"The Need Is Here.” How One Regional Funder Is Stepping Up for Public Health

Woody and Gayle Hunt have deep roots in El Paso, Texas. Woody’s grandfather, M.L. Hunt, started a coal business there in 1920, and in 1947, his father and uncle created Hunt Building Corp. Woody Hunt took over the family business and today is senior chairman of the board of Hunt Companies, a diversified, family-owned holding company that invests in operating businesses, real estate assets and infrastructure assets in the U.S. and abroad. He met his wife, Gayle, when they were both students at the University of Texas, El Paso, and they raised their five children there.

El Paso is also where they started their philanthropy, the Woody and Gayle Hunt Family Foundation, and the region has been the primary focus of the foundation’s giving. Since its founding in 1987, the grantmaker has committed over 89% of its giving locally “to create a more globally competitive region and improve its economic prosperity,” according to its website. It has made grants and commitments of over $147.9 million in support of 2,934 initiatives and 624 organizations.

The foundation prioritizes a range of causes, including arts and cultural heritage, education, and economic development. Healthcare is also a primary focus: The foundation supported the establishment of the Woody L. Hunt School of Dental Medicine as well as the Gayle Greve Hunt School of Nursing, both at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center El Paso.

Now, the foundation is stepping up for public health by providing $500,000 to establish a scholarship fund at UTHealth Houston’s School of Public Health El Paso. The goal is to support students pursuing a master’s degree in public health and to increase the number of public health practitioners in the region. It’s one example of how a local funder is tackling the preventative healthcare gap in its home region, with an eye toward career pathways and equity for lower-income residents.

Public health touches everything

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for a strong public health system, as well as the many ways our existing system is falling short. According to a 2022 report by the Trust for America’s Health, only 5.4% of the $4.1 trillion the U.S. spent on health in 2020 went to public health and prevention. According to the report, “As the pandemic has illustrated, chronic underfunding of public health at both the federal and state levels has left the country ill-prepared for public health emergencies and impedes prevention of many of the major causes of illness and death in the United States.”

As we outlined in our State of American Philanthropy brief on the subject, public health is a focus for several major national funders, including the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Bloomberg Philanthropies (each gave over $200 million between 2015 and 2019). The Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation has been a quiet but prodigious supporter of reproductive care in the U.S. for some time now, and the Gates Foundation’s globe-spanning health giving needs no introduction. Meanwhile, Mike Bloomberg has been philanthropy’s top crusader against the harms of tobacco, and has supported public health education through the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins.

Meanwhile, many community foundations and local and regional health funders also make public health a priority. The Hunts’ support for public health education in their home region is a good example. Exorbitant higher education costs discourage many students from staying in college or pursuing a graduate degree; gifts like the Hunts’ that support scholarships for aspiring public health students aim to make the field more equitable and diverse. As Kristina Mena, El Paso campus dean of the UTHealth Houston School of Public Health, said in a recent interview, “The No. 1 barrier to students who want to pursue a degree in public health is the cost.”

For Woody Hunt, the issue is local — strengthening public health is one component of improving the wellbeing of the region. “When you boil it all down, it’s really about a focus on the quality of life,” he told El Paso Inc. after he and Gayle were named El Pasoans of the Year in 2022. “To have good educational access, good healthcare, arts and culture, and good jobs, you have to have a quality of life. Those are all interconnected.”

Mena is working with the Hunt Family Foundation to finalize the details of how the scholarship fund will operate, and whether it will cover full scholarships for a small number of students, or partial scholarships for a larger number. The plan is to begin providing scholarships for the fall class of 2023.

Investing in prevention

El Paso is located in the Paso del Norte region (also called the Borderplex region), which includes two countries, three states and three major cities (El Paso, Texas; Las Cruces, New Mexico; and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico). Paso del Norte is one of the largest bi-national communities in the world. Poverty on the U.S. side is higher than the national average, and public health infrastructure is under-resourced and understaffed — and so is the health system in general, as Woody Hunt explained in a recent interview. “Within our region, we can’t find a medical specialty [in which] we’re not underserved compared to the state or the country,” he said. “So on a per capita basis — whether it’s a physician, a dentist, a nurse —we’re below the state average, and we’re even farther below the national average. So any credential within the healthcare field we need more of, and that includes public health.”

Well before the pandemic, Hunt had an interest in public health. He was a founding member of the board of the directors of the Paso Del Norte Health Foundation, a health conversion foundation that has been promoting healthcare access and preventative healthcare in the area for 25 years.

“I’ve had a long-held view that our health system in the United States pays to treat people who are sick, it doesn’t pay to prevent health issues in the first place,” he said. “We’ve got this lack of funding, at least in my view, on the prevention side. This is inherent to the way our system is structured. So I see the scholarship fund as a way of making an investment on the prevention side.”

Hunt is matter-of-fact and modest about his philanthropy, which has consistently focused on the region he loves. “I’ve always felt I didn’t have to go very far to find a place to focus our charitable dollars, because the need is here,” he said. “And the capacity to make a difference is greater, just by definition, because we have a lower-income population.”

Mena says the scholarships will make a big difference. “For our students, getting together the funds to attend graduate school can be challenging, so this could be the deciding factor,” she said. She pointed out that tuition costs are particularly high for students who are enrolled in dual degree programs (students at UTHealth can pair a public health degree with a degree in medicine, dentistry or business).

“I think more and more people have realized that public health can offer a unique skill set; it complements so many different degrees,” Mena said. “We’re seeing people from the business community, we’re seeing folks who might want to pair a public health degree with an engineering degree — how do we design safer workplaces and schools, for example. Political science — I always say, there’s probably nothing more political than public health. I think the pandemic taught us that public health is not an isolated sector. It touches everything.”

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