RMHF continues to receive positive feedback from community members, nonprofit partners, and local leaders regarding our Voices from the Region series, which we launched in early 2025. Therefore, we’re excited to continue the series in 2026 with a renewed focus on bringing you more community voices and perspectives that provide crucial insight into health and racial/ethnic equity, power building, power sharing and our aspirations for a healthy and equitable Richmond region.
As we move forward, an essential aspect (and my main takeaway from the series so far) has been the theme of interdependence.
I believe we are our brother’s keeper. Unless you have had the good fortune of avoiding life’s many travails because you have been buffered by wealth or privilege, most, if not all of us, have at some point experienced struggles that directly relate to a lack of resources or a lack of access.
In human services work and sometimes even within our respective families, we often see our neighbors trying to navigate complex and unsympathetic systems, sometimes getting trapped in a financial or health spiral in the process. Those who work in the philanthropic and nonprofit sectors dedicate our time, energy and resources to help these people, our brothers and sisters, to survive and thrive. We are interdependent, and what happens to one affects us all.
That is at the core of our Voices from the Region series: acknowledging that interdependence and then shining a spotlight on the different leaders working to serve our communities in different ways.
As we move forward, let’s commit to being in closer proximity with each other. That includes feeling encouraged and empowered to reach out to the organizations you see featured in the Voices series to learn from them, collaborate with them or join with them.
For me, success in 2026 would mean that our region goes viral with a spirit of collaboration, a passion for alignment and strategic coordination, a commitment to put the common good first, and an unbreakable covenant with one another to listen intently and then take courageous action to build viable and sustainable pathways to a more hopeful, healthy, and equitable future for all.