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.

Read More →

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.

Read More →

The Box Problem: Why Health Philanthropy Keeps Missing 34 Million Americans

A few years ago, I sat down to fill out a routine intake form at a doctor’s office. I got to the race and ethnicity question and did what I have done since I was a child: I paused. Not because I didn’t know who I am, but because the form didn’t know what to do with who I am. Black or White. Asian or Hispanic. Choose one. I am Indian and White, and I have spent my whole life being asked to leave part of myself in the waiting room.

Read More →

Lessons from a Year of Disruption: What’s Worked So Far as We Help Michigan Prepare for H.R. 1

By now, the health philanthropy field is familiar with the potential harms posed by H.R. 1, the budget reconciliation act signed into law in 2025. In Michigan, possible impacts from the legislation include up to 355,000 people losing Medicaid coverage, $32 billion in projected reduced federal Medicaid spending over the next decade, up to 796,000 families with reduced or lost SNAP benefits, and up to $2.3 billion in reduced annual provider tax payments to hospitals.

Read More →

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.

Putting Knowledge to Work for Mental Health

A challenge to the philanthropic community: do better when it comes to funding for mental health. Dr. Garduque describes how grantmakers can – and should – play a key role in charting new territory, challenging service systems to do better, and promoting the adoption of evidence-based practices.

Read More →
Better Health Through Better Philanthropy - Grantmakers in Health

What Patient Safety is Teaching Us

This Views from the Field spotlights the Pittsburgh Regional Healthcare Initiative, a regional health care quality and patient safety improvement program. With initial funding from the Jewish Healthcare Foundation and support from a wide variety of community stakeholders, this initiative has evolved into a nationally recognized model for improving health care quality.

Read More →

Congregations as Health Service Partners

The current debate about government funding has sparked renewed interest in faith-based organizations and their role in meeting the economic, health, and educational needs of society. The small, open country chapel…the urban church with declining parishioners and rising community needs…the burgeoning suburban congregation of young families…the mega-church with a multimillion dollar budget…all are lumped together with countless other religious groups as one solution to the nation’s needs.

Read More →

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.

Read More →

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.

Read More →

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.

Read More →