A Conversation with Regan Gruber Moffitt, Vice President at the St. David’s Foundation

Regan Gruber Moffitt is the vice president of community investments at St. David’s Foundation, an Austin-based health funder, where she oversees grantmaking, community collaborations and strategic partnerships. Founded in 1996, St. David’s serves the Austin metropolitan area and Central Texas.

In 2022, the foundation, one of many regional health funders aiming to pair support for healthcare services with efforts to tackle the social and economic issues that shape community wellbeing, disbursed $80 million, including $71 million awarded in grants and $9 million in direct dental care and funding to local safety net clinics.

Over the course of her career, Gruber Moffitt has seen community health challenges from many levels, inspiring her ultimately to work in the philanthropic sector. After graduating from Wellesley College, Gruber Moffitt, who grew up in Arkansas, first worked as an ESL mathematics teacher with Teach for America in Houston. It proved to be a formative experience. “What I saw early on was that I couldn’t fix a lot of the problems I was trying to fix from the classroom,” she told me in a May conversation. “These were not just practical challenges, these were really policy challenges.”

Gruber Moffitt later made her way to Austin, Texas, where she served as a legislative aide in the state legislature and got a masters degree in education from the University of Texas at Austin. In 2005, she returned to Arkansas to continue her education, receiving a law degree from the University of Arkansas and going on to practice law in Little Rock for a little under two years. She joined the world of philanthropy in 2009 at the Little Rock-based Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, which supports education, economic and social justice causes in Arkansas. Gruber Moffitt moved to the St. David’s Foundation in 2021.

I recently caught up with Gruber Moffitt to discuss her career trajectory and some welcome shifts in the public health funding space. Here are some excerpts from that discussion, which have been edited for clarity.

What is the biggest takeaway from your Teach for America experience?

What I learned I carry with me every day in my work and personal life, which is that the people with the challenges are also the people with the answers. The immigrant and refugee kids that I taught, and their families, knew the barriers facing them; they just did not have the ability to remove them.

I realized I had to figure out where I fit within the ecosystem of creating change, which led me to policy work. The state representative in the district where I taught was a fierce advocate for equitable education, so I got to see first hand his advocacy and its potential to impact my students more than what I could do in my classroom.

Can you talk more about your transition to working at the Texas legislature?

After I finished my two-year Teach for America commitment, I started working for a small startup company that was writing online textbooks. This was so long ago that they were CD-ROM textbooks.

I was a remote worker, and they said I could move to Austin, which is where I eventually got my master's in education with a focus on public policy. I got to know some folks in the legislature and decided that I would like to work a session. Pulling some of the through-lines from that experience into philanthropy, a good part of my job was talking to a diverse set of constituents and understanding and adapting systems that impact current needs, as well as those in the future.

Have you noticed any glaring differences between the legislative and philanthropy worlds?

The biggest difference I see is the motivation. Policy is political, and I’ve found that philanthropy, at its best, stays true to its definition, which is the love of humanity.

Instead of becoming entrenched in certain ways of thinking, philanthropy can be a space where we can bring people together without being caught in the bureaucracy or having to figure out if it's going to be politically popular, which is why, when I made the leap to philanthropy, I stayed.

And how did you make that leap?

After the legislative session in Austin ended, I decided to go to law school with an eye toward the policy space. I practiced as a corporate attorney but realized I wanted to focus on public policy that affects people who face barriers to being able to prosper, so I answered an ad in the paper for the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation. I think it was the last time they placed an ad in a newspaper.

What is one area in public health that’s been traditionally underinvested where philanthropy can move the needle?

While the field has been talking about investing in social determinants of health for more than a decade, they have often not been prioritized. And so there is an opportunity to see, name and work specifically on economic stability as a core determinant of health.

A couple of weeks ago, my board chair passed along a New York Times article called “Many Patients Don't Survive End-Stage Poverty,” which speaks to his issue. Philanthropy has to help families push beyond poverty to prosperity to improve their health outcomes, and fortunately, I am seeing a trend of local health foundations acknowledging this and bringing resources to bear to advance economic security.

What book do you suggest our readers check out?

I have three. One's about life, one’s about leadership and one's about love.

I just finished the first one, which was suggested to me by a peer in philanthropy, “Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life,” It applies the principles of design thinking, like curiosity and “bias to action,” to make the life you want.

The book on leadership is “The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World.” It gave me and continues to give me practical advice and much-needed affirmation of how to lead in a time of change.

And then the last one is “All About Love” by bell hooks. I'm in the middle of it and read a chapter every evening to inspire me. It’s about how love can't just be a noun, it also has to be a verb.

Any parting thoughts?

I am a child of the South and a passionate advocate for advancing equity in the region. I also acknowledge that our region has a hard history and faces current tough challenges.

But in my roles in Arkansas and Central Texas, I have also had the chance to have a front-row seat for the phenomenal work happening and the tremendous potential for change in the region. Many of my fantastic philanthropic colleagues outside of the region find it difficult to understand what is happening in the South and some believe that the issues are intractable. I ask them to be willing to learn, visit, recognize the progress, even when it looks different than where they live, and bring their resources to bear.

The famous W.E.B. DuBois quote, “As the South goes, so goes the nation,” continues to hold the truth. As someone who cares deeply about the South, I ask my peers across the country to support how the South goes. And, of course, as a first step, come visit me in Austin sometime soon!

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