Reports
10-YEAR STRATEGIC DIRECTION (2025-2034)
Empire Health Foundation is committed to reimagining our role alongside community. Our 10-Year Strategic Direction for 2025-2034, adopted by the EHF Board in May 2024, represents the culmination of a multi-year process of listening to and learning from community. Our partners have asked us to show up as a stronger partner and focus our resources in the communities most impacted by persistent health inequities.
As a foundation we are shifting our resources to focus on building community power in BIPOC, 2SLGBTQIA+, disability and rural low-income communities. This shift is guided by data on health inequity, the lived experience of our partners and the experiences of like-minded philanthropies who have improved health outcomes by focusing on community power building. We hope that you see your work and our future partnership reflected in this strategic direction.
At Empire Health Foundation, 2023 was a year of transitions. At Camp Hope, we worked with service providers to transition unhoused people into better housing and treatment options. The efforts of this partnership led to the humane closure of the largest homeless encampment in Washington. Through our grant programs we focused our resources in communities most impacted by health inequities — BIPOC, 2SLGBTQIA+, disability and rural low-income communities.
Our 2023 Community Impact Report, "Centering Community, Embracing Growth," captures some snapshots of our work in community and celebrates the integral partners who make this work possible. It also shows the direction we are heading in as a foundation dedicated to serving the communities most impacted by persistent health inequities.
In 2023, we partnered with Roanhorse Consulting, an Indigenous-led firm, to co-develop an equitable evaluation model that honors the principles of the Equity Healing Framework. The process was designed to gather feedback from community partners about how we’re showing up now and how we can best support their work going forward. Grounded in Indigenous knowledge, Roanhorse’s evaluation framework asked what people know, see and feel. In doing so, their questions prioritized and centered the lived experiences of community partners — capturing rich feedback from multiple perspectives.
We are fully committed to this journey of becoming a more equitable and community-guided organization. The feedback gathered through this process has been invaluable as we move beyond nice words on a page to grounding our Equity Healing Framework in tangible action. We invite everyone to read the full report of Roanhorse’s findings linked above.
Moving forward, we remain dedicated to listening, learning and evolving in partnership with communities.
Driving our work and our investments is a dedicated commitment to supporting communities across the Inland Northwest whose members have been most impacted by historical injustices, persistent inequities and economic disparities.
Adopted in 2022, the Equity Healing Framework grows out of what EHF has learned from our past work and from our community partners — that the role of philanthropy is not to solve; it is to support; to ensure communities have ongoing resources for healing.
That support means recognizing, learning from and amplifying the expertise and lived experience within those communities. It means working in ways that are community-focused rather than issues focused. It means approaching BIPOC, LGBTQIA2S+ and economically disadvantaged/rural communities with curiosity and humility and working in partnership with community leaders and organizations to co-create conditions for healing.