Back to Annual Meeting Page		American Public Health Association 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition December 10-14, 2005 Philadelphia, PA

Abstract #114347

Patricia Gail Bray, PhD¹, Carla M. Cooper, PhD¹, Ilana Reisz, MA, PT, PhD cand², and Kayshin Chan¹. (1) Community Health Assessment, St. Luke's Episcopal Health Charities, 3100 Main Street, Suite 800, Houston, TX 77002, (2) Behavioral Science, University of Texas Health Science Center School of Public Health, 1200 Herman Pressler, Houston, TX 77030, 713.667.0632, reisz@sbcglobal.net

St. Luke's Episcopal Health Charities was organized as a public charity eight years ago and is now Texas' largest faith-based charity devoted exclusively to health. During the past eight years, we have funded $57 million in 839 grants to nonprofit organizations in a 57 county area of Texas. Additionally, we have leveraged over $1 million on behalf of the community. Since the mission of the charity is to serve the underserved, our values align very succinctly with those of public health.

Philanthropic organizations committed to funding health care interventions have a unique role to play within the community that can be beneficial to public health planning and policy development. As a matter of course, since these grantmakers fund health care interventions, they are poised to review the programmatic outcomes and share those with other nonprofits working on similar projects in different geographic regions.

Another leadership role that philanthropic organizations should pursue is that of facilitating community collaboratives. Since public/private partnerships are necessary to build strong community collaboratives, philanthropic staff have strong relational ties to both the public and private communities. The community collaboratives can be instrumental in directing the planning and policy advocacy kinds of activities that strengthen the community as a whole.

Finally, philanthropic organizations can be strong partners with academic institutions or other organizations interested in obtaining federal funding. It has been our experience that in partnering on these types of grants, we can draw down federal funds for local initiatives that enhance the health of the community.

Learning Objectives:

• 1. Learn how public health planning and policy development can benefit by having a philanthropic partner.
• 2. Learn about the types of evidence-based data that can be shared between philanthropic organizations and public health.
• 3. Identify three specific ways that philanthropies can contribute to planning and policy development activities.

Keywords: Partner Involvement, Competition

Related Web page: www.slehc.org

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

I wish to disclose that I have NO financial interests or other relationship with the manufactures of commercial products, suppliers of commercial services or commercial supporters.