Reimagining Rural Health Listening Sessions
The Georgia Health Policy Center facilitated two listening sessions—an in-person session in May 2025 (before H.R.1) with 12 representatives from public and private funders and health systems, and a virtual session in July 2025 (post H.R.1) with 21 program implementers from health care and community-based organizations.
Progress Report: Older Americans Act Reauthorization Campaign
In October 2023, Grantmakers In Aging (GIA) and Grantmakers In Health (GIH) launched an 18-month initiative to engage funders in the reauthorization of the Older Americans Act (OAA). This report highlights key activities and takeaways and previews future programming.
Diversity in the Leadership, Staff, and Boards of Health Philanthropy
A new Grantmakers In Health survey of health funder leadership, staff, and boards found that health funder organizations are more racially and ethnically diverse than the broader field of philanthropy.
Fact Sheet: Five Ways Congress Can Strengthen the Older Americans Act, and What Philanthropy Can Do
First signed into law in 1965, the Older Americans Act (OAA) provides critical services that address the social drivers of health for older adults such as nutrition, transportation, senior centers, elder rights protections, caregiver support, and health promotion. A popular, bipartisan, and effective law, the OAA is set to expire on September 30, 2024, if it is not reauthorized. Foundations play a critical role at every stage of the OAA, from the time Congress begins reauthorizing the law, to the appropriation of funding, to the implementation of OAA programs. Now is the time to act.
Advancing Health and Creating Lasting Impact: MacKenzie Scott’s Grants to Health Foundations
In 2019, MacKenzie Scott announced that she was stepping into the world of philanthropy to give away her multi-billion-dollar fortune “until the safe is empty”. She has kept her word—to date, she has given away $16.5 billion. Her initial process for choosing which organizations would receive grants was shrouded in mystery. From 2019 to 2023, Scott used a process she termed “quiet research” to identify possible grantee organizations. The lucky organizations received a call from Scott’s consultants, who let them know they were receiving a grant for immediate use however they would like to spend it. In the Fall of 2022, Grantmakers In Health (GIH) became one of those grantee organizations, along with more than 20 health foundations. Two additional GIH Funding Partner organizations received gifts in 2020 and 2021, respectively.
2024 Survey Summary: Health Workforce Strategies
Concerns about the supply, diversity, cultural responsiveness, geographic distribution, and safety of the health workforce have reached a critical level across the country. Philanthropy has a role to play in maximizing the health workforce to achieve patient safety, provider well-being, equitable access, care quality, and improved health outcomes. Therefore, GIH recently conducted a survey to learn about funders’ strategies related to their health workforce investments.
Public Health Approaches to Firearm Violence Prevention
Firearm injuries are a serious public health problem, killing more than 47,000 Americans each year and becoming the leading cause of death for children and teens in the United States in 2020. Given the impact and complexity of this health crisis, Grantmakers in Health (GIH) hosted a first-ever preconference session focused on firearm violence in advance of the June 2023 GIH Annual Conference on Health Philanthropy. Session speakers briefed partners on the causes of gun violence and provided an opportunity for health funders to learn more about potential solutions through a public health lens. This Issue Brief provides highlights of the meeting’s proceedings and previews GIH’s plans to convene a funder learning collaborative on firearm violence prevention to continue the peer learning and sharing that began at the preconference session.
The Story of Care: A Snapshot of the Care Narrative Change Landscape
At some point, every one of us will need care or need to provide care. The COVID-19 pandemic put a spotlight on the extraordinary contributions of caregivers and exposed the failings caused by our nation’s lack of care policies, especially for communities of color. Deploying narrative-change strategies across care-related issues will help create the conditions for cultural and policy progress. The goal of this report is to share with funders the promising narrative-change strategies and tactics that have been identified, a directory of funders and grantees who are supporting this work, and how philanthropy can best support this effort.
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