Letter from the Board Chair
To the residents of Pinellas County:
This inaugural annual report comes four years after this organization began studying how it could maximize its value to the community, and two years after we became operational as a Foundation.
One of our early Board members drilled into our DNA the critical importance of first taking the time to gain a deliberate and deep understanding of our community’s needs. Others drove home the importance of earning the community’s trust. Learning about our community’s needs and earning its trust will always be at the forefront of our efforts.
This Foundation has evolved into one that has embraced a community-focused mission that views the health of our community through the lens of a wide range of “social determinants.” We have also established a set of governing values that guide our every step and by which the community can hold us accountable. You can see these values in action by browsing our website.
An important job of any Board is to hire a good leader. In Randall Russell, we found an excellent first President and CEO for this Foundation. He has spent 35 years forming and leading nonprofits throughout the South, in a career dedicated to social transformation and social justice. He is an asset to us and a great addition to the St. Petersburg community where his influence is already being felt. Randy has assembled a staff with both local and national expertise in key areas of our mission.
To the residents of Pinellas County:
This inaugural annual report comes four years after this organization began studying how it could maximize its value to the community, and two years after we became operational as a Foundation.
One of our early Board members drilled into our DNA the critical importance of first taking the time to gain a deliberate and deep understanding of our community’s needs. Others drove home the importance of earning the community’s trust. Learning about our community’s needs and earning its trust will always be at the forefront of our efforts.
This Foundation has evolved into one that has embraced a community-focused mission that views the health of our community through the lens of a wide range of “social determinants.” We have also established a set of governing values that guide our every step and by which the community can hold us accountable. You can see these values in action by browsing our website.
An important job of any Board is to hire a good leader. In Randall Russell, we found an excellent first President and CEO for this Foundation. He has spent 35 years forming and leading nonprofits throughout the South, in a career dedicated to social transformation and social justice. He is an asset to us and a great addition to the St. Petersburg community where his influence is already being felt. Randy has assembled a staff with both local and national expertise in key areas of our mission.
In the last 12 months, the Foundation made nearly $4.5 million in grants to 48 local organizations, which are not only deploying those funds for the benefit of the community in very specific ways, but are continuing to provide the Foundation with data, information and feedback about our community health needs.
We have also started to focus on health equity as a Foundation priority in the last year. Health equity, however, can be a challenging concept. Consensus in the field of health grant making is still coalescing around a working definition.
What the community data tells us is that factors such as racial discrimination and socioeconomic status – where people live, work, play, are educated, and spend their leisure time – clearly correlate with disparities in health and longevity. Our community, like others around the nation, still feels the lingering impact of our country’s history of legally enforced discrimination in housing, education, and other systems that started developing even before the birth of our nation, and have carried forward well into modern times.
Health Hazards tend to accumulate in poor neighborhoods. Your ZIP code can be more predictive of the span and quality of life than your genetic code. As a Foundation, we are currently prioritizing our investment in community where it appears to us that the public health needs and disparities are the greatest. We believe this effort, over the long term, will not only uplift the health of those who live in the areas we focus on, but also the health and wellness of our community as a whole.
On a personal note, my term as chair of the Foundation Board expired in September. I am humbled and awed by the many dedicated Board members who have served the Foundation from its inception. Our Board members reflect the diversity of our community and have worked tirelessly for the Foundation. For myself and the community, I thank all of you for your service. And as you know, the personal journey that I have traveled with you has fundamentally changed my personal perspective on the events of our times. I can no longer consume the news without seeing some aspect of the social determinants of health lurking near the surface.
Racial and socioeconomic injustices – particularly those aspects that have become embedded in our systems over the last two and a half centuries – have inflicted misery on too many for too long. And those injustices have had a terrible, long-term impact on public health.
I believe the Foundation is pointed in the right direction to help facilitate over the long term, a positive change in the health of our community. But it will take our entire community, putting aside stereotypes and predispositions in judging others, to make this work. How we use the resources available to us – including those of the Foundation – and the results we achieve as a community in this endeavor, will be a legacy that we pass on to generations to come. I know I speak for the Board when I say that we hope you will engage more deeply with the Foundation in the coming year. And for the skeptics amongst you, I challenge you to participate in our Speakers Who Inspire program and urge you to suspend your powers of disbelief long enough to listen to those speakers with an open mind.
Thank you for your support and for taking the time to read this report.
Yours sincerely,
Steven C. Dupré
Board Chairman
Steven C. Dupré served from April 2013 to September 2017 as the Foundation’s first Chair of the Board of Trustees. His vision and dedication to the Foundation were extraordinary, and we thank him for his service. Mr. Dupré lives in St. Petersburg and is an attorney with Carlton Fields in Tampa. He has more than four decades of broad commercial litigation, trial, and appellate practice.
Letter from the President & CEO
Greetings!
Welcome to the inaugural annual report of the Foundation for a Healthy St. Petersburg. The period it covers spans our creation as a new, private foundation in 2015 through the first half of 2017. The Foundation was created by statute from the proceeds of the sale of Bayfront Hospital, a not-for-profit hospital, to a for-profit hospital chain. Our approximately $180 million in assets generate interest every year and these roughly $8 million in funds are designated for the benefit of our community’s residents.
We are a place-based, activist foundation dedicated to eradicating health inequities in our county. We are grateful for the leadership and bold vision of our Board of Trustees, who got the Foundation up and running quickly and acted decisively to deploy this important new community resource where it is most needed. In the often slow-moving world of hospital conversion foundations, this represents remarkable progress.
We are mindful that no one invited us to be here, we simply arrived on the scene. We take this reality to heart by living our values of transparency and accountability and by listening to you, members of our community. Throughout this report you will find numerous examples of our commitment to this way of being. Are we measuring up to these ideals? We will continually ask you to tell us how we are doing.
Greetings!
Welcome to the inaugural annual report of the Foundation for a Healthy St. Petersburg. The period it covers spans our creation as a new, private foundation in 2015 through the first half of 2017. The Foundation was created by statute from the proceeds of the sale of Bayfront Hospital, a not-for-profit hospital, to a for-profit hospital chain. Our approximately $180 million in assets generate interest every year and these roughly $8 million in funds are designated for the benefit of our community’s residents.
We are a place-based, activist foundation dedicated to eradicating health inequities in our county. We are grateful for the leadership and bold vision of our Board of Trustees, who got the Foundation up and running quickly and acted decisively to deploy this important new community resource where it is most needed. In the often slow-moving world of hospital conversion foundations, this represents remarkable progress.
We are mindful that no one invited us to be here, we simply arrived on the scene. We take this reality to heart by living our values of transparency and accountability and by listening to you, members of our community. Throughout this report you will find numerous examples of our commitment to this way of being. Are we measuring up to these ideals? We will continually ask you to tell us how we are doing.
The Foundation’s approach to health is grounded in the social determinants of health. These are the environments and systems – social, economic, political, physical – that individuals are born into that affect all aspects of their lives. Health is more than health care and health habits. Human needs like transportation, employment, housing, clean air, and education all impact human health. We seek partnerships with all sectors of the community – nonprofit, government, faith-based, and private – to get at the root cause of conditions that lead to less than optimal health for many families and neighborhoods.
The Foundation prioritizes health disparities among various groups and places where obstacles to good health are most unfairly clustered. This often requires having conversations about race and poverty. These are difficult conversations that our culture has not prepared us for. They are complicated by the fact that so many aspects of our lives are siloed by skin color, socio-economic status, geography, and gender identification that keep us from knowing and understanding the other.
The Foundation is committed to creating opportunities and safe spaces for these conversations. We believe that our community can become stronger, more resilient, and cohesive by confronting the history of discrimination that continues to affect us all. We envision a St. Petersburg and Pinellas County that lead the nation in eradicating health inequities and empowering all residents to achieve optimal health and well-being.
Complex challenges in population health and health equity will require multi-sector, collaborative approaches. Municipalities, governments, businesses, nonprofits, faith-based entities, funders, universities, hospitals, community and neighborhood leaders, and individual citizens all have a role to play in and will benefit from creating the transformative changes that many of our neighborhoods need. The Foundation is here to facilitate collaboration, provide resources, including grant dollars, and is fully invested in making a long-term commitment to building community trust and effecting positive social change that we believe will improve the health of our entire community.
In addition to grantmaking, we have convened more than 1,200 people and hundreds of organizations on a variety of health issues. We have seen some successful early results from these convening efforts and plan to expand them. We remain committed to careful and continuous consultation with both our local community and the nation’s leading health foundations to help us gain a deeper understanding of the community’s needs and ideas for improving our public health.
In the coming year, we will invest in research and strategic communications initiatives that will help us better understand and convey some of the obstacles to equity and avenues to achieving optimal community health. Related to this is the fourth pillar of our work, policy and advocacy, which will launch in the coming year. And we are always exploring innovative ways to invest in social change that may involve different combinations of strategies and unconventional approaches.
If you are interested in knowing more about the Foundation, there are many ways to engage and stay connected. Registering for our e-newsletter is a great way to learn about Foundation events, convenings, grant opportunities, and stories of people making a difference in our community. You can use the form at the end of this report to provide feedback, ask questions, and share your own observations about how we can work together to create a healthier and more equitable Pinellas County. And we are always available for a call or visit to the Foundation.
We look to you for guidance and inspiration and pledge to continue to earn your trust. Thank you for your support and for reading this report.
With gratitude,
Randall H. Russell
Financial Summary & Audit
By the Numbers
32
Grants funded as of June 2017
$4M
Dollars granted as of June 2017 *$4,277,873
288
Number of organizations registered with the fundation to apply for grants
$22k-$1B
Range of operating budgets of funded partners and applicants for funding
70
Number of Pinellas County social service agencies we visited during the Foundation’s listening tour.
16
Number of social determinants of health indicators that guide our work
15th
Ranking by asset size among Florida’s 6,817 foundations
Top 2.3%
Ranking by asset size among 102,695 American foundations
Foundation Highlights
Strategic Focus 2017-20
The Foundation commits to be a courageous, credible, and influential voice on behalf of the change our community seeks. We envision every person equitably achieving optimal health and well-being.
Mission and Philosphy 2.0
Our mission is to end differences in health due to social or structural disadvantages and to improve population health. We do this by inspiring and empowering people, ideas, organizations, and relationships.
Strategic Communications
We will bring awareness to the challenges and opportunities in our community and create a climate for positive social change through public information campaigns, speaker series, and data.
Grantmaking and Social Innovation
We will continue to make investments that elevate the capacity of all sectors to use their wisdom, resources, and talents to achieve optimal health and well-being for all residents of Pinellas County.
Convenings and Meetings
We will maintain focus on the social determinants of health, with emphasis on education, housing, food & nutrition, and income equity. We will use convenings, meetings, and listening sessions to learn from and co-create solutions with the community.
VALUES
A Foundation of Integrity
The Foundation is guided by a strong set of core values. These will be reflected in all aspects of our grantmaking, convenings, research, communications and day-to-day activities as we interact with our community and pursue our mission.
Transparency
The Foundation will operate in full disclosure of our plans, actions, transactions, our investments, relationships, and our partnerships throughout the community.
Equity
We believe that all residents deserve to lead full, happy and healthy lives regardless of race, ethnicity, income, geography, or gender identification.
Collaboration
We embrace the value of bringing people together to cultivate trust. When collaboration and coordination are strong, we achieve more together.
Listen & Learn
The Foundation will operate in full disclosure of our plans, actions, transactions, our investments, relationships, and our partnerships throughout the community.
Evidence Informed
Research and ongoing assessments help ensure our actions are based on data-driven needs and evidence-based outcomes.
Inclusive
We embrace all members of our community, particularly those who are not often included.
Engaged
We engage the corporate, public, private and nonprofit sectors to improve community health.
Lead
We lead with data, policies, health messages and funding. We work to leverage additional private and philanthropic resources to benefit the community.
Compel Action
As an unbiased and unfettered community resource, the Foundation will take bold action to promote equity and optimize health.