Good Health and Health Equity

In an equitable world, every child and family could achieve optimal health – with easy access to care for their physical and mental well-being.

This is why we focus our health equity grantmaking in two priority areas:

• Public health and health care.
• Maternal and child health.

Public health and health care

Good health is about more than medical care. Health equity means removing economic and social barriers that prevent people from experiencing optimal health, such as poverty, lack of transportation and education opportunities and environmental factors. We look for innovative initiatives that:

• Advance systemic and policy changes.
• Promote health care access and coverage.
• Strengthen and build capacity in the public health infrastructure.
• Increase coordination between sectors and communities, emphasizing a holistic approach to what impacts health.
• Introduce new narratives to increase understanding of health inequities and the urgency to address them.

Maternal and child health

Healthy moms, healthy birthing people and healthy babies should be the starting point for a healthy society. Yet in the U.S., racial disparities in maternal and infant mortality and morbidity persist across all socioeconomic statuses – especially for Black and Indigenous families.

Our grantmaking promotes peak health for birthing parents and our youngest children, prenatal through infancy. We look for initiatives that:

• Increase the availability of culturally relevant care in close proximity to communities most impacted by disparities.
• Promote the expansion of health coverage.
• Address the systems that create obstacles for optimal health.
• Strengthen the maternal-child health care workforce.
• Address racism within the health care system.

Approaches vary by location according to the expressed needs of our communities.