Health Equity: More Urgent Now Than Ever

In just a year and a half of grantmaking, we have committed over $44 million in funding, nearly a third of the total assets we expect to invest over the Foundation’s lifespan. Our intention to spend down our assets enables us to make the large- scale investments needed for catalytic change.

Our funding approach, guided by community input, purposefully places long-term investments in communities with the lowest life expectancies. We do this because we know that where we live has an outsized impact on our health. We center the leadership of communities who have been and continue to be marginalized and underinvested in, recognizing that those closest to the challenges are also best positioned to develop solutions.

We emphasize the importance of collaboration, knowing that resources and programs should be coordinated around the needs of a person or family, not siloed and fragmented. And, finally, we focus our investments “upstream”: we aim to tackle the social and economic conditions that hinder individuals from being able to attend to their health and well-being, that increase the risk for chronic disease and poor outcomes, and that are concentrated in communities that have borne the brunt of discrimination and disinvestment.

While we enter 2025 with concern for the national and global climate, we believe that the work to knit communities and people together in common cause, toward resilience, health, and equity, is only more important and urgent. We know we are not alone in this work, and we appreciate the warm welcome that we’ve received since our inception from funders, policymakers, health care leaders, advocates, and community health champions from across the region.

As a spend-down foundation, we recognize that our time is limited and our greatest legacy comes from the lasting impacts of our work together, whether it is youth who create a healthier and more equitable future, better coordinated systems, newly forged relationships, or ideas that are co-created and spread. Especially in these challenging times, we look each day not for the harvest we can reap, but for the seeds that we can plant. We are honored to share these seeds with you.