Striving for Equity: Riding to Success with Mobile Health
The Leon Lowenstein Foundation (LLF) is a family foundation established in 1941 with a focus on health, education, and the environment. In 2019, LLF adopted a new focus area for our health grantmaking. Our goal was to develop a strategy that would enable us to make a meaningful contribution to health equity, particularly through enhanced access to primary and preventive health services in disadvantaged communities.
Centering Black Voices: Lessons from a Two-Year Pilot Program in the Kansas City Region
The REACH Healthcare Foundation’s mission is to advance health equity through coverage and care for underserved people. A regional foundation granting about $4.5 million annually, REACH recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. To mark this milestone, Board and staff leadership reflected on the foundation’s evolution from a highly politicized health care conversion foundation at its inception to a philanthropy striving to reshape its actions and practices to reflect a more reparative approach focused squarely on health equity.
Building Community Power to Improve Climate Resilience and Health Equity: Learning What It Takes
Over the past decade, many health foundations have shifted from funding specific programs to addressing social determinants of health by supporting policy and systems change strategies Abundant research has demonstrated that low-income communities of color face structural barriers to health that more affluent white communities do not, ranging from access to healthy food to stable housing and clean air. These differences in community conditions didn’t happen by accident—they are the result of intentional policy decisions over generations that apportioned resources and opportunities along racial and ethnic lines.
National Rural Health Day Provides an Opportunity for Philanthropy to Engage and Support Underserved Communities
For anyone with an interest in rural health, clear your calendar on November 16th and help celebrate National Rural Health Day, a day to celebrate and lift up the work of doctors, nurses, clinics, hospitals, and other stakeholders working in our rural communities.
Q&A: Bringing an Australian Perspective to American Health Philanthropy
Traveling thousands of miles from Melbourne to Minneapolis, Lauren Monaghan of The Ian Potter Foundation attended the 2023 GIH Annual Conference on Health Philanthropy to learn more about the American public health philanthropy sector at the country’s largest gathering of health funders.
Lessons from an Equity Toolkit Workshop: Facilitator Perspective on Participatory Engagement
The Blue Shield of California Foundation is a long-time multisector collaborative funder with a health equity focus. Increasingly, we find that multisector collaboratives are a powerful vehicle to change systems toward racial equity. We heard from our partners and grantees a strong need for tools and resources that provide several outcomes: to establish equity at the collaborative level, to outline an arc of learning to help place a collaborative on an equity spectrum, and to provide tools to help collaboratives move deeper into equity. To support this work, the Equity in Collaboration Toolkit was developed in partnership with Cristobal Consulting. Its goal is to help multisector collaboratives see where they are taking concrete actions to center equity—and where they are not—through an embedded equity assessment.an embedded equity assessment.
Strengthening a National Field of Practice for Climate, Health, and Equity: Learning What it Takes
When The Kresge Foundation’s Climate Change, Health and Equity (CCHE) initiative launched in 2018, community power mobilization was integral because too often the people closest to viable climate resilience solutions were excluded from decisionmaking. Since then, the leadership of CCHE’s community-based, health practitioner, and health institution partners has underscored the significance of community power to transform climate policy and public health practice.
Notes from the Journey: Going Beyond Words to Advancing Health Equity
In the weeks since the 2023 Grantmakers In Health conference in Minneapolis, where we gathered as a community of grantmakers seeking to advance health equity, I have been reminded often of the inspiring and encouraging conversations we had by an envelope of Post-It Notes sitting on my desk. These notes make me smile. They make me feel connected. And their messages motivate me to continue the journey from health to health equity for the long haul.
Terrance Keenan Institute Alumni Reflect on How COVID-19 Changed Grantmaking
Foundations play a vital role in the nonprofit sector, funding everything from safety net services to social innovation. Like many businesses, philanthropic organizations altered their ways of doing business in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The health sector, including hospitals and other health care settings along with public health organizations, were deeply affected by the magnitude of illness and the polarization of the pandemic response. To understand exactly how the business of health grantmaking shifted during COVID-19, Jennifer Chubinski and Allen Smart conducted in-depth interviews with health foundation leaders from around the country to learn what changed in their grantmaking strategies and practices.
The Kids Are Okay: Lessons Learned from a Youth-Led Participatory Grantmaking Program
The Natrona Collective Health Trust (NCHT) was created in October 2020 after the sale of our community’s standalone nonprofit hospital to a regional hospital system. As Wyoming’s first health conversion foundation, NCHT uses trust-based philanthropy and systems change advocacy to advance the mental well-being of our community’s young people. During an extensive strategic planning process, we found that at both our community and state levels, there is insufficient infrastructure to address mental and behavioral health needs, which perpetuates health disparities and high incidences of childhood trauma.