The Virginia Funders Network (VFN) is delighted to shine the spotlight on Partner Member, Community Health Solutions (CHS). CHS has been a Partner Member of the network since 2025. Their organization “provide[s] research, consulting, and learning support to help people create healthier communities.”
Here is a little more from Stephen Horan, Founding President of CHS:
As a Partner Member, what are you looking forward to the most? What led you to join the growing network of funders and partners that comprise VFN’s membership?
Communities matter for human flourishing. Virginia funders play a vital role in bringing people together for learning, action, and positive community impact. Not only as sources of funding, but also as conveners and catalysts. At CHS we help to facilitate this work by supporting collaborate efforts for community improvement…our philosophy is that philanthropic organizations can and do play valuable community roles as conveners and catalysts in addition to funders.
How have changes over the past few years, influenced your leadership?
Collaborative leadership has never been more important. Civic life has become more divisive and complex at the very time we should be working together as never before. We have to commit ourselves to working across boundaries with respect and a commitment to learning and acting together.
Tell us about a project or an area of work you’re most excited about.
We are always excited about the work Partnering for a Healthy Virginia (PHV), a statewide initiative fostering partnerships for community health improvement. With collaborative leadership from the Virginia Department of Health and the Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association (VHHA) Foundation, PHV brings together public health agencies, hospitals, and other community stakeholders to coordinate efforts for community health improvement. At Community Health Solutions we support the PHV Impact Collaborative, where people come together to share promising practices for community health assessment and improvement. VFN members can learn more and join us at https://phvhub.mn.co/discovery.
Share a recent story of “success” or positive progress within your organization.
Our core strategy is collaboration support, which involves bringing people together for learning, action, and impact. Our breakthrough application is the community learning network, a virtual platform that can bring people together to assess needs, design strategies, develop capacity, execute for results, and demonstrate impact. The community learning network platform is extraordinarily flexible and cost efficient, but also human centered, so people really are able to connect and work together in effective ways. We are able to rapidly deploy community learning networks so organizations large and small can work together for community improvement, and all of the resulting knowledge stays with the community when the project is finished.
What else would you like your fellow VFN Members to know?
Community matters for everything we are trying to do with health and human flourishing. Every policy, program, or initiative, whether it comes from government, nonprofits, or the for-profit sector, has to be implemented by local stakeholders at the community level. If it doesn’t work at the community level, then it doesn’t work.