Letters from the Chair and CEO
Letter from 2018 Board Chair, Mark Carter
The Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky is making tremendous strides in its increasing effort to be an influential advocate for policies that improve health. We are extremely proud of our grantees’ achievements and of the Foundation’s initiatives since we were founded in 2001, and we’re now moving into a front-line role ourselves.
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In 2017, in our first major foray onto those front lines and under the leadership of
former Board Chair Charlie Ross and CEO Ben Chandler, the Foundation created, raised funds for, and launched a statewide coalition that brought together under a single campaign traditional health advocates and also a variety of other organizations committed to reducing smoking in the Commonwealth. We’re excited about the potential of this Coalition to tackle one of the significant health issues in the Commonwealth – high tobacco use.
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Kentucky struggles with other health challenges, including high rates of obesity, heart disease, substance use and poor dental health. We know that an individual’s poor health is associated with poverty, poor educational attainment and other social and cultural challenges.
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The Foundation can make significant progress in only a few health issues over any given time period, given our size and our resources. We must set challenging health improvement goals, but we also must narrow our focus so we can achieve them. In addition, we must engage community and health leaders in working together to be successful.
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This report summarizes the major steps we took along that path in 2017. It is good work that lays the foundation for attracting greater engagement and achieving even more challenging goals in the future.
In health,
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Mark Carter, Chair
Foundation Board of Directors
Greater Engagement
Challenging Goals
Letter from CEO Ben Chandler
Dear Friends of the Foundation,
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Significant improvement in Kentucky’s typically poor health measures requires all hands on-deck. The Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky recognizes that big health changes can only be achieved by enacting policies that impact entire population groups. We also recognize that major policy change requires pursuing greater engagement and setting challenging goals.
To that end, in 2017, I travelled from one end of the state to the other meeting with community leaders to establish or strengthen relationships. These meetings represented the beginning of the Foundation’s new, statewide effort to address an issue that jumps out as the most impactful thing we can do to improve Kentucky’s health: Reduce tobacco use.
Our first major statewide advocacy campaign began with the launch of a multi-sector partnership called the Coalition for a Smoke-Free Tomorrow at a rally with more than 100 advocates, physicians, educators, faith leaders and others from across Kentucky in attendance. Here’s a sneak preview of the 2018 annual report: While we didn’t get the $1-per-pack increase on cigarette taxes that we sought, we did win the largest cigarette tax increase in the history of the Commonwealth.
Even while taking on this major new Tobacco Use Reduction initiative, we kept our commitments to existing grantees in 2017. The two initiatives under the Foundation’s previous strategic plan – Investing in Kentucky’s Future (IKF), which focuses on preventing today’s school-aged children from suffering chronic diseases as adults; and Promoting Responsive Health Policy (PRHP), which funds other advocacy groups to make public policy more responsive to the health needs of Kentucky – created some significant accomplishments in 2017, which are highlighted in this annual report. We are particularly proud of the coalition building and strengthening that has happened in our IKF communities, as well as the policy changes that both our IKF and PRHP grantees fought so hard for and achieved. These accomplishments will help create and sustain long-term health improvements in Kentucky.
Read about these and other success stories in our 2017 annual report, and let us know if you have questions or would like to become more engaged in health policy work in your community or statewide. We’re always looking to connect people who have the desire and the skills to help improve the health of our people.
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Toward a healthier Kentucky,
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Ben Chandler
President and CEO