The New Hampshire Children’s Health Foundation, Endowment for Health, and the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation came together to form the Funders Collaborative recognizing the need work together to respond to critical gaps in health advocacy capacity. With this recognition came a shift toward co-funding the development of a long-term, stable advocacy field to advance social and public health campaigns. Priority focus areas of the collaborative include early childhood, health care access, behavioral health and substance use disorders (with separate funding from NHCF) – with longer term focus on wellbeing of children and families.
Location:
Concord, NH
Focus Area:
Statewide
Structure
Supported by the Endowment for Health, New Hampshire Charitable Foundation and New Hampshire Children's Health Foundation. Staffed by consultants.
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NH funders also have a long history of working together to advance public-private partnerships and supporting efforts to tackle major issues. The formation of the NH Funders Collaborative reflects many years of funder collaboration, such as: sometimes jointly co-funded various work, including in the policy and advocacy realm; co-convening stakeholders; co-funding grantwriting, public forums or data analysis.
The catalyst for a more formal funders collaboration was the realization that NH funders needed to respond to critical gaps in health advocacy capacity.
In the spring of 2015, leaders at three statewide New Hampshire philanthropic foundations, Endowment for Health, New Hampshire Charitable Foundation and New Hampshire Children's Health Foundation, began meeting monthly to discuss their mutual concerns about the dearth of policy successes and strong advocacy organizing capacity in the state. During a particularly difficult state budget session, it became evident that a new model was needed. In particular, these funders understood that enhanced policy and system-wide investments were necessary to better support the needs of New Hampshire’s children and families.
This led the three foundations to make a formal commitment to work together under the name “New Hampshire Funders Collaborative”. Their collective and agreed upon aim is to more efficiently deploy their resources, with the primary goals of filling an anticipated policy leadership vacuum in NH and creating a stable advocacy infrastructure for promoting the health and wellbeing of the state’s most vulnerable residents. Funding priorities include early childhood.
The NH Funders Collaborate co-founders shared more about the evolution of their collaboration in a May 2021 webinar hosted by ECFC. View the webinar recording.