Field Placement:  The California Endowment
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Preceptor: Will Nicholas
Student Name: Lisa Martin
Year: 2008

My summer internship was spent at the Los Angeles offices of The California Endowment (TCE), the largest health foundation in California.  TCE’s mission is “to expand access to affordable, quality health care for underserved individuals and communities, and to promote fundamental improvements in the health status of all Californians”. TCE has three main funding priorities – increasing access to care, reduction of health disparities, and increasing cultural competence of health systems.  In order to create positive change in these area, TCE funds grants in response to community proposals and also solicits partners to help them reach their strategic health goals. 

TCE is currently in the process of enacting a new ten-year strategic plan that will see a marked difference in the way it funds health projects.  I worked with Will Nicholas, the Director of Research at TCE, on a project to identify and analyze TCE’s history of funding research grants, in order to develop a framework for future research funding.  This involved a thorough search of documents and a database containing over ten years of TCE grants, developing a typology of research, classification of all grants identified as research, and analyzing trends in funding.   This gave us a detailed look at how research is funded at TCE (i.e. a higher percent of research grants are directly solicited, are policy focused, etc), from which we were able to begin to formulate recommendations for future funding across departments and goal areas. 

While my research skills were greatly expanded though this internship, I learned even more from my exposure to TCE’s work atmosphere and philosophies for improving health.  By participating in staff learning sessions and grant review meetings, I was exposed to a broad range of the most innovative health programs in California and got an insiders look at how proposals are funded.   My first year of CHS classes were wonderfully supplemented with direct connections to public policy and urban planning approaches, which combined to give me a very broad and holistic perspective of public health programming.

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