Featured Resources

Looking Around the Corner: (Re) Imagining Power for a Healthy and Just California

A report prepared by the USC Equity Research Institute for The California Endowment summarizes a forward-looking project to envision what we can collectively achieve if we invest in movements.

Read More →

New Manual Provides Guidance on Civic Health

The Civic Health Alliance, a nonpartisan group of health and civic leaders, published The Civil Health Compact, a new manual for health care systems to advocate voter participation and other civic responsibilities to patients to advance community health outcomes.

Read More →

Latest Resources

Joan Alker of the Georgetown Center for Children and Families to Be Honored with the Andy Hyman Award for Advocacy

Joan Alker, Executive Director and a cofounder of the Georgetown Center for Children and Families (CCF) in Washington, DC, will receive Grantmakers In Health’s 2024 Andy Hyman Award for Advocacy.

Read More →

A New Generation of Researchers: Hearing from Youth Leaders on Their Well-Being

Building upon a previous conversation with Juan Martinez of the Aspen Institute and Cynthia Weaver of The Annie E. Casey Foundation on their collaboration on the Youth and Young Adult Well-Being project, the following Q&A features three paid youth consultants who are leading the research initiative as the Youth and Young Adult Well-Being core team. Each team member represents a different cultural affinity group in the well-being project: Desiree Armas from Latine Bienestar, Niara Frankson from Black Expressions of Well-Being, and Zenetta Zepeda from American Indian/Alaska Native.

Read More →

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.

Read More →

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.

Read More →

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.

Read More →

Reports and Publications

GIH Events

2011 Terrance Keenan Award Acceptance Speech

Read the acceptance speech of Drew Altman, head of The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, upon receiving the 2011 Terrance Keenan Leadership Award in Health Philanthropy. He shares his thoughts on what foundations should be, concerns about the field, the theory of change, and his experience transforming Kaiser into what it is today.

Read More →
GIH Events

Building Capacity for Health Advocacy at the State and Local Level

This paper was prepared in conjunction with a strategy session convened by GIH and sponsored by the Missouri Foundation for Health and The California Endowment last fall. It examines philanthropy’s role in advocacy, the various sectors that constitute the field of health advocacy, capacities required to effectively engage in advocacy efforts, ways health funders have facilitated advocacy capacity development, and key issues for future action.

Read More →