Our Journey
A New Vision
In 2012, Palm Health Foundation’s senior leaders shared their aspirations for a deeper connection to the Palm Beach County community and the ability to transform community health.
“Collective Impact,” a place-based grantmaking approach, provided the foundation a framework for shaping our ideas.
The foundation’s leadership team spent the following year canvassing the community, seeking input for our early vision to wrap a collective impact model around the foundation’s priority areas: diabetes, behavioral health and family caregiving.
We began to see that a more holistic approach was needed emphasizing systems, culture change and a new perspective to see ourselves as local stewards of shared resources. As our vision came more into focus, a new theory of action emerged.
By 2014, the foundation decided to move forward with a five-year commitment to invest $1 million in each of six selected communities to make lasting, sustainable impact around some of the most complex health-related issues.
The strategic shift emphasized the partnership between residents and leaders as we began working hand-in-hand to build organizational and individual capacities to support new and existing networks and influence factors that are key in transforming systems.
The overarching goals set at the beginning of the initiative were to:
- Help narrow health disparities among the residents in Palm Beach County
- Increase capacity among individuals, organizations and systems to impact lasting and sustainable change related to health and well-being
- Establish a learning framework to evaluate the overall impact of the Healthier Together initiative as well as the impact at the community level