Building a Culture of Health

We Are a Funder of Lifelong Well-Being

Palm Health Foundation exists to help all Palm Beach County residents thrive and reach their full health potential. Over our existence, we’ve shifted our grant-making focus from addressing “healthcare” to addressing “health.”

The word “healthcare” alludes to clinical and acute care settings, where a person’s health issue is being treated rather than prevented. While the foundation still supports clinical healthcare, we also acknowledge research that shows a person’s health outcomes depend just as much on their zip code as their DNA code, or medical predispositions. 

People need access to healthy foods, safe places to exercise and to reduce chronic stress to maintain good health over their lifetimes. To better the health of our community, the foundation is committed to addressing the social and environmental factors that are impacting our health.

The Community Changemakers Fund

Seven local funders support The Community Changemakers Fund  (CCF) at Palm Health Foundation. This fund was inspired by Palm Beach County winning the 2020-2021 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Culture of Health Prize in recognition of the way residents take the lead in creating solutions to build healthier communities. 

The CCF is investing in the individuals, organizations, and businesses committed to community change and is connecting them with like-minded changemakers to share project ideas and resources.  

The Healthier Together Initiative

In 2013, Palm Health Foundation’s senior leadership and board of trustees evolved the foundation’s grantmaking approach by launching Healthier Together, a community-led solution to improve health disparities in diabetes, behavioral health and family caregiving in six Palm Beach County communities. 

Healthier Together puts residents at the core of developing health solutions around their own needs rather than force-fitting a system that doesn’t always recognize the complexity, culture, context and circumstances of diverse communities. 

For Palm Health Foundation, Healthier Together represents a departure from traditional responsive grant-making, embracing the social determinants of health to implement a truly resident-led initiative viewed through a health equity lens. 

Download our Healthier Together paper, A Shared Purpose: Transforming Communities Through the Social Determinants of Health

The Let's Move Physical Activity Challenge

According to The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, 1/3 of all children born in 2000 or later will face obesity related health problems such as diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, asthma and cancer. Palm Health Foundation responded to these alarming statistics and launched the county-wide Let’s Move Physical Activity Challenge in 2012. 

During Let’s Move, the foundation and local partner Digital Vibez, Inc. invite residents to form teams, commit to exercising at least 30 minutes a day throughout the month of March and log their minutes on the Let’s Move website.

Our goal is for residents who participate in the challenge to take charge of their health and continue incorporating physical activity in their daily lives beyond the month of March.

Palm Health Foundation's Leadership Lab

Palm Health Foundation is building from the learning and momentum of our place-based grantmaking strategy Healthier Together. There are two significant cornerstones contributing to the success of the highly-localized, community-driven efforts: the people part of the initiative and the flourishing networks addressing health in their communities.

The foundation is committed to prioritizing these cornerstones by continuing to invest in individuals as they pursue better health and opportunities for all and invest in the power of networks as necessary and effective complements to organizational and systems-orientated solutions.

In December 2021, the foundation supported a cohort of Palm Beach County-based leaders addressing various aspects of change-making efforts through a 9-month Leadership Lab. This cohort was supported by a seasoned coach with expertise in networks, leadership management, and strategic planning.

Palm Health Foundation’s

Neighbors Helping Neighbors Fund

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Palm Health Foundation quickly leveraged our role as collaborator, convener and leader of innovative solutions for better health by engaging local partners to organize relief and response efforts. 

We began collecting stories from the community using Sensemaker, an online story collection tool, to understand resident needs. The collected stories confirmed what we already knew to be true – that certain people fair much worse than others when faced with everyday obstacles – and even worse in the case of a global crisis. 

We established the Neighbors Helping Neighbors Fund to help our neighbors in need, in exactly the way they need it. The fund puts small grants directly into the hands of Palm Beach County residents so they can recover, rebuild and plan for the future. 

Palm Health Foundation has committed $200,000 of our own grantmaking funds to provide a dollar-for-dollar match for every contribution made to the Neighbors Helping Neighbors Fund.