A New Path for Philanthropy: Supporting Oral Health Through Community Partnerships 

Good nutrition is essential to good oral as well as overall health. A community-based organization in central Washington state called APOYO shares this belief with Arcora Foundation. Beyond food and nutrition services, the organization has long supported immigrant and Latinx families with culturally relevant outreach, advocacy, and resource navigation. But during the summer of 2025, their ability to support communities was in jeopardy.

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Welcoming and Belonging: Drivers for Equity and Growth

More than a decade ago, leadership at REACH Healthcare Foundation began exploring how a community would function if it truly embraced welcoming and belonging for immigrant and refugee populations. The mid-sized Midwest philanthropic foundation sought to invest in a plan to reveal, then address, the systemic barriers impacting Kansas City’s efforts of inclusion for all members of the community.

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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.

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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.

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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.

New Manual Provides Guidance on Civic Health

The Civic Health Alliance, a nonpartisan group of health and civic leaders, published The Civil Health Compact, a new manual for health care systems to advocate voter participation and other civic responsibilities to patients to advance community health outcomes.

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RRF Foundation for Aging Releases Call to Action to Address Older Adult Debt Burden

In a new Call to Action, RRF Foundation for Aging illuminates a problem hidden for too long – older adult debt – and calls on advocates, researchers, service providers, funders and others to get involved with addressing this urgent issue.

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Committing to the Long Game of Advancing Better Health Through Public Policy

As people across the country prepare to vote in state and local elections, those of us working in health philanthropy should take a moment to reflect on what we can do to support policies to advance better health outcomes.

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Promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Health Care Workforce

The Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation is the only national foundation solely dedicated to improving the public’s health by advancing change in the education of health professionals. The Foundation’s current focus is the clinical learning environment where the health care workforce both acquires skills and delivers care.

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The Gilead Foundation: Advancing Health Equity Through Education Equity in the U.S.

While the COVID pandemic and most recent racial reckoning galvanized the traditional health philanthropy community, many corporate funders made their first foray into supporting racial and social justice efforts as well as health equity. Corporate social responsibility efforts were, and continue to be, scrutinized as merely cosmetic public relations efforts with no real long-term, institutional commitments to driving meaningful change in Black and Brown communities that have long been historically, intentionally marginalized.

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Health Philanthropy’s Equity Blind Spot: Syringe Services Programs

Syringe services programs (SSPs) have existed, mostly under the radar, in the United States since the early days of the response to the HIV epidemic. Illegal then, and still illegal in many jurisdictions across the country today, sterile syringe access is a bedrock of harm reduction.

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