By Gary L. Yates
January 9, 2006

In December 2000, after a two-year process of strategic planning, the Board of The California Wellness Foundation approved a new grantmaking strategy for the Foundation: the Responsive Grantmaking Program. Four goals were established with the intention of building cohesiveness across the Foundation’s grantmaking:

• To address the particular health needs of traditionally underserved populations, including low-income individuals, people of color, youth and residents of rural areas;
• To support and strengthen nonprofit organizations that seek to improve the health of underserved populations;
• To recognize and encourage leaders who are working to increase health and wellness within their communities; and
• To inform the development of public policies that promote wellness and enhance access to preventive health care.

The Responsive Grantmaking Program represents a significant evolution in TCWF’s definition of strategic philanthropy. Our initial emphasis was on “proactive” grantmaking, with the majority of grant dollars allocated to initiatives and substantial sums set aside for large-scale evaluations. Now, we consciously strive to strike a balance between Foundation-driven programs and a more responsive approach. This represents a real sea change.

Our initiatives focused on ideas that originated at the Foundation. We regarded the organizations chosen to implement those ideas as secondary in importance to the goals of the initiatives. In our new approach, we start with organizations whose mission is to improve the health of underserved populations in California. Our conversation with them begins with their mission and how our funding might help them best fulfill it.

In contrast to our initiatives, with their complex array of moving parts, our new approach follows an intentionally simpler design. This doesn’t mean that we are sacrificing coherence or that there is no structure to the work. Within some general parameters that define our priorities and focus, we encourage a variety of proposals, particularly for core operating support. The structure of the grantmaking around a particular health issue will further evolve over time — as clusters of grants are made and the board and staff’s experience with those grants is assessed. Our intention is to remain maximally responsive to developments while getting to know the players throughout the state.

The four grantmaking goals encompass cross-cutting themes — underserved populations, sustainability, leadership and public policy — that create the opportunity to view our grantmaking as one cohesive program. This has dramatically reduced the “silo effect” that permeates through so many foundations and was ever-present at TCWF in our previous initiative-style grantmaking. We no longer use the phrase “program area” to describe our work on a specific health issue. Rather, we have a single grantmaking program addressing a number of health issues as we pursue our mission to improve the health of the people of California. In this approach, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

We believe this philanthropic approach is allowing the Foundation to be more flexible in its funding strategies and better able to support the essential efforts of nonprofits working to improve the health of underserved Californians.