History, Mission AND REPORTS

Our Mission

Our mission is to support and partner with communities to advance racial equity and eliminate health disparities through advocacy and strategic investments.

Our Values

  • Compassion:  We believe compassion is the foundation for meaningful care of self, organization, and community.
  • Relationships: We cultivate and nurture relationships through transparency, honesty, and empathy. 
  • Health as a Human Right: We believe equitable, comprehensive, and affordable health coverage is a fundamental right of every human being.  
  • Systems and Symptoms Approach: We support long-term solutions that fix broken systems as well as initiatives to address immediate needs.
  • Anti-racism: We believe that it is our collective responsibility to dismantle institutional and systemic racism. 
  • Community Voice: We value the voice and expertise of local communities and prioritize solutions from within them. 
  • Intergenerational Equity:  We practice stewardship and strategic investing for the benefit of generations to come.  

Heal

Our Beginning


Previously known as the Baptist Healing Trust, The Healing Trust was formed from the sale of Baptist Hospital to Ascension Health/St. Thomas Health Services in 2002. Since then, we have given over $100 million to the Middle Tennessee community. Based on the terms of the sale, over $34 million was granted to Baptist Hospital to support a variety of its programs. Programs include hiring and orientation programs, leadership/employee partner development, mission-related education, community outreach, and programs for seniors.  Despite our origins, we are a private, independent foundation and are not affiliated with St. Thomas Health Services or the St. Thomas Health Services Fund.

ANNUAL REPORTS

In 2023, we awarded 157 grants, totaling $4.628,435 to nonprofits in Middle Tennessee. Learn more about our impact and programs through the years.

Grantee Perception Survey

We engaged The Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) to confidentially survey our grantees about their experience working with us. CEP is a nonprofit that has surveyed more than 40,000 grantees from over 300 funders. CEP assesses funder performance and compares the foundation’s results with other similar-sized foundations. We continue to receive top scores and are in the top 20% among CEP’s 300 funder dataset.