Communities
A Blog for and about Funders Focused on Health and the Environment
Over the past several years, the Environment & Health Program at The Heinz Endowments has prioritized work to help the Pittsburgh region become truly livable. But it is hard to imagine how a city with dirty air, a notably toxic built environment, safe...
I’m obsessed with analogies. I feel like I can’t claim to understand a given issue unless I can describe it effectively using an analogy that’s both intuitive and provocative (and hopefully positively delightful to boot). I’m also obsessed with science...
We're pleased to share a review of HEFN’s work in 2016. It was a year of milestones and movements, of political tensions and strengthening alliances.
With the widespread media coverage of Flint, Michigan’s water crisis, cities, advocacy groups, and philanthropy have adjusted their assumption that the country’s laws and infrastructure assure the public safe and healthy drinking water. In response, the...
Major awards are shining much-deserved light on champions of environmental health and justice. The recent winners have varied stories; there's a student, an attorney, a pediatrician, biologists, a grantmaker, and an environmental health advocate. But their...
Catastrophes like the Flint water crisis could happen in Pittsburgh, if we ignore the needs of our community and believe that public health and prosperity cannot go hand-in-hand. Heinz Endowments President Grant Oliphant writes about why Flint matters and how...
Clean drinking water is a health essential, but too often not people’s reality. This post explores what the unfolding story in Flint Michigan is revealing about environmental health hazards, as well as what it's catalyzing in philanthropy to improve...
At P.S. 51, an elementary school in the Bronx that was sited in a former lamp factory, children had been reporting assorted illnesses over the years. Testing at P.S. 51 revealed dangerous levels of toxins, but parents weren't informed for more than six months...
How the New York Community Trust's investment in research of mothers' exposures to toxic chemicals and their effects on children's health helped to improve health outcomes and strengthen the public health case for regulation of chemicals.
Recently Amy Solomon stepped away from her program officer position at the Bullitt Foundation. In this blog post, Amy answers questions she'd been asked – or had asked herself – and she shares her reflections on her twelve years at the Foundation, on...
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Who We Are
Development and Operations Director
Kojo Spencer has more than two decades of development experience specializing in proposal writing, grants and relationship management, and strategic development for national, regional and community-based organizations.