Health Equity:
Our Way Forward

Equity is the only way forward. Equity is the superior growth model for the nation.

-Angela Glover Blackwell

Vision:

Our vision is for the people of Palm Beach County to experience a better life through quality health.

Mission:

Our mission is to inspire and fund initiatives that improve the health of our communities.

Our Guiding Principles:

We promote change by asking the challenging questions to drive action.

We don’t have all the answers, but we work with others to find solutions.

We take strategic risks and make bold decisions in fulfillment of our vision and mission.

We take our work seriously and enjoy doing it.

Our Philanthrophic Capital:

We are more than a grantmaker. We bring the entirety of our philanthropic capital to fulfill our vision and mission. Our capital includes our organization, our people, resources, communications, infrastructure and partners.

The Palm Beach County Landscape

Quantum Foundation and its many partners are well aware of the socioeconomic factors driving positive health outcomes in Palm Beach County. Those same socioeconomic factors, when absent, drive poor health outcomes in our county’s most disinvested neighborhoods. They include safe and affordable housing, healthy food, robust educational opportunities, meaningful living-wage employment, access to transportation and generational wealth. This gap that exists between people with positive health outcomes and those with negative health outcomes because of social advantage and disadvantage is known as health inequity.

Racial Equity Undergirds Health Inequity

People of color are overrepresented in neighborhoods with the poorest health outcomes.

Racial and ethnic minorities experience a disproportionately higher rate of poor health outcomes compared to the white population in the county due to social disadvantage, specifically in the areas of: infant death, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, chronic lower respiratory disease and HIV/AIDS. Disinvested neighborhoods, compared to the county’s average, have higher rates of the structural drivers of poor health.

Racial Inequities are Both Historical and Contemporary

The historical perspective regarding how racial inequities came to be is too often excluded from the conversation in Palm Beach County and is regularly discounted. Racial segregation was intentional and still impacts the health of our county.

Our Strategic Planning Process

The time leading up to our twenty-year anniversary has been a time of deep reflection for the foundation.

The relationships and reputational capital built by the foundation are second to none. Nonprofit organizations continually remark that a grant from Quantum Foundation is ‘the seal of approval’ and the driver for investment from other funders. This position offers us an opportunity for which no other entity in the county is positioned.

While the foundation has had a substantial impact over the last twenty years, gross inequities remain. Palm Beach County is home to some of America’s wealthiest communities and, in sharp contrast, some of America’s most impoverished and isolated communities, often with just a street dividing the two. While this strategic planning process formally commenced in June 2019 and ended in April 2020, the foundation started considering the influence of the social determinants of health in 2016. In addition, as our Quantum in the Community program matured, we recognized how critical grass-roots agencies and local change leaders are to our strategy. When we formally started this strategic planning process in 2019, Quantum Foundation challenged ourselves with the question:

We developed a theory of change to guide our future work.

  • Reflection and education on the social determinants of health or the non-medical factors that influence health such as housing and neighborhood conditions
  • A 2019 board retreat involving collaborative learning sessions with partner health funders in Palm Beach County
  • Peer-to-peer consultation with Consumer Health Foundation, a philanthropic leader in health and racial equity; the Richmond Memorial Health Foundation, a hospital foundation whose evolution mirrors ours; and the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, a foundation in Arkansas that recently released a five-year vision centered on equity.
  • External interviews with 45 community partners from
  • 10 different sectors along with five community residents
  • Internal interviews with Quantum Foundation staff members and Board of Trustees
  • Internal discussions of Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How our Government Segregated America at both the board and staff levels
  • Clarification of strategic priorities with the Board of Trustees
  • Strategic framework approved by the Board of Trustees and shared with the larger community

Change Trajectories of Life Outcomes in Disinvested Communities

In order to accomplish this, we will develop a broader, long-term and truly innovative community-based strategy to change trajectories in disinvested neighborhoods. This upstream element draws from deep involvement in the community and our nine-year history with our Quantum in the Community program. First, we want to hear what community members say they need. We also know that it is important to prioritize support for grassroots organizations led by those most affected who are 1) responding to community members’ basic needs and 2) engaging communities to build their collective capacity to advocate for the policies and systems that underpin health.

What We Learned

We now understand that communities were intentionally built to drive investments to white communities and away from communities of color. The remnants of this structural and institutional racism remain today and are visible in the inequities in our county.

It is an easily accessible history if you look closely. We can go 45 miles west to see the substandard labor housing that still exists to this day for the workforce serving the sugar industry, or we can drive two blocks from our building to the Hurricane of 1929 Mass Burial Site where 674 Black victims of the resulting flood were buried after drowning in Belle Glade.

The results of our history are extreme poverty, community disruption, lack of economic mobility, poor housing quality and affordability and trauma. It is clear that to improve the health of Palm Beach County, we must understand this history and its contemporary manifestations and build multi-sector, multi-stakeholder solutions that account for it.

First, this means all of us must build our capacity to analyze the root causes of our communities’ challenges in ways that we may not have done before. Second, we must then move from ally to advocate and act in ways that disrupt the root causes of health and racial inequities.

We will address the root causes of health inequity that are economic, educational, social, and racial/ethnic in nature. To address root causes it is not enough to just fix outdated policies and broken systems. We must dismantle and reconfigure policies and systems to benefit our families, communities, and neighborhoods to achieve equity.
-Eric Kelly

Health Equity Happens Both Upstream and Downstream

A FRAMEWORK FOR HEALTH EQUALITY

Theory of Change

Our theory of change formally combines our understanding and experience with downstream activities and upstream activities. Through our strategic planning process, we have integrated what we have learned into this theory of change.

There are two main areas of evolution in our strategy:

1. Develop a health equity framework for our strategy,

2. Work both upstream and downstream to improve health.

First, we will build a health equity framework to guide our work. The second evolution is the expansion of our theory of change to be more inclusive of the upstream factors that influence health. This expansion will serve to strengthen and expand our impact downstream.

Within these two areas of evolution, there are multiple elements. Most are not short-term approaches. Nonetheless, as a grantmaking foundation designed to operate in perpetuity, we must take a long view on our ability to impact the health of the county.

Our success relies on our ability to drive change and work directly with partners all across this county and utilize the entirety of our resources, we will realize better engagement in health, greater access to health resources and stronger connections for healthy communities and ultimately achieve our vision for the people of Palm Beach County to experience a better life through quality health.

What to Expect:
2020-2023

This is a three-year framework to drive the evolution of the foundation. This framework will increase our impact and sustain our work beyond the three-year period. Expansive change takes time and cannot be accomplished overnight nor can it be accomplished in isolation. Coupled with this plan is an internal work plan to guide staff and board actions. It will take some time for us to sharpen our approaches because we want to listen closely to what communities say they need.

Our Way Forward

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