Growth in Conversion Foundations: Implications for Health Education

Abstract

A dramatic trend in health care today is the sale of nonprofit service delivery organizations to for-profit businesses. The monies from these sales are frequently used to create nonprofit foundations whose goal is to benefit the community's quality of life. The rapid growth in the number of these “conversion” foundations, their ties to the local communities, and their interest in broadly addressing the underlying determinants of health have great implications for health educators and present specific challenges for the discipline of health education. Health educators can offer valuable skills to these foundations, including the ability to make community assessments more valid and comprehensive; ensure that funded activities are community driven; assist with planning; foster a vision of foundation practice that promotes collaboration and coalition building; and aid with evaluation of work of both the foundation and its grantees. The challenges for the discipline of health education include fostering institutional ties between health education and public health organizations and conversion foundations; developing undergraduate and graduate level curriculum on foundation philanthropy; providing internships at foundations; developing continuing education on the philanthropic community; establishing mechanisms for foundations to access professional health educators; and developing scientific literature on the public health impact of conversion foundations.