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Leading Boldly, Building Trust: Lessons from a Community-Driven Strategic Planning Process
The Horizon Foundation of Howard County, Maryland believes that everyone in our community deserves to live abundant and healthy lives. But there are barriers standing in the way of some of our residents—particularly people of color—from achieving that vision. We know that for too long, inequitable laws, policies, and practices have held back many of our neighbors. The Foundation recently completed a 14-month long strategic planning process to figure out how to address these systemic barriers in a way that centers the voices of our community members who are most impacted. We realized that our work—what we focus on, who we engage with, and how we make decisions—needed to fundamentally change.
GIH Signs Organizational Commitment to Thrive Through Civic Health Initiative
GIH has signed an organizational commitment to the Thrive through Civic Health: We Will Vote initiative. The focus of the Initiative is to implement a health sector strategy to build awareness, commitment, and momentum and increase voter participation of health sector workers.
Engaging Youth to Guide Research on Their Own Well-Being
In 2019, the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Equity and Inclusion unit hosted a convening with young people from Black, Latinx, and American Indian/Alaska Native (AIAN) cultural affinity groups, along with adults who support the work and leadership of these youth and young adults. The young participants, many of whom were from the Aspen Institute’s Fresh Tracks program, expressed the need for young leaders to be the ones defining youth well-being and finding solutions that help their own communities support the well-being of young people.
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.
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.
Want to See Lasting Systemic Change and Transformation to Build Health Equity? Invest in Power Building
Despite a commitment to transformation, equity, and rebalancing the scales of justice, philanthropy often operates in ways that undermine its very purpose. Historically, the philanthropic field has taken a siloed and narrow approach to change, offering investments in short-term funding cycles and attempting to create change from the top down.
Reports and Publications
Health Policy Update: September 16, 2026
GIH’s Health Policy Update newsletter, published twice a month, is an essential resource for helping our Funding Partners to better understand the changing federal health policy landscape.
Health Policy Update: September 2, 2026
GIH’s Health Policy Update newsletter, published twice a month, is an essential resource for helping our Funding Partners to better understand the changing federal health policy landscape.
Health Policy Update: August 19, 2026
GIH’s Health Policy Update newsletter, published twice a month, is an essential resource for helping our Funding Partners to better understand the changing federal health policy landscape.