It’s About You

By Magdalena Beltrán-del Olmo

To Our Readers: Spring traditionally brings changes, so it seems fitting that The California Wellness Foundation has picked this time of year to share with you—our readers—a new twist on our time-honored tradition of storytelling about the work of grantees.

The debut edition of our magazine, Grantee, marks the beginning of a new chapter in our communications program’s focus, which for nearly 15 years has been to promote grantees using a journalistic approach that tells the stories of the programs and people who are improving the health of Californians.

After a successful 12-year run, our newsletter, Portfolio, has been retired. In its place, we have created this colorful, news-inspired magazine with more pages devoted to feature stories and increased news and information we believe will be more responsive to grantees, community leaders, policymakers, health experts and other readers.

In other words, this magazine is about responding to you—those individuals and institutions that are committed to helping Californians become healthier.

The redesign efforts are not limited to Grantee. All of our publications, including Reflections and our How To Apply brochure, have been redesigned to include enhanced presentation of information. As an added bonus—and thanks to technological advancements in the printing world—we are accomplishing this even more cost-effectively than before.

We are giving our website a major makeover. Our new website name accents our focus on wellness. Formerly titled www.tcwf.org, our www.CalWellness.org site will now feature increased news and information in a less crowded format with greater ease of navigation. Information previously hard to locate, such as our Leadership Recognition program and feature stories about grantees, is being reorganized using a multiple-portal format to make key sections easy to find.

Why all the fuss? Well, we have you to credit. Thanks to the feedback you provided in numerous surveys and unsolicited comments about our communications efforts, you told us what you found helpful and what we should improve.

We believe that the newly designed communications content strongly echoes our Foundation’s Responsive Grantmaking Program. We hope that by spotlighting the work of grantees, the information we generate puts them in a better position to share their success stories, challenges and measurable impact with their key audiences.

As always, we welcome and look forward to learning from your comments.