Business Commons^™

Reconciling Philanthropy’S Role In Disruption And Revolution: Hard Lessons From A Community-Driven Power-Building Strategy To Achieve Health Equity, Kien S. Lee, Courtney Ricci, Mia Ramirez

The Foundation Review

This article shares The Colorado Trust’s experience with Community Partnerships for Health Equity (CPHE) after initiating a resident-led strategy for systems change and encountering the myriad challenges to its implementation that ultimately led to exiting the initiative.

The CPHE strategy intended to fund community members directly instead of working through the nonprofit sector in the state, and thereby shift power from nonprofit organizations to residents. It eventually involved more than 20 communities across Colorado and created change in certain communities — from filling service gaps and creating local partnerships to shifting local systems.

The Trust had good intentions in its …

Advancing Social Determinants Of Health Through Investments In Postsecondary Attainment And Sustaining Employment, Melissa B. Eggen, J’Aime C. Jennings, Molly O’Keefe, Brandy N. Kelly Pryor, Leslie Clements

The Foundation Review

In 2018, the Humana Foundation shifted the focus of its work to the social determinants of health, with the key aim of promoting health equity. With this new focus came a recognition that larger, long-term investments would be needed to support strategies addressing upstream determinants of health. The foundation also recognized the need to co-create processes with communities to understand how to provide essential holistic supports.

This article explores one area of the foundation’s new efforts, the Strategic Community Investment Program, which focuses in part on postsecondary attainment and sustaining employment. The foundation partnered with the University of Louisville’s Center …

Can Coaching Help Community Partnerships Promote Health Equity, Community Engagement, And Policy, Systems, And Environmental Changes? Results From An Evaluation, Jung Y. Kim, Lisa Schottenfeld, Michael Cavanaugh

The Foundation Review

Foundations and other entities have increasingly funded coaching and technical assistance to support multisector community partnerships to promote health and health equity. However, much remains to be learned about how coaching can best support these partnerships.

As part of its efforts to build a culture in which everyone in the United States has a fair opportunity to be healthy, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation partnered with the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute to provide structured coaching to strengthen the capacities of community partnerships. The foundation contracted with Mathematica to evaluate the coaching program, focusing on whether it had an …

Making Health Equity Real: Implementing A Commitment To Engage The Community Through Fellowships, Saphira M. Baker, Mark D. Constantine

The Foundation Review

Between 2016 and 2019, Richmond Memorial Health Foundation jumpstarted its transformation from a health legacy foundation committed to increasing access to health care to one promoting regional health equity through a racial and ethnic lens. A central component of this new focus was the trustees’ decision to invite community members to inform and advance the health equity strategy through two distinct community fellowship programs — the Equity + Health Fellowships. These programs ultimately provided the foundation with a new language, benchmarks, and structure for welcoming broader community engagement.

This article highlights the outcomes of both programs, how the experience with …

Moving Upstream: An Intersectoral Collaboration To Build Sustainable Planning Capacity In Rural And Appalachian Communities, Laura Milazzo, Holly Raffle, Matthew Courser

The Foundation Review

As part of an effort to address health inequities in Appalachian and rural Ohio, the state’s Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services developed an upstream intersectoral health innovation that specifically addressed the lack of infrastructure and other capacity issues that create barriers to obtaining federally funded prevention services among communities with the highest need for those services.

The department partnered with two nonprofit organizations and a university to create a performance-based, stepping-stone investment strategy that provided monetary awards to community organizations and included intensive, customized training and technical assistance that promoted capacity- building for data-driven strategic planning.

This article …

Becoming Strategic: Finding Leverage Over The Social And Economic Determinants Of Health, Douglas Easterling, Laura Mcduffee

The Foundation Review

While a number of observers have offered advice to foundations on how to be more effective with the implementation, evaluation, and adaptation of their strategies, there is little guidance on how foundations should go about designing their strategies.

This study fills that gap by analyzing the strategic thinking of health conversion foundations when they determined how they would address various social determinants of health. Based on interviews conducted with the leaders of 33 foundations across the U.S., we identified four strategic pathways: expanding and improving relevant services, creating more effective systems, changing policy, and encouraging more equitable power structures.

In …

Toward Health Equity For Asian American, Native Hawaiian, And Pacific Islanders: The Health Through Action Model, Traci Endo Inouye, Rachel Estrella

The Foundation Review

· Since 2009, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation has invested over $100 million to foster racial healing and eliminate policies, practices, attitudes, and cultural messages that reinforce differing outcomes by race.

· Health Through Action represented an unprecedented level of investment targeting AA and NHPIs. Embedded within the WKKF racial equity portfolio, it was the first time a private-sector foundation joined forces with a national AA and NHPI organization to acknowledge and address health disparities facing this population.

· HTA provided direct grants to seven AA and NHPI collaboratives and 11 AA and NHPI anchor organizations around the country to advance …