How the de Beaumont Foundation Seeks to Forge Public-Private Partnerships for Health
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Supporting public health workers through the COVID pandemic has been one priority. Photo: Ringo Chiu/shutterstock
Kelli Gerdes, the population health manager of the Cerro Gordo Department of Public Health in Mason City, Iowa, was having trouble finding child care in 2018. From then on, through the COVID pandemic and beyond, others on her staff were in the same boat. So were many others in their community. Why was this happening?
In 2022, the Bethesda, Maryland-based de Beaumont Foundation released a call for applications for its IMPACT collaborative, with the main criteria being building a partnership between public health and the private sector. Gerdes applied for and won a no-strings-attached grant of $100,000 to explore solutions to the child care access problem. They brought large employers to the table, designed a wage supplement program, raised money for it and created a child care certificate program for high school students with the private sector.
“That's really what got us to engage with the Chamber of Commerce and all the different partners at the table,” she said. “Because we really knew this was affecting pretty much everyone in our community at some level.”
With the flexibility of de Beaumont’s funding, the group was able to pivot from its original idea of building a child care center at the local community college to one addressing the root cause of the child care crisis: low wages that were driving child care workers away from the profession. “We found out that the starting wage for all of our centers in the county averaged $9.81 an hour, which was basically the lowest-paying position we could find in our county,” Gerdes said.
The group in Iowa forged a public-private network that succeeded in building a wage-supplement program to raise the child care provider wage in the county by 17%, according to Gerdes. While it’s not quite what she would consider a living wage, it was enough to draw new hires into the field to fill much of the need. Since January, the county’s child care centers have added 33 additional child care workers, allowing them to keep regular business hours and serve 97 more children. Nine high school students who completed the group’s child care certification program in May have also applied for child care jobs in the county. “It’s really hitting the mark on what we wanted to do, and that was to serve more children,” Gerdes said.
Encouraging workers in the public health arena to team up with the private sector for the public good is a specialty of the de Beaumont Foundation, founded in 1998 by Pierre “Pete” de Beaumont, an engineer and founder of the tool and gadget company Brookstone, with the lofty goal “to relieve human suffering.” The IMPACT collaborative — launched in four additional communities across the country — was based on the realization that the private sector needed to be engaged around the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Brittany Giles-Cantrell, a program director at the de Beaumont Foundation. “As employers, anchor institutions, as purchasers in communities, they have a huge outsized role to play on economic security, on outcomes and support for individuals and families,” she said.
Such a project sits squarely within the mission of the de Beaumont Foundation, which is “to advance policy, build partnerships, and strengthen public health to create communities where people can achieve their best possible health.”
The foundation attained 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status in 1999 and made its first grant of $150,000 to the Molecular Immunology Foundation for cancer vaccine research. In 2009, after a decade of funding medical research and some public health projects, de Beaumont funded a face-to-face meeting of the Big Cities Health Coalition, a group of public health agency leaders who would gather to brainstorm solutions to thorny urban public health problems. After Pete de Beaumont’s death in 2010, his estate endowed the foundation with $160 million, according to Giles-Cantrell. In recent years, the foundation’s annual charitable disbursements have hovered between roughly $10 million and $14 million.
Minding the gaps
The de Beaumont Foundation rarely solicits grant applications. Instead it researches and identifies gaps where work needs to be done. For example, in order to understand how the public health workforce is faring and where it might need support or training, it launched a national survey, the first of its kind, the Public Health Workforce, Interests and Needs survey (PH WINS) in 2014, and subsequently conducted surveys in 2017 and in 2021. Giles-Cantrell explained that the findings of the surveys, developed in conjunction with the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials help public health leaders set their priorities.
The 2021 survey captured the intense stress and burnout that many public health workers experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic as they faced threats and harassment for implementing measures like wearing face masks or shutting down gatherings to help prevent the spread of COVID. More than 50% of the 45,000 public health workers queried said they experienced symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, with 20% reporting that their mental health was “fair or poor.” Some 41% said they experienced harassment, threats or bullying. Still, 94% felt their work was important and 79% were “satisfied with the job.”
The PH WINS survey is listed as one of the de Beaumont Foundation’s four largest direct charitable activities in 2022. In addition to making grants, other charitable activities outside of regular grantmaking comprise a significant part of de Beaumont’s work.
The foundation’s firm grounding in the public health sphere is reflected in its leadership. It has its own team of public health researchers and evaluators. Its President and CEO Brian Castrucci, an epidemiologist, has worked in health departments in Philadelphia, Texas and Georgia, and several staff members in leadership, including Giles-Cantrell, have degrees in public health. Giles-Cantrell said that when Castrucci first came on board in 2012 as the foundation’s chief program and strategy officer, he wanted to double down on de Beaumont’s commitment to supporting public health departments — an area that he thought other foundations weren’t especially focused on. “Public health departments have been foundational to our nation's history,” she said, but that history is “an undertold narrative.”
Another part of de Beaumont’s work to support public health departments during COVID involved signing up as a founding partner of the Health Action Alliance in 2021. Working alongside other partners such as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the CDC Foundation, Ad Council and the Business Roundtable, the alliance, with help from coalition-building impact firm Meteorite, sought to offer scientists, health experts and wordsmiths training to better educate the public and large corporation employees about vaccines and address vaccine hesitancy in communities of color. “The business community’s leadership is critical not only to ending the pandemic, but also to bolstering the U.S. public health system,” Castrucci said when launching the project. “With a strong public health infrastructure, we can better identify and prevent future threats to our health and maintain our nation’s safety, security and economic prosperity.”
De Beaumont also works to advance policy into practice. Following a report by the Institute of Medicine in 2012 calling for the integration of public health and primary care, for example, the foundation, along with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Duke Family Medicine and Community Health, developed a book in 2015 for practitioners. “The Practical Playbook: Public Health and Primary Care Together” sought to assist primary care, public health and community advocates with tackling preventable diseases, such as asthma in children, by addressing root causes such as air pollution or mold. Since the book was published, a video about the effort notes, it has led to 600 partnerships and 1,000 programs across the country.
A second volume of the playbook was published in 2019, addressing the need for building multisector partnerships. The third playbook, released this year, centers maternal and child health in service of addressing the disturbingly high rate of pregnancy complications and maternal deaths among Black women and certain other minority populations.That grim reality, the authors write, stems from “the intersection of racism, sexism, poverty and other systems of oppression that lead to fewer opportunities, less access to resources and protections, increased stress, and poorer-quality care.” Noting that the book will necessarily lead to uncomfortable conversations, the authors hope that “by having these conversations, we mobilize individuals, organizations and communities to continue demanding change.”
To promote health equity, the de Beaumont Foundation also recently began serving as the program office for an initiative known as Modernized Antiracist Data Ecosystems for Health Justice, which was launched by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “It’s a way to uplift examples of what public health data infrastructure needs to look like to be informed by and with community,” Giles-Cantrell said.
All in all, de Beaumont’s guiding principle of making a difference, Giles-Cantrell said, “is really thinking with an upstream and systems-level lens.” That way, “we can be the best stewards of the resources we have.”
