Our Strategy - Deaconess Foundation

Sowing Our Vision

Liberation in Seven Generations

In 2022, Deaconess Foundation sought feedback from residents across the Eastern Missouri and Southern Illinois region to assist in continuing to center the wisdom and vision of our community in the Foundation's policy priorities and values. Deaconess engaged key partners Gladiator Consulting and Commonality, Inc. as a project team to connect with and collect feedback across a variety of neighborhood and community gatherings, funded partner focus groups, one-on-one interviews, and national peer funder conversations and policy research. Ultimately, the insights shared from community lived experience urged the project team to imagine a journey and future which the last seven generations of Deaconess’ work has prepared the Foundation for.

This narrative, enclosed tool, and appendix are intended to inform, guide and call Deaconess Foundation, its peers, funded partners, and community to the transformative work only it can accomplish across the next seven generations.

Our First Seven Generations

The legacy of Deaconess began in St. Louis in early spring of 1889 with the establishment of the Evangelical Deaconess Society. Shortly thereafter the men and women of the Evangelical Church (now the United Church of Christ) consecrated the first Deaconess Sisters to serve the health needs of the community. The first Deaconess Home established to provide health care was located at 2119 Eugenia Street in St. Louis. It would be its second hospital building, which operated from 1897-1930, that would care for residents of St. Louis through an influenza pandemic that ravaged communities across the globe. In 1930, Deaconess opened its third and final hospital on Oakland Avenue, known then as “the magnificent new hospital on the hill.” For the next 47 years, Deaconess would truly embody its meaning...

One who is

devoted to service.

Upon the hospital system’s sale to for-profit Tenet Health System in 1997, Deaconess Foundation was formed as a grantmaking organization “to support children’s causes” across the St. Louis metropolitan area. Fueled by a vision of a future where ALL children in Eastern Missouri and Southern Illinois, especially those growing up in poverty, are made a high priority, Deaconess Foundation invested in over 600 organizations serving children and families in the region.

In 2014, Deaconess celebrated its 125th anniversary by publishing The Deaconess Spirit: 125 Years in Mission and initiating its systems-change oriented advocacy approach. Deaconess established the following public policy priorities:

Healthcare

All children of the St. Louis region should have universal access to comprehensive mental, physical and dental care, supported by a trauma informed care approach, a network of school-based health centers and the benefits of Medicaid expansion.

Economic Mobility

Families in the St. Louis region should be able to achieve economic stability within one generation in an environment marked by fair chance employment practices, family — supporting wages and asset-building supports.

Justice and Equity

All children of the St. Louis region should receive just treatment under the law, with specific emphasis on contact with the state’s systems for juvenile justice and foster and adoptive care.

Early Childhood Education

All children of the St. Louis region should enjoy full access to quality early childhood care and education from birth to Pre-Kindergarten.

These four public policy priorities have guided Deaconess’ investment in and advocacy for a range of community-led and/or informed initiatives critical to creating conditions that support child well-being in the greater Eastern Missouri and Southern Illinois region. Further, it is upon these priorities that community members were asked to reflect, evaluate, and provide perspective.

Since commencing its grantmaking activities in 1998, Deaconess has invested more than $100 million to improve the health of communities across St. Louis City, St. Louis, Jefferson, St. Charles, and Franklin Counties in Missouri, and Madison, St. Clair, and Monroe Counties in Illinois.

The community celebrates these investments

and calls us to do more.

For 134 years in mission, Deaconess Hospital and Deaconess Foundation have joyfully demonstrated devotion through service to the children and families of our regional community, grounded in a set of organizational values that have guided the work and relationships within Deaconess Foundation and with the community we serve.

Our Values

Faith

As followers of Christ, we are called to emulate Christ’s living example through generations.

Healing

Healing is essential to achieve a state of wholeness, well-being, and a renewed sense of purpose and harmony.

Liberation

We tenaciously commit to eradicate oppressive systems, advocate for justice and equity, and foster a culture of individual and collective release and healing.

Justice

We stand resolutely against anti-Black racism and systemic discrimination in all its manifestations.

Rooted in these values, history, and experience, Deaconess has established a trusting relationship with the community and looks to its next 100-plus years through the lens of the community’s urgent charge for justice, belonging, and liberation.

What We Heard

Community Calls to Us

The neighbors, activists, leaders, and organizers we spoke with represent a wealth of community brilliance, lived experience and wisdom. In these conversations, individuals made clear and direct connections between intersecting challenges, such as:

Economic insecurity made worse by health concerns and the pandemic

Access to housing impacting a child’s education, mental health, and lifelong economic opportunities

Natural disasters creating housing insecurity and economic distress

(including Eastern Missouri and Southern Illinois’ recent historic, 100 year flooding)

Climate change impacting
food access

Repeatedly, we heard the request to address challenges in the aggregate — and that no one systemic failure could truly be addressed without great effort and action around the others.

It is incredibly difficult to characterize the challenges or opportunities for improvement, because it’s all compounded. Each issue dramatically impacts the others. The entire system is interconnected and broken… creating pain in every area. The compound effect of it all is crushing.”

Youth Focus Group

2020 Census

To counter the historical, chronic undercounting of people of color in the United States census — which has detrimental implications for the federal funding of community resources including schools, hospitals, infrastructure and more - several of Deaconess’ Funded Partners, including Action St. Louis , Metropolitan Congregations United , Missouri Jobs with Justice , Organization for Black Struggle , and MOVE MO, organized to increase census participation in the greater St. Louis region.

Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) Freedom Schools®

Deaconess launched its network of Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) Freedom Schools® in 2017. Rooted in the Mississippi Freedom Summer project of 1964, the CDF Freedom Schools program is a seven-week summer literacy and cultural enrichment program. Post launch, and pre-pandemic, Deaconess’s Freedom Schools program intentionally expanded locations to reach more youth. In 2019, Deaconess’s CDF Freedom Schools Scholars joined over 180 other CDF Freedom School sites in 87 cities and 28 states across the country for a National Day of Social Action. For their civic engagement that day, Deaconess’s Freedom Schools Scholars went to City Hall to offer solutions to gun violence in their communities to then-Mayor Lyda Krewson and President of the Board of Aldermen Lewis E. Reed.

Clean Missouri

A statewide coalition of organizers, advocates, and volunteers collected and submitted more than 340,000 signatures for Amendment 1–CLEAN Missouri to be placed on the November 2018 ballot.⁵ Deaconess supported this campaign in support of fair and transparent state governance by providing space for organizers to host phone banks with volunteers, as well as an informational session for elected officials at Deaconess Center for Child Well-Being. Thanks to the work of all partners, 62% of Missouri voters elected to pass the Amendment in November 2018.

Close the Workhouse

In 2017, the Close the Workhouse Campaign, led by Action St. Louis, Arch City Defenders, and The Bail Project, launched to attack mass incarceration, close the Workhouse (St. Louis City’s Medium Security Institution), end wealth-based pretrial detention, and reinvest money used to cage poor people and Black people into rebuilding the most impacted neighborhoods in the St. Louis region”.⁷ After two years of educating, organizing, and activating individuals and organizations in St. Louis to demand the closure, the Board of Aldermen voted unanimously on July 17, 2020 to close the Workhouse by the end of 2020. Deaconess supported the campaign through its Responsive Grants portfolio, provided convening space to the campaign at Deaconess Center for Child Well-Being, and advocated for closure of the Workhouse.

COVID-19 Equitable Relief and Recovery Fund

Deaconess invested more than $2.2 million to support emergency response and recovery efforts in the St. Louis region from March through August 2020.⁷ Created to strengthen existing regional infrastructure for public health and social service coordination while promoting racial equity, regional collaboration, and inclusion in COVID-19 responses, Deaconess’ Equitable Relief and Recovery Fund (with matching funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation) provided grants to more than 100 Black-led social service and social change organizations providing direct aid to people impacted by the pandemic. To meet the needs of a rapidly changing environment caused by the advent of COVID-19, Deaconess recalibrated its funding model and processes to expedite grantmaking, with most organizations receiving funds within three weeks of submitting a proposal. In addition to these efforts, Deaconess also partnered with the United Church of Christ and 14 St. Louis churches to buy and abolish $12.9 million in medical debt for 11,108 families early during the initial pandemic year of 2020.

Deaconess Center for Child Well-Being

The Deaconess Center for Child Well-Being opened at 1000 Vandeventer Avenue in 2018. Its mission is to build power to advance child well-being in the St. Louis region by strengthening alliances for child-friendly public policy, increasing citizen contact with policy makers, positioning youth and organizers to move systems, and engaging faith communities in child advocacy.⁵ Intended to serve as supportive infrastructure for organizing for public policy change, the Center’s offerings evolved during the COVID-19 pandemic to meet the virtual and open-air needs of Deaconess’ partners, even as public gathering restrictions were in place.⁷

Ferguson Commission

Launched in November 2014, the Ferguson Commission was created to both examine issues that came forth in the light of the killing of unarmed teenager, Michael Brown, by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, as well as offer recommendations to make the St. Louis region a “stronger, fairer place for everyone to live.” Comprising 16 members from business, clergy, health care, law enforcement, civic and educational leadership, the Ferguson Commission not only issued specific, practical policy recommendations in its final report; it also led to the launch of Forward through Ferguson, a 501(c)3 catalyst for lasting, positive change in greater St. Louis. Deaconess took an active role in supporting the important work of the Ferguson Commission; in addition to providing funding, Deaconess’ then Board Member (and current President & CEO) Reverend Bethany Johnson-Javois, MSW served as its Managing Director, and Deaconess’s past President & CEO, Reverend Starsky D. Wilson, served as its Co-Chair.

Just for Kids (J4K) Anchor Institutions Program

In 2018, Deaconess launched its J4K Anchor Institutions program by selecting five organizations as multi-year partners to strengthen and ground systems change and community organizing efforts in the St. Louis region.⁵ Each partner was offered support from capacity building consultants, executive coaches, peer exchanges, and funding to develop and implement four-year plans to enhance their governance and leadership, technical infrastructure, organizational culture, financial capacity, and strategy.

Medicaid Expansion

Deaconess invested $100,000 to support a 2020 collaborative public policy campaign launched by Missouri Jobs with Justice and Action St. Louis. This campaign intended to mobilize their combined base among uninsured or underinsured citizens and develop the leadership capacity of people for whom access to healthcare had been denied due to the failure to expand Medicaid.⁷ Thanks to this work, as well as that of many other partners, Missouri voters in August 2020 approved a state constitutional amendment to expand Medicaid to more than 270,000 Missourians with 53% of the vote. After state legislators refused to fund the constitutional amendment — thus, delaying Medicaid expansion - a lawsuit was filed to force the state to implement the mandate. This lawsuit eventually made its way to the Missouri Supreme Court, which issued a unanimous decision to affirm the state’s duty to expand Medicaid. Additional Deaconess activities to support Medicaid expansion included cosigning a published editorial, serving on the YES on 2 St. Louis Champions Leadership Table, and hosting the launch of voter canvassing efforts.

North Central Plan

Deaconess sponsored the creation of the North Central Plan, a community-led strategic planning process which brought the Covenant Blu Grand Center and Vandeventer neighborhoods together to develop their vision for the future. This 12-month planning process, which commenced in late 2019 with the convening of a community Steering Committee, leveraged the Deaconess Center for Child Well-Being’s available spaces for public convening and collaboration. The North Central Plan has since been adopted by the City of St. Louis as an official planning document; its asset-based, resident centered approach can be a model for future development.

Peer Funder Collaboration

Deaconess has frequently collaborated with a range of peer funders on initiatives designed to advance community civic engagement. In addition to initiatives explicitly described in this section (e.g., Freedom Schools, North Central Plan, Raise Up Missouri, and the St. Louis Regional Racial Healing + Justice Fund), other partnerships to support civic engagement include (but are not limited to) the Feed the Babies Project, a community-wide, multipartner emergency collaboration to counter the 2022 infant formula shortage, and collaboration to support the St. Louis City American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) Community Needs Town Hall to discuss where $250 million of ARPA funds should be allocated.

Raise Up Missouri

In 2017, Deaconess, in partnership with the Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program at Shelter Rock, dedicated funding from a joint Public Policy Grant to the Raise Up Missouri African American Voter Engagement Campaign.5 The campaign, a collaborative effort of Missouri Jobs With Justice, The Fight for $15, and the A. Philip Randolph Institute, focused engagement in Black communities in St. Louis City and County to support the statewide ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage to $12 by 2023. The petition to raise Missouri’s minimum wage garnered more than 120,000 signatures and was approved to appear on the November 2018 ballot, via which Missouri voters approved the measure to increase the minimum wage with 62.3% of the vote.

Reverend Buck Jones Memorial Grant for Tenant Organizing

In honor of the 50th anniversary of the historic St. Louis Rent Strike, as well as to honor the ministry of the late United Church of Christ minister, the Rev. Buck Jones, Deaconess invested $40,000 to support tenant organizing for residents of the Clinton-Peabody Housing Complex in November 2019.⁷ The Reverend Buck Jones Memorial Grant for Tenant Organizing was partially funded from the settlement of a suit filed by Missouri's Attorney General against the St. Louis Housing Authority and McCormack Baron Salazar at the call of residents from Clinton-Peabody. Additional support from Deaconess was provided to ensure the power of residents was sustained in a meaningful way. Clinton-Peabody residents participated in the selection of Action St. Louis as an organizing partner.

St. Louis Regional Racial Healing + Justice Fund

Deaconess, Forward Through Ferguson, and the Missouri Foundation for Health – with a matching grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, as well as other financial support from 21 additional peer funders – collaborated in 2020 to establish a $2 million fund to invest in healing community trauma and changing the conditions that reinforce systemic racism.⁷ Through a community-led grantmaking process, the Racial Healthing and Justice Fund supports efforts to develop capacity and infrastructure in the racial justice movement to envision, articulate, and create a transformed St. Louis region through community organizing and healing arts.

Our Opportunity

Responding to the Call

From the community, we heard the complexities of surviving and trying to thrive in a colonized, racist set of systems. The community has called Deaconess Foundation to imagine its role in seeding a future world with conditions no one alive today has ever experienced. Having demonstrated through the years, its willingness to listen, reorient and act boldly with its resources and influence, the community has challenged Deaconess Foundation to audaciously own its power in our collective journey of and to racial liberation. Liberation is not meant to simply describe an outcome — rather it is an intentional and conscious movement in which our community can freely exist, dream and thrive in the absence of oppressive systems in a culture of solidarity, respect and dignity.

Imagining Racial Liberation in Philanthropy

As we assess philanthropy across the U.S., it is critical to note that very few donors or funders can even authentically define liberation let alone apply such a definition and outcome to the concept of modern day philanthropy. Our peers are beginning their own personal work of decolonizing self and examining bias and oppression; we see institutions shifting their practice toward participatory grantmaking and inviting community members on to boards of trustees. Yet, we still see philanthropy make grants to nonprofits, and nonprofits maintaining direction and control of resources ultimately meant for the community. The decision for an institution to move toward liberation disrupts the status quo.

What Deaconess seeks to accomplish is

revolutionary.

However, there are some examples and learnings from our peers that test the boundaries of innovation and change with a racial equity lens.

The Kataly Foundation moves resources to support the economic, political, and cultural power of Black and Indigenous communities, and all communities of color. By transforming our relationship between capital, the planet, and each other, Kataly will redistribute and redefine wealth in a way that leads to transformation, abundance, and regeneration.

As the only nonprofit grantmaking platform developed by funders and organizers of color, JustFund challenges existing systems in “an intervention into the antiquated systems that grantmakers have inherited.” Today, JustFund is a growing values-aligned community for those centering equity in grantmaking. It funds transparently, efficiently, and equitably, and is proud to have moved millions from grantmakers to organizers, to date.

Built as a network of people with wealth who are making change by working in partnership with movements, Solidaire Network has positioned itself as a bold alternative to the risk-averse and slow-moving philanthropic mainstream. Through this audacious spirit to practice radical giving and motivating new investment, Solidaire’s approach to grantmaking is to be transformational rather than merely transactional, bring more money to the movement ecosystem, and bring more than money to its work of social change.

Borealis is a social justice philanthropic intermediary working to resource grassroots movements for transformative change. Borealis builds bridges between funders and organizers to support movements working to make a future that serves all of us. Borealis has grown to include nine collaborative funds working to enhance its collective impact within and between movements across the country. From Black-led movement-building, to queer and trans liberation, to disability justice and inclusion, Borealis’ work is rooted in the understanding that in order to upend oppressive systems, it must support the people most impacted by those systems.

Prophecy:

Liberation

Timeframe

Focus Area

Posture

Role

Values

A Framework for Liberation

The Tool

We are hopeful that this Liberation Framework tool will provide Deaconess a flexible path for the journey ahead. “Tool” is both a noun and verb. It helps us to shape, form and finish. It is something necessary to the performance and successful completion of a task. A tool is very much a means to our end. This doesn’t mean that we must only use this framework or that the framework isn't adaptive and responsive to what we learn through the passage of time.

This Framework offers
five distinct orientations.

(click on each section to learn more)

Timeframe

Focus Area

Posture

Role

Values

Our timeframe for this work towards liberation is approximately 150 years or seven generations from today. In this document, we consider Present Day — Year 10 naming the focus areas, postures, key social change areas and values we believe could guide Deaconess’s work and strategy. For the years that follow, we encourage Deaconess to consider a set of scenarios. As those phases draw closer, it is our intention that Deaconess would review its milestone success alongside ongoing feedback from community and the real-time conditions of the world to continue to chart its liberatory work. We acknowledge that the path to liberation is neither linear nor finite nor time-bound and seek to use time as a construct for planning and implementing specific action.

Here we center how Deaconess can prioritize its power, influence and positionality. Informed by community wisdom and guided by Deaconess’s history of service, we have identified three initial areas to advance liberation — Grantmaking, Peer-to-Peer Leadership, and Advocacy + Policy Change.

On our liberatory journey, these areas may change — for example, grantmaking in its current form may cease to exist. Policy changes, specifically at the federal level, may shift and change what is necessary for regional and statewide systems. As Deaconess engages and calls in its peers, the way institutional funders think about and “gatekeep” resources may evolve. We anticipate, especially as we draw closer to the mid-term phase of this journey, focus areas are pliable and can be made responsive to progress (or lack thereof) and reality.

To participate in a liberatory movement, we must understand how and where we exist against the background of existing community entities, innovation, changemaking and transformation. Deaconess’s leadership and activities are not siloed and do not exist in a vacuum. Even if Deaconess itself may be ready to advance a particular segment of liberatory work, it does not mean that other key partners may be oriented and prepared to engage. And ultimately, we desire for Deaconess to use its abundant resources as potently as is possible.

For this initial iteration of the framework, we relied on the Three Innovations Ambition Continuum, a tool resulting in the mash-up of existing social change thought leadership. In the continuum, we find three types of innovations:

Incremental Innovation focuses on improving, rather than changing the performance of existing systems.
Reform-oriented Innovation aims to change aspects of an existing system that entrench specific societal challenges.
Transformative Innovations seek to transform systems and/or create new ones based on radically different ideas, in order to do things in unprecedented ways.

Each part of the continuum is critical to liberation and requires Deaconess be nimble in accepting which posture may best advance the journey. It is important to note here, as stated earlier, that the continuum must not be implemented in a linear fashion.

The Three Innovations Ambition Continuum

This approach by Cabaj & Perla is a “mash-up” that merges and expands upon four frequently cited frameworks for change-making:

Getting to Maybe: How the World Has Changed, by Westley, Zimmerman and Patton

Three Orders of Change, by Waddell

The Three Horizons Framework, by Sharp and adapted by McKinsey Consulting

The Water of Systems Change Framework, by Kania, Kramer and Senge

The next orientation of the framework is the role Deaconess should play in a particular Focus Area during a particular time. Here, we included the Social Change Ecosystem Map, a tool developed by Deepa Iyer of Building Movements Project. This tool orients 10 specific roles around the shared goal of “Equity, Liberation, Justice and Solidarity”. It serves as a clear reminder of what roles we can/should hold and where we can call the wisdom and experience of others into the gaps we can’t fill. In our liberatory work, we must accept that while our resources are abundant, they are also finite. Intentionally preparing for the liberation of Black lives and Black bodies, is a precondition for the liberation of humanity. Liberation is realized when all of us, together, are free. In committing our resources to one or two roles in the social change ecosystem, we hold space for others to join us.

Social Change Ecosystem Roles

Weavers: I see the through-lines of connectivity between people, places, organizations, ideas, and movements.

Experimenters: I innovate, pioneer, and invent. I take risks and course-correct as needed.

Frontline Responders: I address community crises by marshaling and organizing resources, networks, and messages.

Visionaries: I imagine and generate our boldest possibilities, hopes and dreams, and remind us of our direction.

Builders: I develop, organize, and implement ideas, practices, people, and resources in service of a collective vision.

Caregivers: I nurture and nourish the people around me by creating and sustaining a community of care, joy, and connection.

Disruptors: I take uncomfortable and risky actions to shake up the status quo, to raise awareness, and to build power.

Healers: I recognize and tend to the generational and current traumas caused by oppressive systems, institutions, policies, and practices.

Storytellers: I craft and share our community stories, cultures, experiences, histories, and possibilities through art, music, media, and movement.

Guides: I teach, counsel, and advise, using my gifts of well-earned discernment and wisdom.

Living our values is about practicing them. Deaconess Foundation has a long history of embodying its named values and identifying the actions and practices within its teams, partners, and the community that will operationalize those values. As Deaconess Foundation looks ahead to the next 150 years, we asked community members to provide input on how the current values have been operationalized and what additional or alternative values could help guide the Foundation to the liberatory future it seeks. Reflecting upon the many values named, five value themes emerged. Although not the only values suggested, these overarching themes — specifically formulated as actionable verbs to guide Deaconess Foundation’s work every day — collectively embody the community’s imperative call to pursue liberation in all engagements. We thus offer the following themed values as a potential starting point for shared language, practices and decision-making:

Dismantle
Heal
Justice
Collaborate
Faith & Love

Through this tool, we seek to name where existing values have shown up in Deaconess Foundation’s work and elevate the newly recommended values where called for to support the work ahead.

We charge Deaconess Foundation to think deeply on the tool provided as a baseline while finalizing and completing roles and responsibilities and building in existing initiatives. We further believe the highest and best use of this tool will continue to be constant iteration across its orientations with the input and guidance of Deaconess Foundation's community as well as adjacent co-conspirators on the liberatory journey. It likely will require the development of other tools — ranging from informal relationships and networks, to institutional strategic, scenario, or actions plans, to the birth of new institutions or collaboratives.

Timeframe

Focus Area

Posture

Role

Values

Timeframe

Focus Area

Posture

Role

Values

Deaconess Foundation Role

Upon applying this framework retroactively, we see that Deaconess’s commitments and activities already align with the framework’s considerations. The institution’s posture has moved between incremental innovation and reform-oriented innovation. Deaconess has been a leader among its regional peers in naming, centering and supporting Black and Brown-led/Black and Brown-centered institutions and communities. It has moved in and out of various roles across the social change ecosystem depending on what circumstances called and activated them to be — such as Healers, Frontline Responders, Caregivers and Visionaries. A comprehensive list of near-term accomplishments can be found in the appendix.

As Deaconess chooses to name liberation as its seven generations goal, it must be explicit in Deaconess’s identity. A key activity for the Deaconess Foundation moving forward will be to reimagine its mission, vision, values (noting our recommendations above) and theory of change to align with its adoption of an iterative, evolving liberatory framework.

Closing Reflection

Our Strategic Aspiration

As an institutional advocate focused on health justice and social justice, Deaconess Foundation will orient its abundant relationships and resources in pursuit of liberation within the next seven generations.

Primary Components of Strategy

Beloved Community

intentional undoing and unlearning of internal and external practices and processes rooted in white supremacy culture to create a more anti-racist, intersectional, equitable and democratic workplace which mirrors the ways Deaconess Foundation shows up and exists in community and the broader ecosystem while
elevating, celebrating, and inspiring the ecosystem in Missouri and Illinois by lifting up the liberated behaviors that are creating the conditions that lead to individual and community wellness and liberation.

Power Building

investing bistate to support strong enduring civic agency and engagement for equitable participation in the democratic process to public policy,
catalyzing the local, regenerative economy based on reflective, responsive, and reciprocal relationships,
brokering interdisciplinary multigenerational collaboration, and
positioning Deaconess Center for Child Well-Being as public square for community members.

Closing Reflection

Our Next Seven Generations

Our community, in its infinite and abundant wisdom, has called us to a new chapter of our story. We come to this place not knowing where this chapter will take us and knowing we, nor our children, will live to see its conclusion. We bring with us the legacy of the Evangelical Deaconess Society of St. Louis and Deaconess Hospital. We lead through service and ministry alongside the United Church of Christ. We are willing to experience discomfort and overcome obstacles in the spirit of racial liberation. We know that the journey to liberation might mean that the Deaconess Foundation no longer exists — as a philanthropic entity or otherwise. And on that day, our future ancestors will celebrate the seeds we planted and realize liberation.

For the next seven generations, Deaconess will orient our abundant relationships and resources within a liberatory framework so that our community will together realize

JOY OF FREEDOM FROM OPRESSED SYSTEMS.

View the Deaconess Foundation Engagement Strategy Appendix below to learn more about the strategic refinement process and community engagement.

Download Appendix