Building Health Equity in Silicon Valley:
Narrowing Our Focus & Aligning Our Roles to Maximize Impact
Dear Friends,
For the past year, we’ve been reflecting upon our impact in the community and refining our strategic direction. This process drew upon input from community members, funding partners, collaborating organizations, staff, and our Board of Trustees, as well as research and data from our programs and external sources.
Today, we’re excited to announce a more focused strategic direction that aligns our roles as a provider, a funder, and an advocate to build health equity in Silicon Valley. We also humbly request your input to help inform grantmaking and advocacy priorities that align with our focus areas.
Our Focus
As we build health equity in Silicon Valley, we’ll focus on three strategies that align with unmet community needs as well as our demonstrated areas of expertise:
Improving Health Through Food
Making Chronic Diseases More Preventable & Manageable
Prioritizing Health In Housing
We believe that focusing our efforts in these three areas will improve the health of vulnerable populations in our community: older adults, recently housed individuals, and people at risk of or living with a chronic condition, including HIV/AIDS.
As a result of this focus, in the past six months, we’ve also made difficult decisions to transition or sunset some business lines. However, thanks to partners like FIRST 5 and Catholic Charities, we’re pleased that some of these business lines – including Family Resource Centers – will continue to operate and benefit the community.
This focus will not impact our Financial Administrative Support Services (FASS). We remain committed to operating FASS, a wholly-owned subsidiary providing comprehensive accounting services for over 80 nonprofits.
Our Approach
The Health Trust plays three roles in the community – as a funder, a provider, and an advocate – to build health equity. Through experience, we’ve learned that we’re more impactful as an organization when we align these roles to create lasting change for the people we serve and to the systems and policies affecting their health. As a provider, we’re able to reach thousands of local residents. As a funder and an advocate, we have the power to reach tens of thousands – even hundreds of thousands – of residents.
As part of a larger ecosystem, we recognize that collaboration is essential in building health equity. We’ll strive to partner with individuals, community-based organizations, funders, and policymakers to achieve our mission.
Grantmaking & Advocacy Priorities
We cannot do this work in isolation and seek input from our partners – clients, community-based organizations, policymakers, and local leaders – to help inform our grantmaking and advocacy priorities.
We kindly ask that you join us at one of our two upcoming learning sessions so that we can learn from your expertise and experience.
Tuesday, November 13, 2018
12:30pm – 2:00pm
Morgan Hill Community and Cultural Center
17000 Monterey St., Morgan Hill, CA 95037
Thursday, November 15, 2018
3:30pm – 5:00pm
Mayfair Community Center
2039 Kammerer Ave., San Jose, CA 95116
RSVP
If you can’t attend either session and would like to give feedback, please fill out the RSVP form and select the the option to receive an electronic Community Feedback Form.
We look forward to sharing our refined grantmaking and advocacy priorities after completing this community input process.
Thank you for joining us in building health equity in Silicon Valley. Please do not hesitate to contact us at info@healthtrust.org or (408) 513-8700 to share your thoughts.
Sincerely,
Michele Lew
Chief Executive Officer
The Health Trust