Focusing on Impact

For nearly 30 years, St. David’s Foundation has supported efforts to improve health across Central Texas. More recently, we’ve challenged ourselves to face some of the root causes of poor health and recommitted our efforts to invest in the people and communities with the greatest health needs.

This focus has fueled a deeper commitment to health equity. The Foundation is making intentional shifts to remove longstanding barriers to health by ensuring our funding reaches the communities that have historically been furthest from access—and that those investments lead to lasting, generational, and transformative improvements in people’s lives.

In 2024, we introduced Pathways to Health Equity, a strategic plan to guide our work through the decade. Since then, we’ve been working to clarify our role, sharpen our focus, and deepen our impact. We have pursued this effort through deep listening to our community, and through action—by opening up our grantmaking process and inviting our community to share how their work aligns with our shared goals and vision for Central Texas.

A Vision for Impact

Guided by our Pathways to Health Equity plan, St. David’s Foundation will invest more resources than ever before to improve health outcomes in Central Texas. But more importantly, this strategic plan reflects a change in both what we fund and how we fund, reshaping our approach to ensure our investments are even more impactful and equitable.

The Foundation has determined the impact we—working collectively and collaboratively—intend to have in our community. The 2030 Vision for Impact represents our continued commitment to direct services that help strengthen healthcare and economic safety net services for those furthest from access. The Impacts also signal a shift: we are not only supporting important work today—we’re also driving toward essential systemic change tomorrow.

What We Fund

To drive this change, our funding will focus on three intersecting goals:

• Increase access to quality care designed to advance health equity
• Remove economic barriers to improve health outcomes
• Equip communities to achieve their health priorities

Aligned with the objectives outlined in our strategic plan, we are introducing Funding Priorities that will guide our grantmaking through 2030.

We invite you to explore these funding priorities and learn more about our approach and intended impact for the work we hope to accomplish together.

How We Fund

Moving forward, grant opportunities and funding decisions will be guided by the long-term 2030 Impacts. Rather than organizing grants by focus areas, we are now concentrating on the long-term change we wish to see by 2030. This shift means that we will prioritize work that advances our shared goals and moves our community toward lasting, measurable improvement. This new approach not only allows us to build on the impactful work we’ve previously supported, but also opens the door to innovative, cross-cutting solutions that may not have fit neatly into previous categories.

We’re also expanding the way we support our partners. In addition to continuing our invitation-based process, we will also use more flexible tools such as open calls and rolling funding—with most grants providing multi-year support to help realize long-term impact. These ways of funding should enable a wider range of organizations to share their ideas and engage. We expect to fund both programmatic and capital projects and hope to work more closely with other funders—public and private—to enhance our impact through more coordinated and collective efforts.

We invite you to learn more about the types of funding approaches here.

What’s Next

On July 1, we will launch two new funding opportunities, Healthy Births, Healthy Communities and Culturally Responsive Mental Health Support. Organizations whose work aligns with the goals of these open calls are encouraged to apply. This fall, we will have two invitation-based funding opportunities focused on strengthening the healthcare safety net and affordable housing.

Looking ahead to early 2026, we’ll announce more grant opportunities for the coming year and beyond. These opportunities will continue to reflect community needs, informed by our Community Health Needs Assessment and ongoing listening to the communities we serve.

We believe that when systems are designed to meet the needs of those who are the most marginalized and hardest to reach, those structures bring health into reach for everyone. Through our strategic grantmaking, our Dental Program, and our Neal Kocurek Scholarship Program, we remain more committed than ever to centering health equity in our work so that every Central Texan will have the promise of realizing optimal health.

Looking forward,

Edward Burger