Connecting Mental Health and Wealth in North Carolina
Mental health and wealth are inextricably linked, influencing each other bidirectionally. While many factors contribute to mental health, we know from the social determinants of health that the most foundational are socioeconomic, including income, wealth, and safe neighborhoods. Asset Funders Network defines wealth in an assets-to-debt ratio.
A Compass of Indispensable Leadership Attributes to Guide Health Philanthropy
Trends in leadership are changing—just take the Terrance Keenan Institute as an example. When the program started in 2010, it focused on general leadership tactics with topics that ranged from leveraging resources and building partnerships to board dynamics. Since then, the Institute’s curriculum has moved towards a recognition that leaders possess individual strengths that can be embraced to make our organizations and the broader field of health philanthropy more effective.
Healing for Our Healers: Funding Transformational Staff Wellness
The Healing Trust has prioritized support beyond the programmatic check since the early years of our grantmaking in 2003. While the “how” of the funding has changed over time, the “why” has consistently been to support the healing of nonprofit staff. This isn’t tangential to making strategic community-based investments, rather it is the foundation on which meaningful change can emerge. When funders invest in the well-being of the staff of partner organizations, it creates a culture where all people’s needs are prioritized and compassionately met. The nonprofit network thrives when its leaders are well-rested. When staff are well taken care of, the clients benefit by means of an energized supporter who shows up with creativity, patience, compassion, and joy.
Striving for Equity: Riding to Success with Mobile Health
The Leon Lowenstein Foundation (LLF) is a family foundation established in 1941 with a focus on health, education, and the environment. In 2019, LLF adopted a new focus area for our health grantmaking. Our goal was to develop a strategy that would enable us to make a meaningful contribution to health equity, particularly through enhanced access to primary and preventive health services in disadvantaged communities.
Centering Black Voices: Lessons from a Two-Year Pilot Program in the Kansas City Region
The REACH Healthcare Foundation’s mission is to advance health equity through coverage and care for underserved people. A regional foundation granting about $4.5 million annually, REACH recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. To mark this milestone, Board and staff leadership reflected on the foundation’s evolution from a highly politicized health care conversion foundation at its inception to a philanthropy striving to reshape its actions and practices to reflect a more reparative approach focused squarely on health equity.
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.
National Rural Health Day Provides an Opportunity for Philanthropy to Engage and Support Underserved Communities
For anyone with an interest in rural health, clear your calendar on November 16th and help celebrate National Rural Health Day, a day to celebrate and lift up the work of doctors, nurses, clinics, hospitals, and other stakeholders working in our rural communities.
Q&A: Bringing an Australian Perspective to American Health Philanthropy
Traveling thousands of miles from Melbourne to Minneapolis, Lauren Monaghan of The Ian Potter Foundation attended the 2023 GIH Annual Conference on Health Philanthropy to learn more about the American public health philanthropy sector at the country’s largest gathering of health funders.
Lessons from an Equity Toolkit Workshop: Facilitator Perspective on Participatory Engagement
The Blue Shield of California Foundation is a long-time multisector collaborative funder with a health equity focus. Increasingly, we find that multisector collaboratives are a powerful vehicle to change systems toward racial equity. We heard from our partners and grantees a strong need for tools and resources that provide several outcomes: to establish equity at the collaborative level, to outline an arc of learning to help place a collaborative on an equity spectrum, and to provide tools to help collaboratives move deeper into equity. To support this work, the Equity in Collaboration Toolkit was developed in partnership with Cristobal Consulting. Its goal is to help multisector collaboratives see where they are taking concrete actions to center equity—and where they are not—through an embedded equity assessment.an embedded equity assessment.
Strengthening a National Field of Practice for Climate, Health, and Equity: Learning What it Takes
When The Kresge Foundation’s Climate Change, Health and Equity (CCHE) initiative launched in 2018, community power mobilization was integral because too often the people closest to viable climate resilience solutions were excluded from decisionmaking. Since then, the leadership of CCHE’s community-based, health practitioner, and health institution partners has underscored the significance of community power to transform climate policy and public health practice.