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Creating Healthier Communities to Reverse Childhood Obesity

Learn how the YMCA’s Healthier Communities Initiatives, which include Pioneering Healthier Communities, Action Communities for Health, Innovation, & Environmental Change, and Statewide Pioneering Healthier Communities, are helping to address the obesity epidemic.

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Disparities in Food Access and in Opportunities for Physical Activity

This article discusses the causes for the rising tide of preventable chronic disease, not only in Massachusetts but across the country. It also highlights some of the key factors that have produced this change and the parts of the population that are often more affected.

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An Unprecedented Health Challenge Working with Border Communities

The Paso del Norte region is experiencing an unprecedented public health challenge – over the past three years, more than 8,000 individuals were murdered in Ciudad Juárez.

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Creating Common Ground: Working Together for Food Systems Change

A growing number of segments of the philanthropic community are paying attention to the food system and its interconnectedness with other major health, environmental, justice, and community issues.

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Ingredients for a Healthy School Lunch Movement

From a comfortable distance, the solution to the childhood obesity problem sounds deceptively easy: children need to move more and eat healthier foods. Yet, as you examine the many causes of childhood obesity, the simple solution is not quite as simple as it sounds. Encouraging children to adopt healthy habits is challenging because unhealthy eating and sedentary lifestyles are engrained in our culture.

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Healthy and Safe Housing: A Foundation for Healthy Futures

The link between housing and health is well known and well established. Efforts to improve public health through housing improvements go back to the origins of the public health movement.

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Reports and Publications

GIH Bulletin: January/February 2026

One year ago, as we were just one month into the new administration, I wrote that “At a moment when so much has been described as ‘unprecedented,’ and so much of what we value is being attacked, we need to ask ourselves as individuals, organizations, and a field, what do we stand for? What values do we hold, and what will we do and say to defend them?” Today, the answers to these questions are needed more urgently than ever.

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GIH Bulletin: November/December 2025

GIH President and CEO, Cara V. James, delivered these remarks on Protecting the Freedom to Give at the closing of the 2025 Health Policy Exchange, in Arlington, Virginia.

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Behavioral Health Strategies

GIH conducted a survey in late 2024 on funder engagement in behavioral health. This fact sheet, based on a sample of 139 health funders, summarizes the current trends, gaps, successes and challenges for funders. It also highlights philanthropy’s continued commitment to behavioral health while also signaling concern about the upcoming funding environment.  

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