Transformative Philanthropy
In our latest blog post, our founder and president, Dr. Ruth Shaber, reflects on Tara Health’s early years — how we built mission-aligned portfolios, developed new tools for gender-lens investing, and leveraged every resource to create meaningful change.
But as Ruth shares, even as we worked to innovate and disrupt, deeper questions emerged — questions that fundamentally reshaped our understanding of power, expertise, and transformation:
“Even as we built these innovative structures and solutions, questions began to surface that would fundamentally reshape my understanding of power, expertise, and transformation.”
It’s messier, deeper, and more profound than I anticipated.
By Ruth Shaber, MD, Founder and President
When I founded Tara Health in 2014, I carried the certainty of a physician. I was convinced that clear metrics, evidence-based solutions, and innovative tools would solve systemic problems. With decades of experience in women's healthcare and systems engineering, I set out to apply medical rigor to philanthropy, believing that data-driven decisions and creative deployment of capital would transform the lives of women and girls. I believed our approach was transformative, but the journey ahead would challenge not just our methods, but our core assumptions about transformation itself.
From the start, we committed to aligning 100% of our assets — financial and human — with our mission. Working with the Foust/Meeker team at Merrill Lynch, we began in public markets, building what we hoped would be a fully mission-aligned portfolio. When we found metrics and evidence lacking, we deployed grant dollars to develop frameworks like the XX Factor and Four for Women, adding tools and rigor to the field of gender-lens investing. As our corpus grew from $10 million to $82 million, we expanded into private investments, taking direct stakes in companies advancing women's health and bringing other funders alongside us to build lasting infrastructure in the field.
This comprehensive approach to deploying capital remains core to our work today. We match capital types to problems: blending grants with low-interest loans for abortion clinics, providing capital alongside technical expertise for early-stage companies.
But our commitment has always extended beyond writing checks. From the beginning, we believed that contributing our time, networks, and expertise was essential to strengthening our partners' work. In our early years, this meant my hands-on involvement in initiatives like reproductive healthcare quality measurement with Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and the Center for Youth Wellness's groundbreaking work to advance evidence-based interventions for children exposed to Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs).
Today, this same commitment to building deep relationships as catalysts for change guides our partnerships with our anchor organizations: Rhia Ventures, Orchid Capital Collective, the BSR Center for Business and Social Justice, and the Oasis Institute (website forthcoming). As we move through our spend-down, our fundamental belief remains unchanged: transforming unjust systems requires leveraging every resource — grant dollars, investment capital, and the power of people working in genuine partnership with one another.
The Profound Messiness of Power
Yet, even as we built these innovative structures and solutions, questions began to surface that would fundamentally reshape my understanding of power, expertise, and transformation. The metrics and frameworks we developed reflected deeper assumptions about whose knowledge counted and what impact meant. The certainty I'd relied on as a physician and philanthropist - the very certainty that had guided my entire professional life — was about to be challenged in ways I never expected.
What began to unfold through relationships with partners and grantees was messier, deeper, and more profound than I could have anticipated. It pushed me to examine not just how we deployed resources, but the deeper assumptions about power and change that I had never thought to question — assumptions that had shaped not just my work, but my sense of self.
As we kick off a new chapter of our work, focused on telling our stories and grappling with our learnings, I look forward to sharing more about my ongoing journey — one that continues to surface new questions, challenges, and joys even as I write these words. I invite you to watch the video below where I begin unpacking my journey through a more personal lens.
A New Chapter for Tara Health
For years, our grantees, partners, and peers called on powerful institutions, like ours, to confront an uncomfortable truth: the money and power we hold and steward are often built upon the very unjust systems we seek to change.
By Elise Belusa, Executive Director, Tara Health Foundation
Dear friends,
In the eight years since I joined Tara Health, initially as a program officer, almost everything has changed. And yet, as I write this, I see that the foundation’s most enduring spark still persists: our eagerness to challenge norms, take risks and push beyond the comfortable boundaries of conventional philanthropic practice.
They say the middle part of a story is the hardest to tell. In my current role as executive director of Tara Health, I'm acutely aware that we're navigating through the middle. Our beginning is behind us, our conclusion is visible on the horizon, yet we're embarking on a significant new phase of our work — one we hope will contribute meaningfully to the broader conversation about the role of institutions and people in creating change.
The Call to Action
For years, our grantees, partners, and peers called on powerful institutions, like ours, to confront an uncomfortable truth: the money and power we hold and steward are often built upon the very unjust systems we seek to change. Their call to action has been clear: break from the status quo, dismantle long-standing power structures, and redistribute to reimagine.
Like many of you, we’ve done our best to listen deeply. Though spending down has always been Tara Health’s plan, we have shaped the “how” of our spend down in response to these calls to action. We’ve committed to transferring 100% of our resources to the movements we support over the next three to five years. We’re now also committed to engaging with the broader philanthropic and investment landscape, seeking to understand our place within it and how we might contribute meaningfully to its transformation.
What’s unfolding at Tara Health is a long, incomplete, and nonlinear journey of transformation. We are reimagining nearly everything: from how we build and support staff, to who serves on our board, to how we’re governed, how we invest, make grants, define impact, and more. We’ve shifted our mission, our vision, our organizational structure, our relationships, and ourselves in response to our growing understanding of power — how we hold it, how it shapes our work, and how transforming it could perhaps be our most meaningful impact.
The Landscape
The contours of this new landscape are both encouraging and challenging. The tools for transformative change are largely at our fingertips — documented and ready for use. Yet, something crucial seems missing: the collective will and courage to fully embrace this change. Many of us who steward significant resources grapple with deep, disquieting questions about transforming our power, privilege, and control. At Tara Health, we’ve found that doing so can be complex and sometimes painful. But beyond the discomfort, beyond the fear of loss, we’re discovering unexpected purpose, connection and even joy.
This discovery guides our final commitment: to document and share, honestly and vulnerably, our collective and individual experiences reckoning with and relinquishing our historically unjust status, capital and power. By telling our stories — the struggles, breakthroughs, and ongoing questions — we can contribute to building the collective will our world needs and deserves.
Transforming power is a complicated, often winding journey. It is deeply personal and profoundly collective. As we move from the middle of our story to our final chapters, we’re committed to sharing what “transforming in action” has looked like for us in its raw, unpolished truth. Hopefully, our experiences will inspire others to do the same.
Join us in the months and years ahead as we continue sharing our experiences in this new blog. Next month’s post will feature our founder’s perspective, and we invite you to engage with these stories, challenge our thinking and share your own journey.
Your story, like ours, is part of this broader narrative of reimagining what’s possible. As we move forward, we hope you will breathe with us, dream with us and grow with us. Because ultimately, the transformation of philanthropy — and beyond — isn’t just about changing systems or practices. It’s about changing ourselves and, in doing so, expanding what’s possible in our work and shared world.
Best,
Elise