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Beyond the Exam Room: Impacting Health Outcomes Through Civic Engagement
August marks Civic Health Month, a time to showcase the link between voting and health and celebrate efforts that ensure every voter can support their community’s health at the ballot box. At the same time, the United States is grappling with a health care system ranked 37th globally despite consuming 17 percent of the country’s GDP. With 26 million Americans uninsured and 43 million underinsured, the gap in access to care continues to widen. This crisis will deepen as critical ACA subsidies expire at the end of 2025, potentially leaving 3.8 million more Americans without coverage, in addition to new federal cuts to Medicaid and changes to how coverage is accessed through the health insurance marketplace, which could result in as many as 20 million Americans losing their health insurance.
Protecting Ballot Measures to Protect Democracy
Access to abortion care in Ohio. The chance to support city candidates with democracy vouchers in Seattle. Promoting judicial ethics in Colorado. An $11 an hour minimum wage in Arkansas. What do these policy changes have in common? They were all enacted through the ballot initiative process, and they all support healthy, thriving communities, both in process and in outcome. But multiple states are seeing efforts to curtail the ballot measure process, limiting the voices of voters.
Collaborating for Impact: Providing Trust-Based Grantmaking and Technical Assistance to Support Local Resilience to Extreme Weather Events
In the last few years, there has been an increased number of extreme weather events, including wildfires, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods and heatwaves in the United States. In 2023, the United States experienced 28 disasters that cost at least $1 billion, the largest number of billion-dollar disasters in a single year on record (Smith 2024). While some areas of the country are more susceptible to these threats, there are no regions immune to disasters. According to a recent Gallup poll, 37 percent of adults in the United States report they have been personally impacted by at least one extreme weather event in the last two years, which is higher than the 2022/2023 survey result at 33 percent.
Reports and Publications
Beyond Grantmaking: Health Foundations as Policy Change Agents
This GIH report seeks to help the field of health philanthropy maximize its strategic potential and minimize the difficulties inherent in taking on new roles by both describing ways funders are directly engaging in policy change efforts and distilling the key lessons learned from these experiences.
Gun Control: A Health Policy Issue?
Although the health-related consequences of gun violence are undeniable, the need for stronger gun control policies to address these health outcomes is hotly contested. Is the field of health philanthropy particularly “gun shy” about engaging in the contentious policy debate surrounding gun control? A number of health funders have supported grants and initiatives related to violence prevention, but relatively few have explicitly recognized gun control as a health policy objective.