Growing Local Philanthropy to Improve Health
Community foundations are often in the best position to bring partners together, across sectors and geographies, and to tackle the complex set of issues facing their residents. They represent a network that can serve as a powerful force, including to improve health outcomes. Recognizing this, Kansas Health Foundation launched the Giving Resources to Our World Initiative with the goal of strengthening local philanthropy in communities across Kansas.
Foundation for a Healthy St. Petersburg
Data from across our county tell us that stress, disease, and other repercussions of discrimination take their toll on the health of Black people at an alarming rate. That is why the Foundation for a Healthy St. Petersburg prioritizes race equity as we pursue health equity to improve population health. This necessitates working with our community to challenge the status quo and confront systems that perpetuate inequality and reinforce advantages and disadvantages along racial lines. It is relentless, slow work but necessary to create the lasting change residents deserve. We are and will be community-led by listening deeply for lived experience and solutions from the community.
Can We Have It All? Balancing Key Factors in Evaluating a Grant Portfolio
Like many funding organizations, Methodist Healthcare Ministries of South Texas, Inc., has been on a journey to incorporate strategic evaluation into its grantmaking, and in 2019, completed an ambitious suite of impact evaluations. The evaluation had multiple aims, including: determining the portfolio’s impact; examining the impact of each intervention via program-level studies; and supporting grantees’ use of and capacity to engage in these and future evaluations.
Gilead Sciences, Inc.
Gilead knows that it will take more than medicine to end some of the greatest public health crises of our time. The social, economic, and political factors that drive infectious disease epidemics present formidable challenges to our work. But together–in partnership with communities most directly impacted–program by program, we can help improve health outcomes for the most marginalized populations and help change lives.
Health Equity … It’s a Journey, Not a Destination
COVID-19 has struck with a vengeance, hitting African Americans, older adults, and those with chronic health conditions the hardest. Simultaneously, our nation is experiencing a moment of reckoning, resulting from a long history of racism that has shaped the foundation of this country and thus permeates every system and institution.
Cedars-Sinai
The beauty of philanthropy lies in its inherent flexibility and ability to adapt. We have an obligation to “meet this moment”—a moment of dual public health crises: COVID-19 and race equity—and an opportunity to change the landscape, dynamics, culture, and outcomes of our field. In times of crisis, where innovation and collaboration across systems are enhanced, I am reminded why I chose public health as a career and am committed to adapt, listen, andcontinue support for the most vulnerable.
Prodding New Thinking and New Action: The Crucial Power of Foundations
It is no longer sufficient to be a “good grantmaker.” More and more foundations are grappling with philanthropy’s defining question: “What will we do to make the world a better place, especially for people who have historically been denied the opportunity to lead full, healthy lives?”
Quick Poll Results: Provision of General Operating Support to Grantees and Other Nonprofits
GIH’s July 2020 Quick Poll asked foundations about the provision of general operating support to help current grantees and other nonprofits weather the financial impacts of COVID-19.
Health Forward Foundation
As we continue our work, Health Forward Foundation will center racial equity in our core competencies of leadership, advocacy, and resources. Practicing racial equity means that we will work to create the conditions in which one’s racial identity has absolutely no influence on their ability to thrive. This aspiration requires Health Forward to be the change we wish to see by ensuring racial equity becomes our very ethos.