Explore Health Equity and Social Justice Topics

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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

Social Policy Is Health Policy

Decades of research and practical experience in the United States and other countries have shown that a number of economic and social factors – education, income, occupation, wealth, housing, neighborhood environment, race and ethnicity – have a powerful influence on health. This link between social position and health status is predictable, persistent, problematic, and – we hope – preventable.

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Creating Public Will to End Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities

Each year disparities in health status and health care take a toll on members of racial and ethnic minority groups that translates into preventable illness and death. If the United States eliminated the black-white mortality gap alone, it has been estimated that as many as 84,000 deaths could be prevented annually.

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Pathways Out of Poverty: Exploring New Directions for Health Funders

The links between poverty and poor health are undeniable, yet complex. While health funders recognize poverty as a root cause of poor health, some may be unsure about how to translate that knowledge into action.

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