Trust for America's Health Praises Major Foundations for Supporting Prevention as a Central Part of Health Reform

“Trust for America's Health (TFAH) applauds six of the nation's top health foundations in their call for prevention to be a central part of health reform. The California Endowment, The Kresge Foundation, Nemours, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and Kaiser Permanente issued a joint letter today saying that, ‘Over time, a focus on community prevention will improve health, save money, reduce demands on our health system and, most importantly, lead to a nation of healthier people and healthier places to live.’ These six foundations began the Healthy Eating Active Living (HEAL) Convergence Partnership in 2006 with the shared goal of changing policies and environments to achieve the vision of a healthy people living in healthy places and have invested in numerous community-based disease prevention programs that have yielded in evidence-based results. The foundations say that, ‘It is time to scale up these efforts by including robust financial support for community prevention in any health systems reform.’ ‘These philanthropies have provided leadership for years developing excellent programs that have been shown to have a real impact on improving health in communities,’ said Jeff Levi, Ph.D., Executive Director of Trust for America's Health (TFAH). ‘Health reform provides the opportunity to take these lessons learned and bring them to scale so we can improve the lives of millions of Americans and save billions of dollars in health care costs.’”

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