Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

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This is Lindsay Smith Rogers. Today, Rural Health.

Dr. Kara James is the president and CEO

of grantmakers in health, a support organization

for philanthropies across the country.

She speaks with Dr. Josh Sharfstein

about the crisis in rural health

and where philanthropies are trying to make a difference.

Let's listen.

Dr. Kara James, thank you so much for joining me today

in Public Health on call to talk about rural health. Let's start with an introduction. How would you

introduce yourself to our listeners? Well, thank you, Josh, so much for having me. I would

introduce myself as Kara James. I'm currently the president and CEO of

Grantmakers in Health, where I've been for four years. And before that, I was the director of the

Office of Minority Health and co-chair of the CMS Rural Health Council at the Centers for Medicare and

Medicaid Services, which is in the Department of Health and Human Services.

So grantmakers in health, what is that organization?

So grantmakers and health is a 40-plus year old organization that's called a philanthropy support organization. So we help foundations and we work with more than 200 foundations across the country learn, connect, and grow through educational programming, convenings, reports, surveys, and a variety of activities to network and learn about different issues like rural health.

So I imagine some of these foundations may be huge foundations, giving out lots of money,

...