence, the Health Policy Update provides GIH Funding Partners with a range of federal health policy news.
Racial Equity Requires Funding to Build Power
By focusing on power building to reverse the longstanding inequities that prevent communities of color and low-income communities from thriving, philanthropy can help build safe, strong, and stable communities for all of us.
Productive Partnerships
Twenty years ago, a small group of grantmakers launched a Health and Environmental Funders Network (HEFN), seeking to bridge health and environmental philanthropy and to focus more attention on links between human, wildlife, and ecosystem health. One of my first tasks as HEFN’s first staffer was to try to engage health funders in this enterprise.
New Tools to Combat Ageism
The idea that we live in a rapidly aging society is not news, but here is an important fact: in ten years (by 2030), the United States will have more people over the age of 65 than children under 18 for the first time in its history. And yet, our society has not responded to the opportunities or the challenges that this change provides.
Creating a Neutral Space, Pursuing a Common Mission
Importantly, FCAA created a neutral space for funders; one where individual organizational agendas took a back seat to a unifying mission. This space became an incubator for philanthropic action.
EITC Pooled Fund: Lessons on Ideas, Innovation and Impact
Since 2011, Economic Opportunity Funders (EOF) has been working to increase public support for state EITCs through the EITC Pooled Fund (The Fund). We provide a table around which multiple funders can align support to work on an area of mutual interest, and a mechanism by which funders can quickly and collaboratively deploy funding to help meet the needs of the field.
Boosting Philanthropic Investment in Healthy Food in Tribal Communities
Tribal communities in America receive only about a half percent of all philanthropic giving, and the total dollar amount of grantmaking in these communities by large philanthropic foundations actually declined by 29 percent ($35 million) from 2006 to 2014 according to a report by First Nations Development Institute. Additionally, only a small portion of those grant dollars go to Native-controlled organizations.