Early in his career as a cardiologist, Garth Graham treated a patient with acute cardiovascular disease whose case helped drive home the point that good health starts well beyond the four walls of an examination room.
Dr. Graham, 42, is now putting that lesson into action as president of the Aetna Foundation. Last year the grant maker committed $1.5 million to communities across the country looking for ways to improve residents’ well-being by looking at social issues that have a significant impact on health, such as access to healthy food, threats to personal safety, discrimination, and employment.
The stents Dr. Graham placed in his long-ago patient’s arteries kept the blood flowing for the time being. But Dr. Graham, then a fellow at Johns Hopkins University, knew the procedure did little to help his patient’s overall health.
As the two developed a relationship, Dr. Graham saw that violence in the man’s neighborhood was taking a toll on his health. The patient worried about small scrapes escalating into life-threatening fights, and he struggled to find a safe place to sleep at night.
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“Beyond his heart attack, there were a lot of things driving his risk factor,” Dr. Graham says. “It had very little to do with his coronary artery disease and a lot to do with how he thought about his life in general.”
Jamaican Roots
Dr. Graham came to the United States from Jamaica as a small child after his mother found work as a nurse in Miami. After completing medical school, he concentrated on medical research and his full-time cardiology practice before entering the federal government. He served as deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where he led the Office of Minority Health.
After arriving at the Aetna Foundation in 2013, Dr. Graham worked with the American Public Health Association and the National Association of Counties to develop the Healthiest Cities and Counties Challenge. Last fall, the groups picked the 50 communities to investigate social causes of health problems.
Kansas City was one of the winners. The city is using $10,000 in seed funding from the challenge to develop a violence-prevention plan for young people and families.
Tracie McClendon, deputy director of the city’s health department, says the grant will help the city chart a new course because it will bring together representatives from community-development, nonprofit, public-health, and law-enforcement groups in the city to reduce what she calls “historical levels of mass trauma.”
“Traditionally we look at violence through a criminal-justice lens, as opposed to looking at it through a population-health perspective,” she says.
If the City Council adopts the plan, the Aetna Foundation and its partners will watch for progress. Communities in the grant challenge are eligible for follow-on grants of $25,000 to $500,000 if they can show results. In a time of tight city budgets, that money would go a long way, says Ms. McClendon.
“There’s a hard freeze on everything,” she says. “These opportunities don’t come along very often.”
New Perspective
Moving from his position in the Obama administration to the foundation helped Dr. Graham realize that the government often thinks of itself as the “center of the universe.”
At federal agencies and in Congress, he says, policies get debated from on high, with a limited view into how they change people’s lives.
Leading the Aetna Foundation has given him a close-up view, he says, and provided him with a greater understanding of the pressing need for better health care at the local level.
That need, he says, may become more urgent if the Affordable Care Act, a policy he helped implement, is dismantled and federal Medicaid dollars are parceled out to states in the form of block grants.
Still, Dr. Graham sees health-care policy as constantly evolving. Federal cuts may happen, he says, but they may be only temporary.
By making small grants to cities across the country, he hopes communities can share with one another the progress they’ve made and continue to improve people’s health regardless of what federal policies are in place.
It’s a lesson he says he learned from his upbringing as an immigrant whose family and extended family all worked to help one another.
Says Dr. Graham: “It’s practically impossible to move upward and forward alone.”
This is the latest installment of a series, On the Rise, about young people making a difference in the nonprofit world.
