Giving Compass' Take:

•  After a convening in early October between 75 rural-serving organizations, the end result was a decision to create more health funder partnerships between Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) and private health funders with a sustained focus on addressing the social determinants of health.  

• What have been the barriers for creating these partnerships in the past? What are potential hardships for future partnerships between CDFIs and private funders? How can they ensure mission alignment?

• Read over some examples of effective health funding from Grantmakers in Health. 

Health philanthropy’s attention has shifted over the past two decades from a reliance on health care access work to a deeper look at the factors affecting individual health status (social determinants of health) and, concurrently, at the factors supporting population health (a culture of health).

To date, however, too much of health philanthropy’s work in these areas has been in isolation from non-health funders on both the private and governmental sides.

On October 11 and 12, 2018, seventy-five rural-serving leaders gathered in Atlanta, Georgia, to begin to close the chasm between rural private and public health care funders and organizations working in those same rural communities on issues related to community development, housing, and older adults aging in place, for examples.

Representatives from eleven southern states, along with Washington, D.C., and Atlanta-based federal officials, joined together to examine health data within the context of unique philanthropic partnerships such as those with Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) and the Two Georgias Initiative of the Healthcare Georgia Foundation.

The gathering made clear that while private and public health funders are often working in the same southern rural communities without enough alignment or engagement, an even bigger gap is the disconnect between CDFIs and rural health funders.

CDFIs, which use private and public revenue sources to provide financing options in underserved (and often rural) markets, have little historic relationship with private rural health funders—although both focus on helping rural communities seek and sustain growth. A strong consensus developed from the conference sessions that CDFIs are interested in basic primers on rural health infrastructure, the health policy landscape in rural areas, and the interests of rural health funders.

The bridging of public and private funder investments across the social determinants of health “space” is a daunting prospect that requires practice and experience. As those of us working in philanthropy know, funders often avoid complexity.

Read the full article about health funder partnerships by Allen Smart and Karen Minyard at Health Affairs