The Sisters of St. Joseph Health and Wellness Foundation is dedicated to supporting the holistic health of West Virginia's children and their families. Their mission emphasizes primary and secondary prevention strategies and promoting systemic change to foster a healthier and more equitable nonprofit sector. Through trust-based philanthropy, they aim to redistribute power across systemic, organizational, and interpersonal levels, ensuring less restrictive funding, streamlined processes, and built on transparent, dialogic, and mutually educative relationships.
The grant program from the Sisters of St. Joseph Health and Wellness Foundation prioritizes trust-based philanthropy, focusing on creating equitable partnerships rather than traditional grantee-funder dynamics. This includes multi-year funding, simplified application and reporting processes, and initiating relationships through informal discussions like coffee conversations. The foundation targets organizations and projects that employ primary and secondary prevention strategies to ward off negative physical or mental health outcomes across populations or specific groups. Additionally, it supports endeavors aimed at causing systemic change by fostering new relationships among those with lived experiences, direct service practitioners, researchers, and policy advocates, to sustainably alter unjust societal structures.