Ebony C. Barney, MPH, MSW, LSW, CPH, Vice President of National Service/AmeriCorps Program Director, The Health Foundation of Greater Indianapolis
Jason Grisell, MBA, President and CEO, The Health Foundation of Greater Indianapolis
Abby Pequignot, BSPH, Executive Director, Acts of Kindness
The notice came the way these things now tend to come: abruptly, in writing, and without a transition plan. In April 2025, Public Health AmeriCorps programs were terminated nationally alongside about 900 other AmeriCorps programs. Funding halted. AmeriCorps service members who had built their careers and households around a year of community health service were left waiting for answers no one could give them. Organizations across the country scrambled.
Two of those organizations, a local health department (name withheld to protect agency staff partners and program participants) and the Health Foundation of Greater Indianapolis, in the middle of a partnership we had spent years building, were suddenly without a common goal. What follows is not a story about how we solved a federal funding crisis. We didn’t. It is a story about what we chose to do in the weeks when no one was coming to save us, and what that choice taught us about the role funders play when public systems step back.
For over 20 years, the Health Foundation of Greater Indianapolis has supported an AmeriCorps program that prepares the next generation of public health and human service professionals by combining meaningful community service with hands-on learning, mentorship, and professional development. Through partnerships with service site organizations across Indiana, members gain real-world experience while helping expand organizational capacity and address local community needs.
When the Funding Stopped
The termination was national in scope but landed hard locally. Agencies across our state absorbed significant funding losses simultaneously, both at the federal and state levels, which meant the usual backstops—a neighboring program with room to absorb members and a partner with slack in its budget—were gone. Everyone was managing their own version of the same emergency alone on an island.
For our service members supported by both programs, the consequences were immediate and personal. Their living allowance was the difference between stability and precarity, and many were midway through education requirements tied to their service term. Several were the first in their families to be on a professional pathway of any kind. The abstraction of a federal decision became, very quickly, a set of concrete questions: Can I pay rent next month? Does my degree still count for anything? Will I have a job waiting for me?
We could not answer the first question the way we wanted to, and we could not answer the third at all. What we could control was whether our participants heard from us honestly and often, and whether the commitments we had made to them survived a change in our funding circumstances. We decided they would.
Getting Aligned Before Getting Loud
The first thing we did was not external. Before any communication went out, leadership at the health department and the foundation sat down together and agreed on two things: that decisions would be made from our shared values rather than from our respective liabilities, and that we would communicate transparently even when we had nothing good to report.
That second commitment was harder than it sounds. There is enormous institutional pressure, in a moment of federal ambiguity, to wait and to say nothing until you can say something definitive. Waiting protects the organization. It does not protect the people who are waiting for you. We chose to tell participants what we knew, what we didn’t know, and when we would check back, and then actually checked back on the schedule we had promised.
Aligning first also meant we were not negotiating our values in public. When difficult calls came, as is the nature of these things, we were not starting from scratch or from opposing positions. We had a shared basis for saying yes or no.
Principles Before Procedures
With no federal guidance to follow, we needed a decision model that did not depend on getting new information. We used a principles-based approach: each decision was tested against whether it preserved member well-being, whether it was in line with our professional ethics, and whether it was consistent with the promises we had already made. That framework produced choices we could explain, which mattered more than choices that were optimal.
It also protected us from the two failure modes we watched other organizations fall into. The first was paralysis, waiting for clarity that never arrived. The second was improvisation, where each decision was made on its own terms, and the pattern became incoherent to the people affected by it. Principles gave us speed without drift.
Participants First, in Practice
Concretely, prioritizing service members meant committing resources before we knew whether reinstatement would happen or whether the foundation would be reimbursed. We provided financial support to bridge the gap. We emphasized employment pathways so members who could not wait had somewhere to go. We covered travel and continued to fund professional development, because pausing someone’s credentialing to save money would have cost them far more than it saved us.
Education requirements deserve particular attention. Service programs tie education benefits and requirements to the term of service, and a mid-term termination puts participants at risk of losing the credential they had already largely earned. Protecting that progress was one of the highest-priority things we could do, and it cost both the foundation and local health department very little. Funders looking for where to intervene in a disruption should look first for these asymmetries. These may be the small expenditures that prevent large, permanent losses to individuals, particularly during a crisis.
Reinstatement eventually came, but by then, our participants had already been supported for months. We are convinced the outcome would have been materially different had we waited for certainty before acting.
What Lived Experience Made Possible
Our program invested deliberately in leaders with lived experience of the conditions they were hired to address across both rural and urban communities. During the termination, that investment paid off in a way we had not anticipated. Members with lived experience were the ones who understood, immediately and without briefing, what the funding loss would mean for the families they served. They were also the ones our communities continued to trust while institutions above them looked unreliable.
This is the strongest argument we can make for workforce pipeline investment as a health strategy rather than a staffing strategy. Programs built on community-rooted talent are more resilient under disruption, because the relationship holding the work together does not live in the grant agreement. The foundation recently celebrated 40 years of grantmaking, and that work is deeply rooted in trust, long-term investment, and partnership.
Naming the Partnership Risk
We spent time, during and after, being honest with ourselves about the risk profile of this partnership. Our strength was values alignment: the health department and the foundation wanted the same outcome and said so out loud. Our weakness was funding instability. A program dependent on a single federal stream is fragile no matter how well it is run. The opportunity was workforce investment, which we could scale locally. The threat was policy volatility, which we could not control and had to plan around instead.
We share that assessment because we think funders should ask partners for it directly. A partner who can articulate the weaknesses and threats in their own program is a partner who has thought about failure. That conversation is more useful than any assurance a grant application can offer.
What This Asks of Funders
Federal disruption is no longer an edge case to be managed when it arrives. It is a planning assumption. Different kinds of funders have different levers, and we would ask each to use the one they actually hold.
Philanthropy holds speed. Foundations can move money in weeks or days when public systems cannot move it at all, and that agility is stabilizing out of proportion to the dollar amounts involved. The gap-filling role is not a distraction from strategy; during a federal retrenchment, it is strategy. Flexible, unrestricted, and rapid-response funding is what makes it possible.
Government funders hold continuity. What harmed our participants most was not the loss of dollars alone. It was the silence. Consistent communication and durable administrative infrastructure reduce community disruption and preserve trust that takes years to rebuild once spent. Even bad news delivered on a predictable schedule is a form of support.
Corporate health funders hold labor-market interest. Workforce stability is the clearest overlap between community health and corporate social impact goals. Investing in community health workforce pipelines builds long-term community strength and produces a return that corporate funders can legitimately claim. Furthermore, they should be proud to do so.
Across all three: support flexible funding, invest in community-rooted leaders, plan for system disruption rather than reacting to it, and be willing to share partnership risk instead of transferring it entirely to the grantee.
Where We Landed
The honest version of this story includes fear. There were weeks when we did not know whether we were making a principled decision or an expensive mistake. What we know now is that our members stayed, our communities kept receiving the support they needed, and our partnership is stronger than it was before the crisis tested it.
The question we left our 2026 Grantmakers In Health annual conference session with is the one we would put to any funder reading this: where in your portfolio could values lead the decision making during the next disruption, and what would you need to decide now, in calm conditions, to make that possible?
When funders stand firm in purpose, communities hold strong regardless of what the system does.
References
Ebony C. Barney, Jason Grisell, and Abby Pequignot presented “We Didn’t Stop: Leading with Purpose When the System Stepped Back” at the 2026 Grantmakers In Health annual conference in Baltimore, Maryland. Tools referenced in this article (a principles-based decision model, a partnership SWOT template, and partnership reflection guides) are available at these links.
Association of Fundraising Professionals: Code of Ethical Standards
National Association of Social Workers: Code of Ethics: English
American Public Health Association: Public Health Code of Ethics
Leading with Purpose Through Disruption – Partnership Resilience Worksheet