Explore Health Equity and Social Justice Topics

Latest Resources

Requests for Proposals

Pottstown Regional Community Foundation: August 2025

The Pottstown Regional Community Foundation (PRCF) will launch its 2025 Fall Grant Round. For this final grant round of the calendar year, the foundation prioritizes organizations that demonstrate clear alignment with PRCF’s Results Framework and have not yet received an award this calendar year. Competitive requests will be supported by goals stated in community and regional plans and address needs communicated in foundation or other research studies.

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Humana Foundation Advances Equity Through Community-Engaged Research Practices

Grantmakers In Health’s Maya Schane spoke with Heather Hyden and Soojin Conover of the Humana Foundation about the Foundation’s recently published report, Strengthening Science and Community Impact Through Equitable Research Practices. The report examines innovative research methods adopted by the Foundation’s partners to promote health equity in public health research through community-engaged research practices.

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Working Through Challenges to Sharing Power With Community: Highlights from a Session at Grantmakers in Health’s Annual Conference

The people closest to the issue best know the solutions. For health funders, sharing power with community could mean giving residents a voice in shaping your grantmaking priorities or where grant dollars are spent. Many funders understand that solutions are more likely to be successful when the people who are most affected have a voice in shaping them. But when it comes to including that voice, the work often stalls before it starts.

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Remarks on Defending Philanthropy’s Freedom to Give

President and CEO of Grantmakers In Health (GIH), Cara V. James, delivered opening remarks at the 2025 GIH Annual Conference on Health Philanthropy in New Orleans.

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From Recovery to Resilience: Investing in Collaborative Infrastructure for Health and Equity

After the 2018 Camp Fire – the most destructive and deadly wildfire in California’s history – the California Accountable Communities for Health Initiative (CACHI) understood that the community needed more than programming to recover. In response, the region’s Accountable Community for Health (ACH) was created – a community-rooted, cross-sector collaborative that invests in local leadership to shift systems, influence policy, and address both long-standing inequities and urgent crises.

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Broken Triangle: A Framework for Reparative Philanthropic Relationships

Traditional philanthropic practices have often created imbalanced power dynamics and barriers for Black-led, Black-serving organizations. When the REACH Healthcare Foundation performed a portfolio review in 2018 that revealed this same exclusion within the foundation’s grantmaking investments, REACH committed to reshaping their funding approach, which aims to repair previously neglected —and in some cases, damaged —relationships.

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Reports and Publications

Foundation Strategies to Promote Healthy Eating and Active Living

Growing recognition of the nation’s obesity epidemic and its profound impact on population health has led an increasing number of health funders to identify the promotion of healthy eating and active living (HEAL) as a strategic priority. Anecdotal reports from Grantmakers In Health (GIH) Funding Partners suggest that as the level of investment committed to HEAL has increased over time, the nature of funded interventions has also changed considerably. In order to test these perceptions, GIH conducted this scan of the field to gain a clearer understanding of health foundations’ strategic approach to HEAL. Funded by The Colorado Health Foundation, the study considers foundations’ history with, current strategies for, and future plans regarding HEAL-related investments, as well as prevailing views on the value and effectiveness of these efforts.

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Equity for All: Entry Points to Elevate LGBT Health

Health funders have provided limited direct philanthropic support for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) health. Many question whether LGBT issues should be integrated into mainstream systems and organizations or if they should be supported through targeted strategies. Since few health grantmakers are prepared to carve out a separate programmatic area focused on this issue, a growing opportunity exists for health funders to provide more purposeful support for LGBT health within existing grantmaking strategies to address health disparities and promote health equity.

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Lessons for Strategic Health Equity Grantmaking

Over the past several years, a growing community of funders has begun to identify health equity as a grantmaking priority. No single roadmap exists for doing this work.

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