Letter From Our President

To our friends, colleagues, and our community:

After 30 years of experience with different approaches to our grant making, the Irvine Health Foundation Board of Directors embraced a new approach; we are embarking on a fresh set of activities to further our goal of improving the health status of the diverse population of Orange County, California.

We call our focus technology-enabled healthy living.

This is a pivot. We are turning around a point, not going to a new point. We continue our 30-year effort of striving to improve the health and health status of the people of our community. However, we are moving into the future by working in a new direction designed to achieve our longstanding goal. Our past efforts focused on health care, access to care, health care coverage or the lack thereof. We now pivot toward a message of healthy living to improve health – for individuals and therefore the community as a whole.

To emphasize its beliefs and evolving thinking the IHF Board adopted a new mission statement:

The Irvine Health Foundation is committed to improving the health and well-being of the diverse population of Orange County, California.

All is not completely new. Throughout our history we have engaged in many initiatives completely congruent with a “healthy living” mantra. Today however, we will leverage modern tools and technologies to promulgate, instigate and even evangelize healthy living behaviors and seek innovative paths that advance people’s health status.

In addition to employing new tools and technologies, we will pursue new partners, while we convene with existing community partners who embody our commitment. In fact, we will not only seek new partners, we are committed to embracing new ways to conduct our work. The IHF Board of Directors cannot emphasize its philosophy more strongly, having issued the following statement:

The Irvine Health Foundation intends to use its influence, reputation, entrepreneurial philosophy, staff expertise and financial investments, in partnership with others, to create a healthier Orange County.

To be optimally effective the IHF Board believes that our efforts must be self-directed. Rather than utilizing the conventional grant making approaches we applied previously, we will no longer accept grant proposals. We will be developing initiatives, projects, programs and other activities in furtherance of our mission and goals. We may work with local community-based organizations with whom we enjoy strong relationships and shared values, but we will also be exploring new ways to collaborate. We anticipate working with many new partners, including unique and “non-traditional” partners, both within and beyond Orange County.

To help us direct our efforts clearly, the IHF Board determined that we will concentrate our work on improving the health status of two compelling segments of our community: older adults and military veterans. Orange County’s seniors and veterans have great needs. We believe IHF can make a significant impact on their lives through technology-enabled healthy living.

We are excited about this approach. We embrace the challenge and we commit ourselves to achieving success.

On behalf of the Board of Directors and staff of the Irvine Health Foundation,

Edward B. Kacic
President