“We have more power when we come together and we are better together,” said Janeen Comenote, founding executive director of the National Urban Indian Family Coalition. The coalition is funding 20 urban Native organizations, including eight in Washington State, to support outreach to Native people and ensure they are counted in the 2020 Census.

In the Columbia River Gorge, Comunidades works to amplify voices for environmental and social justice, while increasing Latino/a/x engagement and leadership within local communities. Recently, Comunidades joined with White Salmon residents to organize against evictions.

Building a just and liberated future starts with all of us in Washington. Group Health Foundation stands with those who are protesting police brutality and demanding community-designed solutions for public safety. Since we began grantmaking in 2019, we’ve had the incredible opportunity to fund Black-led organizations throughout the state. We are committed to showing up for them and their communities in this new civil rights era.  

Dawn joins as our investment operations director after spending two decades in accounting and investment operations for university endowments, first at University of Virginia and then more recently at Emory University. She’s looking forward to working with the investment team to ensure more grantees are receiving meaningful funding for their work.

As the COVID-19 crisis began to unfold, Nuestra Casa moved quickly to partner with La Casa Hogar on a radio campaign for Spanish-speaking communities to ensure families received accurate, timely, and culturally relevant information to stay healthy.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Group Health Foundation created the Equitable Response and Recovery Fund to support organizations directly serving and representing Washington communities who are most vulnerable during this outbreak. As we are all working to figure out our best roles during this time of uncertainty, we talked with 40 grantees and share their insights and solutions for addressing immediate needs.

We have great news: Group Health Foundation is opening an office in Pasco. Our staff have visited Pasco and the greater Tri-Cities several times during the past 18 months, much of it documented in our report, A Year on the Road. We have enjoyed beginning to build relationships here, and are grateful to community members who took time to share their experiences and aspirations during our visits.

Fautimah is eager to come on board as the office coordinator for Group Health Foundation and apply her lived experiences and educational background to help advance health equity in Washington State. Growing up biracial and Muslim, Fautimah’s personal experiences led her on a path to equity and social justice work.

A few days after Nichole Maher started as our CEO, we sat down and began a conversation about how we would approach building relationships with intention. We articulated the values we wanted to live by and the commitments to which we would hold ourselves as we began meeting with leaders from across the state.

Eduardo (Eddie) most recently worked with Northwest Health Foundation, where he built deep connections across Oregon and Southwest Washington. For Eddie, centering authentic relationships has been the most rewarding part of his work, and something he hopes to continue at Group Health Foundation.

October marked my one-year anniversary with Group Health Foundation. When I was invited to serve as the CEO for the Foundation, I was filled with immense joy, a vast sense of possibility, and a bit of insecurity. The chance to shape a new foundation with an explicit focus on equity and an unapologetic commitment to advocacy and structural change felt like both a dream and an epic challenge.

Through our new Community Learning Grants, we are eager to support the powerful work that organizations and communities across Washington are doing to improve health equity. To help those interested in this funding opportunity navigate the application process, we hosted a webinar.