Proximity Pays Off as Two Rural Regional Funders Tackle Rural Health​

Despite longstanding notions of country living as healthier and safer than life in big cities, people living in rural areas of the United States are often sicker and live shorter lives than city dwellers — dying from preventable diseases because of a shortage of providers and lack of consistent access to healthcare.

 

The Rural Health Transformation program funded by Congress last year will distribute $50 billion to states through 2030 to help upend grim rural-urban health disparities and offset the effects of an estimated $911 billion in Medicaid reductions over the next decade, courtesy of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that Congress also passed last year. 

But once the Rural Health Transformation program’s funding dries up, will improvements be sustainable?

That’s a driving question that informs the approaches of two different regional funders that have decades of experience funding health projects that last. 

One of these two funders, the Pittsburgh-based Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation, was formed in 1944 by Sarah and Michael Benedum, drawing on an oil and gas fortune. It covers health programs in West Virginia, where its founders were born and raised. 

The T.L.L. Temple Foundation, meanwhile, is based in Lufkin, Texas, and funds health programs in 23 counties in East Texas and one county in Arkansas. The founder, Georgie Temple Munz, started the foundation in 1962 in honor of her father Thomas Lewis Latané Temple, with stock from his timber business, the Southern Pine Lumber Company.

 

The two foundations’ approaches have a lot in common, including in their efforts to capitalize on local connections and trust to determine what works and what should be funded in rural communities. That level of local insight and networking is difficult to replicate by national grantmakers with fewer connections to rural communities, which is one reason that rural health and other rural causes remain underfunded by philanthropy as a whole. But for these foundations, proximity is paying off.