2012 ANNUAL REPORT

Guiding Principles

Leading the Way

Finding and supporting people with great ideas and talent for improving health care for older adults has been an essential component of the Hartford Foundation’s success in Aging and Health. The Trustees and staff turned to the pioneers of geriatric medicine beginning in the 1980s to help shape and lead programs. In the early days, there were only a few. For over thirty years, the Foundation has found and supported many other leaders—in nursing, social work, and all the specialties of medicine—with the vision and passion for improving health for older adults.

In addition to investing in strong project leaders, the Foundation also cultivates leaders for the future. Activities embedded into grant programs deliver specialized leadership training, nurturing, and support, such as an annual Leadership Conference for the Foundation’s geriatric nursing pre- and post-doctoral scholars. Several initiatives focus completely on leadership development, such as the Geriatric Nursing Leadership Academy and the Practice Change Leaders program. Common to all of these initiatives and activities are several essential elements such as mentoring, peer networking, formal training, and encouragement to accept the leadership mantle.

Marie Bernard, MD, deputy director of the National Institute on Aging (NIA) since 2008 is one of many examples of individuals who have benefitted from these leadership development efforts. While at the University of Oklahoma, she was accepted into the Hartford Geriatrics Leadership Development Program for geriatrics division directors and then participated in the program’s advanced level as a Senior Scholar. “Through this program, I learned that there is a literature, a discipline, an approach to leadership—just as there is to geriatric medicine,” Dr. Bernard says. In her leadership role at the NIA, Dr. Bernard helps direct the nation’s research and training programs on aging.

Through scholarships, fellowships, and leadership development programs, the Hartford Foundation has stood behind and supported thousands of individuals who are committed to being the leaders who will change health care for older adults.

Rules of Engagement

One of the Foundation’s core operating principles is a deep engagement with the fields of aging and health and with our grantees. We challenge ourselves to add value to the work of our grantees beyond the dollar value of the grant check, with ever higher expectations to have a direct impact on the mission.

This commitment comes from the top. The Hartford Board of Trustees is almost unique in having a standing evaluation committee which receives reports on the progress of every grant project. Most grant recipients receive an annual in-person staff site visit and a written report, often supplemented by external consultants. Board members themselves often attend site visits. Staff also use these occasions to invite guests to learn more about projects, connect with co-funders, and help grantees succeed with their stakeholders.

To add value to the design of our projects, the Foundation has hired program and grants management staff with diverse and relevant experience. Moreover, the Foundation invests significantly in staff professional development. Staff members stay current on the professional literature and participate in national meetings of experts in the field of aging and health as well as in grantmaking affinity organizations such as Grantmakers in Health and Grantmakers in Aging. The Foundation’s Board of Trustees also keep abreast of developments in the field through background readings and invited speakers at Board meetings.

This commitment to engagement enables the Foundation to go beyond awarding grants to truly making change. Foundation staff and Board members serve on a variety of external advisory committees and related boards. Foundation staff frequently give speeches on effective fundraising and provide a friendly challenge to educational institutions that may view philanthropy as an ATM for parochial interests. With our recently enhanced communications efforts, such as weekly blog posts, we are making an even greater effort to share our observations and even personal stories to advance the mission of the Foundation to improve the health of older Americans.

It is a privilege to work at a major Foundation and a challenge to live up to the legacy of the founders and our predecessors. Sometimes we make mistakes, but we are open to feedback and learn from our failures. We are very proud that according to the experts we respect most— our grantees—the Foundation received an astonishing 99th percentile rating in a universe of comparable funders for impact on the field and 91 percent of respondents agreed that we were “on track” to advance the mission.

Partnerships to Leverage Impact

As the fourth largest philanthropy in the United States in the middle of the last century, our Foundation made enormous contributions to advance biomedical science. A relatively smaller endowment in subsequent years did not diminish the ambitions of the Foundation’s Board of Trustees to make grants that could have a large impact in the new area of Aging and Health. Therefore, the Trustees continually challenge program staff to leverage our funding for maximum effect. This requires us to find partners.

The right partnerships can serve as powerful tools that allow resources to go farther and create bigger movement on important issues than would otherwise be possible. Partnership can mean co-funding, coordinated funding, or even non-financial mutual support.

One of our earliest and longest standing partners was the The Atlantic Philanthropies, a much larger foundation with a shared interest in aging. Co-funding with The Atlantic Philanthropies made possible many of our more ambitious and influential initiatives, including the Beeson
(Beeson Career Development Awards), Jahnigen (Increasing Geriatric Expertise for Surgical and Related Medical Specialists), and Williams Scholars (Integrating Geriatrics into the Subspecialites of Internal Medicine) programs for junior faculty in medicine, the Fagin Fellows program in geriatric nursing (BAGNC), and most recently the Eldercare Workforce Alliance (Eldercare Workforce Alliance). We have co-funded projects with dozens of other foundations over the years.

Beyond the philanthropic sector, we have also leveraged partnerships with federal agencies through coordinated activities and funding. After 10 years of purely private support of the Beeson Scholars program, for example, we formed a partnership with the National Institute on Aging (NIA). The NIA has comparatively vast resources for research awards and seeks to develop expert scholars in the field. The private foundations supporting Beeson Scholars had long emphasized career and leadership development activities which the federal government cannot fund. It was a match made in heaven, and together, the public and private partners are leveraging each other’s strengths and resources. The NIA has since become our partner for other Hartford-initiated programs such as one focused on attracting medical students to aging research careers (Beeson Career Development Awards).

We have collaborated with many other foundations, non-profit organizations, and corporations, finding common ground and gaining strength in numbers. We have looked for ways to be strategic in our partnerships, sharing expertise and relationships as well as dollars. We work closely with members of the Grantmakers in Aging affinity group, such as the SCAN, Archstone, and Retirement Research Foundations, to draw upon their experience and complementary work in the field.

As we initiate new grant programs focused on creating even more rapid and dramatic changes in health care delivery and practice, new strategic partnerships will play an essential role.