The Gilead Foundation: Advancing health equity through education equity in the U.S.

While the COVID pandemic and most recent racial reckoning galvanized the traditional health philanthropy community, many corporate funders made their first foray into supporting racial and social justice efforts as well as health equity. Corporate social responsibility efforts were, and continue to be, scrutinized as merely cosmetic public relations efforts with no real long-term, institutional commitments to driving meaningful change in Black and Brown communities that have long been historically, intentionally marginalized. When Gilead Sciences endowed and re-launched the Gilead Foundation with $200 million in 2021, it did so with the intention and institutional commitment to not only address the upstream drivers of health inequity but also change the way traditional corporate funders invest support in the most heavily impacted communities. (author abstract)