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Season’s Greetings! As the year comes to a close, I continue my annual Health Forward tradition of sharing Sankofa reflections on the journey we’ve traveled.
In the Twi language of Ghana, “Sankofa” means to go back and get it — to take from the past what is good and bring it into the present to make progress in the future. It invites us to pause, look back, and gather wisdom from the paths we’ve walked to enlighten our journey forward. This is a time to hold gratitude, acknowledge challenges and growth, embrace instruction, and fortify our future. With that spirit in mind, I share my reflections on 2024. Celebrating $400 million in impact Since our founding, Health Forward has been deeply rooted in addressing health inequities through leadership, advocacy and resources. From the very beginning, our founders committed us to addressing the barriers that prevent people and communities from thriving. This year, we celebrated a significant milestone — reaching $400 million in community investments in the Kansas City region and across Missouri and Kansas in urban, suburban, and rural communities. Included in this funding was $26 million in 2024. This $400 million milestone is a testament to the power of collaboration and the ongoing work to ensure our region becomes healthier, more equitable, and more just for everyone.
Amplifying voices and community power through civic engagement
This year, we invested significantly, including sweat equity, in civic engagement through and beyond our Power purpose area with organizations and non-partisan movements in Missouri and Kansas. Through these vital efforts and partnerships, we worked to democratize democracy in a historic election year:
Equitable and just places that foster health and wealth
We advanced our affordable homeownership strategy through an invitation-based funding opportunity focused on supporting greater access to achieving and maintaining homeownership. The funding provides $1.6 million to six organizations across our six-county service area that provide downpayment assistance, minor home repair support, and credit and home ownership counseling. This funding opportunity has been bolstered by our Purpose Driven Investing efforts, which consists of employing the foundation’s capital creatively to increase affordable housing stock and other health and wealth building opportunities for our communities of focus.
Within the year, we also partnered closely with our regional Housing and Urban Development (HUD) office and LISC to convene an Emerging Developers Summit, most of whom were Black and brown developers who often buttress the creation and rehabilitation of affordable housing where our communities need them most.
Adriana Pecina, Impact Strategist in our Place purpose area, with partners at the Emerging Developers Summit.
High quality and equitable community health ecosystem
We continued to support organizations dedicated to ensuring equitable access to high-quality medical, oral, and behavioral health care, as well as social services that center and honor the full spectrum of people’s personal experiences — an effort bolstered by our multi-year investment of $10.65 million announced in 2023. Additionally, we held a Food as Medicine Summit that will lead to a funding opportunity to advance a movement focused on demonstrating the clinical efficacy of and reimbursement for food as medicine in our region.
Health Forward hosted a Food as Medicine Summit in 2024 featuring local and national experts.
The KC Health Equity Learning and Action Network (LAN) continued to offer a convening table for the broader health ecosystem to learn and grow in leadership of health and racial equity. Looking ahead, the LAN will center the improvement of Black maternal health outcomes by engaging partners from various health care and grassroots entities to advance evidence-based and/or promising practices while centering belief in Black women’s voices, learning about structural and medical racism, and trusted quality improvement practices in health care.
KC Health Equity Learning and Action Network (LAN) partners met in August to reconvene on the journey we started together two years ago.
In partnership with NORC at the University of Chicago, Health Forward continued to convene leaders across our service area who comprise our diverse health sciences workforce steering committee and community advisory board. These convenings helped finalize a landscape assessment and strengthened commitments to collective action for workforce diversification as essential to achieving better health outcomes for all. In addition to finalizing this assessment, our People purpose area awarded $1.5 million to seven partners who are advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion across health science pathways, including secondary education, higher education, adult certifications, tuition assistance, vocational training, mentorship, and support services.
The economic case for equity and inclusion
In 2024, Health Forward commissioned and released two reports from The Perryman Group. One highlighted the economic boost immigrants bring to Kansas and Missouri, while the other revealed the potential economic harm of anti-DEI policies. Together, these findings underscore the importance of inclusive policies for equitable and sustainable growth and were crucial to our policy and narrative change efforts in both states.
Racial equity in asset management
We continued national field leadership in philanthropy for racial equity in asset management, reaching an estimated $500 million (approximately 53% of assets under management inclusive of commitments) with asset managers that advance our equitable representation aspirations and high-performance net asset return objectives.
Learning for truth and reconciliation To increase our understanding of structural racism and reckon with the harm and violence it perpetuates in our community, Health Forward staff traveled to Montgomery, Alabama – the cradle of the civil rights movement – for an equal justice tour. We visited the National Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, among other places.
This experience was unlike any other in our organizational equity learning journey. It was gripping, formative, generative, and necessary learning, particularly for philanthropy whose wealth, at a structural level, was largely created and scaled by African descendants of the enslaved. An attempt to characterize our learnings here would be insufficient. However, through this experience, suffice it to say that our resolve for and practice of reparative investments and partnerships in service to equity and justice is strengthened.
Sitting united at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice with the team from ProInspire, our visit to Montgomery reminds us that health equity is deeply intertwined with civil rights and equality.
Steadfast in purpose
Like many other organizations working toward health and racial equity and economic inclusion, we have been mindful about the implications of the 2024 election on our work, on our partners, and the communities we serve. The more we have considered those implications, the more we realize that progress in many of the issues that concern us most may be challenged.
Health Forward will meet this moment, grounded in our values and our commitment to racial equity and economically just systems. Holding firm to our values and our commitments requires steadfastness when headwinds present. We have no doubt that the years ahead will continue to give rise to efforts that aim to undermine progress. Yet, as we look ahead, we do so with a bold vision. Having broken ground on our new home on Kansas City’s east side this year, we are clear that this building is not just office space. It is a physical representation of our enduring dedication to racial equity and economic justice.
We look to a future focused on new challenges and triumphs. Breaking ground on our new building and reaching $400 million in funding are celebratory achievements, however the true measure of our success will be the lasting change we create — together. Thank you for being a part of this journey with us. Together, we will continue pushing forward for a more just and equitable future.
