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.
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.
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.
Rhode Island’s Health Equity Zones: Rethinking Community Investing to Create Measurable, Sustainable Gains in Health Equity
In 2015 the Rhode Island Department of Health (RIDOH) launched a project called the Health Equity Zones (HEZ) initiative, with the goal of creating a new public health approach. Rather than prioritizing specific health outcomes, Rhode Island’s HEZ initiative was designed to shift investments upstream to improve the social, environmental, and economic determinants of health by intentionally investing in community infrastructure and resident empowerment. The HEZ initiative has grown over the past seven years to become an internationally recognized model for operationalizing health equity, and during that time we have learned a lot about the role of community investments and how our approach needs to be rethought if we are truly going to invest in health equity.
Centering Racial Justice to Address Climate Change: Learning What it Takes
In 2018, the Kresge Foundation launched the Climate Change, Health, and Equity (CCHE) initiative as a 5-year, $22 million commitment to accelerate action on climate change and climate-related inequities in health. Since its inception, the CCHE network has worked in distinct, yet aligned strategies that focus on health institutions, practitioner and professional societies, and community-based organizations. The priority was to bring together diverse grant-funded partners at different points along their equity journey, with initiative partners providing evaluation, technical assistance, and support to sustain the network.
Children’s Environmental Health Day: Actions Needed Now to Protect Our Children’s Health
It has been over a decade since the World Health Organization raised the alarm that chronic diseases—including cardiovascular, cancer, diabetes, obesity, and metabolic syndrome—are rapidly becoming an epidemic in developed nations, and increasingly, in developing nations. Escalating rates of neurocognitive, metabolic, autoimmune, and cardiovascular diseases cannot be solely attributed to lifestyle, genetics, and nutrition. Prenatal, early life, and ongoing exposures, along with bio-accumulative toxicants, are playing a large role in the increased incidence of chronic disease. In fact, we need only look at the statistics to see that chronic disease rates in children are on the rise, and this can often be linked to toxic exposures.
Rural Road Trip Showcases Resiliency, Collaboration, Innovation, and the Need for a Shared Vision for Rural Health in the United States
Last month I had the distinct pleasure of visiting Georgia and North Carolina with key partners in rural health. Our “rural road trip” was a refreshing journey that provided inspiration for philanthropy’s work and a reminder that ensuring better health for all must engage all rural communities.
New York Health Foundation: September 2022
Learn about the findings from the first-ever statewide survey on the connection between food and health.