Impact Report
June 2015-June 2017

The Foundation for a Healthy St. Petersburg

A Mission of Health Equity

A Mission Of Health Equity

The Foundation for a Healthy St. Petersburg believes that all community residents should have the opportunity to achieve optimal health and live a long, disease-free life regardless of race, ethnicity, income level, neighborhood, or gender expression. The Foundation uses a social determinants of health framework to improve population health and achieve equitable health outcomes in South Pinellas County. By paying attention to the root causes of inequality as framed by the social determinants in our community, the Foundation targets our grantmaking and other mission-related work where it can have the greatest impact.

Letter from the Board Chair

“We hope you engage more deeply with the Foundation in the coming year. Thank you for your support.”

- Steven C. Dupré

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

“We look to you for guidance and inspiration and pledge to continue to earn your trust. Thank you for your support… “

- Randall H. Russell

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

Revenue YTD

FY’ 17 as of June 30, 2017
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Expenses YTD

FY’ 17 as of June 30, 2017
View PDF

Assets

Foundation Assets as of June 30, 2017
View PDF

Download Audited Financials

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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

Grantmaking

Learn about our grantmaking, now in its second year.

Grantmaking

The Foundation’s top priority is to listen and engage with our community as much as possible to ensure that we earn the right to help support interventions that will improve population health and advance health equity. As we launched our first grant cycle in early 2016, we granted funds in a responsive manner, based on ideas collected from the community.

In the summer of 2015, Foundation staff prepared for grantmaking by talking with more than 200 county residents, convening 70 St. Petersburg and South Pinellas County service organizations, and meeting one-on-one with 140 local organizations across sectors. The results of those listening sessions are on our website, including a summary of community comments and a summary of provider comments.

These conversations were our path to understanding the needs of county residents and the attitudes, needs, and challenges of the nonprofit providers who serve them. These learnings were a fundamental driver of our first grantmaking cycle, called Healthy Beginnings.

In November 2015, an interactive information and engagement session provided the forum to announce the Foundation’s grantmaking approach, introduce new staff, and kick off the Healthy Beginnings Request for Proposals (RFP) process. We invited each organization to submit up to 3 Letters of Intent with their best project ideas aimed at enhancing community health via the social determinants of health.

We received more than 200 outstanding ideas from the community and made many difficult preliminary choices to select 47 organizations to submit applications for funding. Five national expert reviewers evaluated the grants submitted. In June of 2016, 19 grants totaling $3.9 million were announced and distributed to organizations working across 10 different social determinants of health.

The full list of funded partners and descriptions of the projects is here: they include support for the disabled, safer sidewalks, a better understanding of LGBTQ youth homelessness, restorative justice in our schools and mentorship for entrepreneurs. Although full evaluation data on the projects is not yet available, we are encouraged at the responses from the community and the preliminary results that have been reported. The projects are touching lives and improving health and quality of life in South Pinellas County.

The Foundation surveyed all who applied for grants, and this feedback was used to shape the 2017 grantmaking cycle, illustrated in this video, called Healthy Communities. The first grant round was a call for quick, one-time projects to build organizational capacity. In late May, Capacity Building Mini Grants of between $10,000 and $15,000 each were awarded to 29 nonprofit organizations.

As of July 1, 15 semifinalists for Transformative Grants--large, single year or multi-year grants of between $50,000 and $500,000 each per year--are making presentations of their project ideas to Foundation staff and external reviewers. Finalists were invited to submit a full application on July 24, and funding award notifications will be made as each project team reaches agreement with the Foundation on their project’s objectives, scope, and duration.

The third and final round of grants for 2017 are Empowerment Grants of between $50,000 and $100,000 each. These grants will support organizations with total organizational expense budgets of $1 million and under, based on feedback the Foundation received requesting a grant round specifically to build capacity of smaller organizations.

In future years, the Foundation will move from field-based ideas to specific investment areas, as we learn from our evaluation process. The Foundation’s funding decisions will strive to be transparent, approachable, outcomes-driven, and evidence-informed.

Convenings

We bring community groups together to identify needs and co-create solutions.

Convenings

Bringing cross-sector stakeholders and organizations together to connect and collaborate on program ideas, identify needs, build relationships, and streamline efforts are top priorities for the Foundation. A critical component to this type of engagement is to respect and acknowledge the leaders we are inviting to the convenings. We will strive to have decision makers at the table for their respective organizations.

We treat those invited as advisors to the Foundation and pay them an honorarium that reflects the value of their time, knowledge, and expertise. Based on this framework, the Foundation launched its convenings with three sessions at Collaborative Labs, St. Petersburg College. The sessions provided a space for community organizations to assess their readiness for collaboration, coordination, and convening. The assessment involved deep reflection on trust, compromise, and risk.

It became evident that the convening framework is compatible with community transformation, but that the inclusion of so many diverse topics and organizations diminished the ability to define a unifying issue, system, or object of the transformation. In addition, the lack of a shared definition of convening contributed to an inability to achieve buy-in and participation of the leadership of participating organizations. Overall, however, the sessions illuminated learning opportunities the Foundation embraced and subsequently integrated into its 2017 convening efforts.

In 2017, the Foundation relaunched its convening work with a focus on three issues raised up by the community as the highest priority: HIV, Housing, and Food & Nutrition. The Foundation hosted one-on-one meetings with organizations representative of a range of perspectives on each convening topic. HIV emerged as the area that demonstrated the highest readiness and most straightforward to resolve, given shared strategies and approaches for confronting the disease.

HIV convening efforts have yielded unified adoption of a 90-90-90-50 model. The model prescribes to the overall reduction of new HIV infections by 50 percent. The reduction in new infections will be a cumulative result of the successful implementation of the 90-90-90 cascade components of the model, which will result in 90 percent of persons living with HIV are aware of their status; 90 percent of persons aware of their status are linked and retained in care; and 90% retained in care having reached viral load suppression. HIV convening stakeholders are currently drafting proposals targeting each component of the HIV cascade with a specific emphasis on system disruption, innovation, and transformation. The proposals will be reviewed and discussed at an upcoming convening, at which time consensus and cohesion will generate insight and future action.

Convenings with a focus on food and nutrition and housing are staged to roll out third quarter 2017 and first quarter 2018, respectively.

Community Engagement

Our engagement strategies aim to foster community well-being and greater health equity.

Community Engagement

Community Engagement is a core value of the Foundation and a key activity of every Foundation trustee and staff member. As a permanent, place-based, private Foundation serving Pinellas County, we are committed to putting down deep roots, cultivating trust, and growing in our understanding of the wisdom of the community about its own needs, resources, and solutions.  Foundation staff members work in partnership across sectors to encourage actions and activities that can lead to community health improvements through health equity and the social determinants.

We have met with literally hundreds of organizations and individuals, and we participate in leadership roles in important local civic initiatives, such as the St. Pete Innovation District, Unite Pinellas, Leadership St. Pete, and the St. Petersburg Area Chamber of Commerce’s Grow Smart strategy. To bring best practices in philanthropy, social innovation, and health equity to our local work in Pinellas County, Foundation staff participate in national organizations such as the Aspen Institute, Independent Sector, Florida Philanthropic Network, Grantmakers in Health, Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, Southeast Council of Foundations, and the Communications Network.

Strategic communications is a powerful part of our engagement strategy and will become a more prominent part of our work in 2018. Our initial goal is to make the public more familiar with the concepts of health equity and to broaden understanding of the social determinants of health as vehicles to improve population health. This necessarily means talking about socioeconomics and race. Our engagement and communications strategies are aimed at making Pinellas County a place where difficult but necessary conversations can and do occur. Here is a list of our principal engagement initiatives and goals:

Community Highlights

Research into the health conditions and quality of life in Pinellas County, along with listening to the community, is the foundation for our work. Sharing this information with the public is a responsibility that we take seriously.

Data and analysis provides a common foundation for coming come together in our understanding of community needs and committing to the best strategies for narrowing the health gap among different populations in our county. A robust series of briefings, called Community Highlights, was developed in 2015. These 13 reports on key social determinants of health in Pinellas County, as well as a summary report of many of the core concepts underpinning the Foundation’s work, were published to our website in advance of our first request for grant proposals. These data-rich reports provided the first-ever comprehensive look at our county’s health through the important lens of the social determinants. They are a fertile source of information, inspiration, and guidance for nonprofit, government, and corporate organizations interested in structuring programs and interventions to improve health and bridge health disparities in Pinellas County.

The Foundation is committed to an update of these reports with 2017 data and every year thereafter.

Annual Community Meeting

A tradition of an annual community meeting was established with a December 9, 2016, gathering of nearly 250 nonprofit and community leaders. The half-day of networking included a State of the Foundation report from President and CEO Randall H. Russell, an overview of 2017 grantmaking from Director of Grants and Programs Curtis Holloman, a listening session facilitated by Collaborative Labs, and small group work to identify high-priority community issues to help shape the Foundation’s plans for 2017. The meeting was an important opportunity to address the Foundation’s values and goals, and to share some of the thinking that inspires our unique approach to funding and community engagement.

With examples from research, county data, and national trends, Mr. Russell touched on the strategies and approaches the Foundation will use to create transformative, structural change over time. He sent a clear message that the Foundation is not a typical funder and will engage in untraditional approaches to create meaningful change together with the community. A video and transcript from the meeting and survey results and results from the community dialogue can be found here.

The themes of the Annual Community Meeting included the importance of listening and earning trust as a permanently place-based foundation that no one invited to be here, the value of transparency, setting clear expectations, and continuously seeking feedback to improve our service to the community. As was the case with the Listening Sessions held by the Foundation in 2015, we were honored by the level of engagement demonstrated by participants at our first Annual Community Meeting. The second is planned for January 23, 2018.

Speakers Who Inspire Series

Through the Speakers Who Inspire series, the Foundation engages the greater St. Petersburg community in a public exploration of the ways inequality contributes to poor health outcomes for many residents. We believe that it is only by confronting and understanding our past, and facing the structural racism and poverty that persist in our society at large and in our region, that we will achieve health equity. We see hopeful signs that community engagement with nationally recognized thought leaders and researchers can inform, inspire, and motivate local action toward a healthier and more equitable St. Petersburg.

Two speaker residencies, one with anti-racism activist Tim Wise in October 2016, and a June 2017 appearance by Dr. David Williams, a leading researcher on health disparities and the impact of racism, stress, and discrimination on health, each exposed more than 300 people to important messages related to core areas of the Foundation’s work. In the case of Tim Wise, a large public talk and luncheon was augmented by several small group meetings that allowed for more intimate exchanges of ideas with targeted community groups. Dr. Williams’s schedule allowed for one public talk, which drew more than 300 people to his two-hour presentation. Videos of both speakers can be found here.

Audience surveys after each speaker’s appearances help the Foundation gauge the value and relevance of this type of education and engagement event. For example, a remarkable 98 percent of attendees of the June 2017 David Williams’ presentation stated that they agreed or strongly agreed that Dr. Williams inspired them to take action to address challenges in their community. These are strong indicators that the event met its goals for engaging and educating the community, and taken together with participants’ qualitative descriptions of what they learned, demonstrate that Dr. Williams’ presentation was relevant and impactful.

Similar events in the remainder of 2017 and through 2018 will prepare the community with the vocabulary, information, and experience necessary to undertake challenging but important conversations about race, discrimination, and health equity and to marshal the strength and courage for transformative change.

Digital and Traditional Media

The Foundation’s e-newsletter reaches more than 1,500 nonprofit, community, business and political leaders, academics and researchers, and concerned community members. An important part of our content relates to grantmaking, but we also share news of community events, survey results, and messages about our approach to health funding and health equity. Email open rates often reach 40 percent or more, an extremely strong performance that reveal our subscribers to be motivated, engaged, and eager for information about the Foundation and its activities. This is a valuable repository of goodwill and one that we will seek to safeguard and leverage.

Our website is at the hub of our information network, for funded partners, grant seekers, and community members, and a new social media presence on Facebook will grow organically over time. We are making strategic use of video to share information in a lively and engaging way—information about our grantmaking, health equity, and topics that have an impact on the health and well-being of the community. You can expect more frequent video blogs from Foundation staff and leadership in the coming months.

Radio underwriting on WUSF public radio has been used to build awareness of the Foundation among people in the region who are engaged in the nonprofit sector as board members, employees, or funders. The short-term goal was to increase the number and quality of grant applications. In the medium to longer term, our strategy includes a multi-media advertising campaign that will disrupt expectations about how to look at community heath, including addressing many hidden implications of discrimination, poverty, and marginalization and their impact on inequitable health outcomes.

Cultivating relationships with traditional media reporters, as well as commissioning community reporters to tell the Foundation’s story on platforms that we manage, will also help to create a climate and culture of acceptance and understanding of the need for greater attention to health equity. In short, social change is at the heart of the progress we seek in more equitable health outcomes in South Pinellas County. We believe that strategic communications will be the driver of the changes of heart, mind, and policy that will get us there.

Trustees

Our trustees provide essential expertise and connections to the community.
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Staff

Our staff has both local and national experience in key areas of our mission.
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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.