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.
Philanthropic Investment in People Power
The California Endowment is spearheading renewed interest in an approach that supports communities to be the architects of their own equity efforts. This article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review (Winter 2023) examines the evidence generated by a decade-long effort that grew up around The California Endowment’s Building Healthy Communities initiative and provides lessons to other philanthropies incorporating a power-building strategy.
For the Community, By the Community: How Philanthropy Can Support Culturally-Led Mental Health Program
Mindful philanthropy recently released new guidance on how funders can support culturally-led mental health programs that are developed by and for communities of color.
Reforming ERISA to Help States Control Health Care Costs
The federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) preempts many state laws relating to employer-sponsored health insurance and thereby dilutes states’ ability to enact cost-control reforms. This Issue Brief from The Commonwealth Fund assesses past efforts and current opportunities for federal legislation on ERISA preemption to enable state cost-control reforms.
Announcing GIH’s 2023 Policy Priorities: Using Our Voice to Make Systemic Changes
When we launched our strategic plan, we noted that to achieve our vision of better health for all through better philanthropy we would need to use our voice to take a more active role to influence advocacy, policy, and funding in targeted areas that will advance health and make a lasting, measurable impact. Our current health “system” is not designed to promote health and wellness, but to provide care once a person is sick, and it is built on a foundation of inequity based on health coverage, or a lack thereof.
Let’s Close the Gap on Mental Health for Good in 2023
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, a mental health crisis was growing in America, with 1 in 10 adults reporting symptoms of anxiety or depression. Today, that number is 3 in 10. The recently launched 988 hotline—the mental health equivalent and alternative to 911—is a monumental step forward in changing how we acknowledge and respond to mental health needs nationally. It finally puts mental health on equal ground with physical health—a recognition long overdue—but it is only a first step in addressing the multitude of behavioral health needs.
SASH: Health Equity Begins at Home
A decade ago, primary care practices and housing non-profits in Vermont partnered to reduce chronic conditions among older adults and younger adults with a disability in collaboration with the state’s Blueprint for Health. Today, as an extender of the Blueprint, Support and Services at Home (SASH), which supports healthy aging in place, is helping to advance health equity in the state.