Forty Years, One Thread

Rooted in Love — what four decades of partnership taught the St. Joseph Fund.

In 1986, the newly formed St. Joseph Health System Foundation made its first grant. It didn’t go to a hospital or a clinic. It went to Mexico City, where an earthquake had leveled neighborhoods and where recovery would take far longer than the news would be at the scene.

That first decision set a pattern we are still following forty years later. Be where the need is, stay after the urgency fades, and trust the people already doing the work.

The Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange founded us to continue Christ’s healing ministry. What we’ve learned since is that healing is rarely something you deliver. It’s something you make room for.

You can watch that lesson unfold throughout our history. In 1998, the Community Building Initiative began asking communities to identify their pain points and health priorities. In 2016, the Intersections Initiative with the Prevention Institute pushed our work upstream, into the conditions that shape health long before anyone reaches a clinic.

Then came initiatives that asked us to follow rather than lead. The Education Initiative (2022) invested in Black, Indigenous, and People of Color-led organizations advancing birth justice and liberatory education. Healing Tides (2023) centered Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander leaders who defined renewal on their own cultural terms. Cultivate to Illuminate (2024) placed community storytelling at the center of power building.

In 2023, we became the St. Joseph Fund and named the thread. Rooted in Love. The phrase comes from the Maxims of Jean-Pierre Médaille, SJ, founder of the Sisters of St. Joseph. Love means philanthropy that is regenerative rather than extractive. It means we don’t disappear when a grant cycle closes, and we measure ourselves by whether communities hold more power — not by whether our reports have tidy facts and figures.

Forty years in, the through-line is simple. Every pivot, every new initiative, and every framework came from listening to true partners who knew something we didn’t.

That is the work of the next forty years, too.

 

Explore our full 40-year timeline at stjosephfund.org/40years, watch our initiative videos, and follow the St. Joseph Fund here on LinkedIn.