Chapter 1: Access
We Started With Access. We Learned Health Begins Long Before Care.
30 Years of Hope Healing Community Justice Equity
The future of California won’t be built for our communities. It will be built by our communities.
For 30 years, The California Endowment has listened to communities and worked alongside people and organizations across California to advance health and racial equity, guided by a simple, unshakeable belief: your ZIP code should not determine how long or how well you live.
Yet in California, and across this country, it still does.
Our work began with access to care. Clinics, health workers, advocates, parents, and young people taught us that care is essential — but it was never enough, because the deepest health gaps in this state were never accidents. They were built by decades of policy choices that treated communities differently based on race: lending practices that decided which neighborhoods got investment and which didn't, school funding tied to those same neighborhood lines, environmental hazards concentrated in some neighborhoods far more than others, and a justice system that pulled too many parents and young people away from their families.
Health is shaped by whether people have safe and stable housing, good schools, economic security, clean air and water, trusted information, a sense of belonging, and a meaningful say in the decisions that affect their lives.
That understanding changed what we funded and how we worked. We invested beyond the walls of clinics and into the conditions that created those gaps. We made longer commitments, because undoing structural harm doesn't happen on a grant cycle. We simplified requirements, because the communities doing this work shouldn't have to fight our paperwork on top of everything else. We resourced residents and local leaders who were already organizing to change the conditions affecting their own health, because they are the experts on their own lives, and the protagonists of this story were never us.
“We live in those communities. Folks know what's happening in those communities.”
How we got here, in four chapters.
Chapter 2: LONG-TERM PARTNERSHIP
We Invested for the Long Term. Communities Showed us What Was Possible.
Chapter 3: USING MORE OF WHAT WE HAVE
We Began Expanding Beyond Grants. More Is on the Horizon.
Chapter 4: BUILDING A MORE EQUITABLE CALIFORNIA
We are Called to Reimagine Philanthropy. Communities Guide our Future.
30 Years By the Numbers
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$5.4 B
Invested in the conditions that shape health
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32,820
Awards to organizations across California
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6,667
Community partners creating change
The Past Decade of Grantmaking
Median grant size
Investing boldly to fuel bold solutions
Multi-year grants
Standing with communities for lasting change, not just short-term wins
Total invested
Putting more resources to work for a healthy, prosperous California
This Moment Asks More of Us
Now California is facing a different kind of moment. The attacks on racial equity are explicit, well-funded, and moving rapidly through courts, statehouses, and school boards. The pressures on the communities we serve are faster, more hostile, and more complex than they were even a few years ago.
Black, Brown, and Indigenous people continue to face barriers to health, safety, and opportunity. Immigrant families are being targeted. LGBTQ+ people are fighting the erosion of hard-won protections. Civic institutions, trusted information, and the right to participate in public life are under growing pressure.
This is not only a moment to protect what community has achieved. It is a moment to ask ourselves what we must become.
There does not need to be another report. There doesn't need to be another initiative. The only thing we need is long-term commitment. We need to invest in movements, in leadership, and people that create that next generation.
Native communities are doing everything for ourselves and philanthropy just doesn't really always recognize that. They always want to come up with the best way to fix the world, and whole time we've been fixing the world since everyone else broke it. If philanthropy actually wants to see the solution to these big long-term issues, then they need to make a big long-term investment in us because we're the ones who've been leading this work forever.
The future of California won’t be built for our communities. It will be built by our communities.
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