07/30/2024 | News release | Distributed by Public on 07/30/2024 11:17
To ensure the Commonwealth Fund achieves its mission of advancing affordable, high-quality care for everyone, we must also ensure we are truly partnering with everyone, including grantees. These grantees should be representative of a varied and diverse population, with work that has a broad-ranging impact.
In 2020, the Commonwealth Fund set out to better understand our performance in this area, with an aim to see who we were supporting as a grantmaking organization. We worked with the Center for Effective Philanthropy to collect baseline demographic data from our grantees and found that we were failing to engage a diverse and inclusive population in our philanthropic efforts - something that is critical to our mission of promoting affordable, high-quality health care for everyone.
Informed by these findings, the Fund took two key steps toward partnering with more ethnically diverse grantees, younger grantees, and grantees with disabilities:
A follow-up survey of grantees in 2023 allowed us to track our progress.
By taking a more intentional approach to engaging grantees outside our existing networks, the Commonwealth Fund partnered with 128 new project directors between 2020 and 2023. Comparing demographic data from grantee surveys in 2020 and 2023 offers a clearer picture of how our new RFPs and small-grant approval process have impacted our grantee community.