Regional collaboration leads to major grant opportunity

Four CommonSpirit hospitals in Northern California recently won a $3 million Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) grant — not as individual foundations, but as a team.

For lead organization Sierra Nevada Memorial Hospital (SNMH) Foundation — along with Dominican Hospital Foundation, Mercy Medical Center Merced Foundation and St. Joseph's Foundation of San Joaquin — serving the local unhoused communities was a major mission pillar. Once they identified this shared goal, together they explored integrating comprehensive Street Medicine training into their primary care residency programs.

According to Sandra Barrington, Chief Philanthropy Officer at SNMH Foundation, the benefits of this innovative initiative were twofold:

"We are not just educating the next generation of physicians; we are also empowering them to directly address the critical health care needs of our unhoused communities. This initiative will profoundly impact patient care by breaking down barriers to access, improving health outcomes for vulnerable populations, and fostering a more compassionate and equitable health care system for all.”

To fund this program, the teams pursued a shared HRSA grant. The application was led by Leia Morgan, CGMS, System Vice President of Philanthropy Grants.

While each of the four foundations may have found some success in funding the program, leveraging the size and scale of the CommonSpirit Health system allowed them to create synergy around their shared objectives — both programmatically and philanthropically.

Through cross-regional collaboration, the teams created a unified residency program that addressed all the needs effectively. In turn, this approach allowed the foundations to clearly articulate a comprehensive understanding of community needs, ensuring a robust and unified grant proposal.

Barrington shared that this collaboration across multiple foundations offered many learnings: “Collaboration is going to be necessary as we move forward to secure these larger funding opportunities. When we work together as a market or region, we can make a greater impact. That is what funders are really looking for: to make a bigger difference.”

To learn more about the impact grants make on our shared goal to deliver high-quality care with humankindness to communities across America, please visit our 2025 Philanthropy Annual Report.

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