Meet Community Champion Ann Monroe, the president of the Health Foundation for Western and Central New York, which helps fund HMG Western New York:

“These are very tight economic times. Every dollar spent duplicating services means one dollar less to help our kids, and the duplication almost always results from a lack of collaboration and coordination across services and agencies.

The Help Me Grow system makes sense given our belief in and need for collaboration across the systems we already have. As a funder in the community, we can give money to single agencies to increase their services, or we can invest in a wholesale strategy that will make it easier for many organizations to do the work they do.

Supporting system change and quality improvement is our sweet spot, and we see Help Me Grow as a way to achieve that.”