Petaluma Health Care District creating foundation

With approximately 80 members representing a wide swath of Petaluma service providers, public agencies, business groups and other interests, the Community Health Initiative of the Petaluma Area, or CHIPA, seemed the natural funnel for grants looking to fund collaborative efforts around complex health issues like poverty, homelessness and education.

Yet when it came time to compete for those limited funds, there was just one problem - CHIPA, which operates under the umbrella of the Petaluma Health Care District, was not able to leverage a corresponding nonprofit.

Three years after launching CHIPA as a group focused on discussing ways to jointly address the issues impacting public health in Petaluma, the Petaluma Health Care District is working to catapult those efforts and others through the formation of an affiliated foundation.

The new foundation is anticipated to make it easier to obtain funding from large endowments and other benefactors targeting complex societal issues in California by providing a single voice for CHIPA’s diverse membership, according to district leaders. The group includes Petaluma nonprofits, police, schools, business groups, health care providers and others.

The foundation will help CHIPA, and other current and future efforts by the district, enter its next phase, according to district leaders.

“One of the things that happens is, sometimes, in the past, we competed against each other, and neither one of those nonprofits got the grant in the community,” said Elece Hempel, president of the district’s board of directors and executive director of the nonprofit Petaluma People Services Center. The nonprofit “will bring together these different agencies, and really, because the health care district can do the financial piece and the reporting piece, those of us who do programs can focus on that.”

Efforts to launch the foundation are expected to wrap up before the end of the year, said Ramona Faith, district CEO.

Faith said large government organizations and groups like the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the California Endowment have shown strong support for collaborative groups like CHIPA in recent years, yet the lack of a related nonprofit has remained a detriment in competing for funding in Petaluma.

“There have been times when we have come across applications that really fit our community needs, but since we’re not a (nonprofit), we could not apply for them,” she said.

The district operated with an affiliated foundation between 1975 and 2011, a nonprofit originally known as the Petaluma Hospital District Foundation and formed to provide support for what was then the publicly owned Hillcrest Hospital. That foundation eventually evolved to be known as the Petaluma Community Foundation, operating with administrative assistance from the district and providing direct funding to various community causes before spinning off under its own executive director.

The district actually approached the community foundation earlier this year to propose rejoining the two entities, but the foundation’s board chose to remain independent.

While the goals of the two foundations will be similar, Faith noted that they will operate through different models. The new foundation will not be soliciting funds from donors on a regular basis, but will function predominantly as a vehicle for large grants.

Hempel, the district board president, agreed that the foundation under development for the health care district shares some lineage with an older Petaluma nonprofit known as Healthy Communities Consortium, or HC2. With a board comprised of various leaders in nonprofits, municipal government, health care and other sectors, that group was formed as a cross-disciplinary approach to developing and funding community programs rooted in public health.

That collaboration was unusual as recently as a decade ago, Hempel said, but has since become a common practice in Petaluma as nonprofits band together to jointly compete for a smaller share of available dollars. That philosophy has helped drive growing participation in CHIPA, whose public health focuses span from promoting access to preschool to discussing where sidewalks should exist along Petaluma roads.

“These are things we can’t necessarily address on our own,” said Erin Hawkins, community outreach program manager for the health care district. “These are multi-layered issues.”

(Contact Eric Gneckow at eric.gneckow@arguscourier.com. On Twitter @Eric_Reports.)