The Delta Dental Foundation (DDF) recently released its new five-year strategic plan, which envisions a world where everyone has access to high-quality dental care that meets their comfort level and abilities across the lifespan.  

“To help realize that dream, we aligned our grantmaking under five strategic aims—access to care, advocacy, education, emerging initiatives and workforce development—with oral health equity for people with disabilities as our cornerstone,” Holli Seabury, EdD, executive director of the DDF and CMF trustee, said. 

According to Seabury, data show that people with disabilities face disproportionate barriers to good oral health, which have led to much higher rates of dental disease as compared to the general population.  

“By committing to ensuring people with disabilities have high-quality dental care that meets their comfort level and abilities across the lifespan, we are centering the needs and experiences of the most vulnerable,” Seabury said. “And when we do that, everyone benefits.” 

But the DDF team didn’t necessarily start there. 

“During the initial stages of the strategic planning process, we worked with facilitators who gently challenged us,” Jen Anderson, the DDF’s senior communications and strategy officer said. “Having that outside perspective forced us to be honest about our resources. It became clearer than ever that if we wanted to make a bigger impact, we needed to narrow our focus and look for measurable ways that we could show progress over time.” 

Anderson suggests that one way to do that is to carefully define your organization’s strategic aims rather than creating generic “buckets” into which nearly every project could fall.   

As an example, one component of the DDF’s workforce development aim is to strengthen and diversify the oral health safety net by developing and supporting programs that recruit providers from diverse backgrounds. So, the DDF isn’t just supportive of oral health workforce development—they are specifically looking for initiatives that will bring oral health professionals from underrepresented backgrounds to safety-net settings. Hygienist Inspired is just one program that came out of that definition.  

“These parameters can help you say ‘no’ to programs that don’t support your goals while still offering you enough flexibility to pivot quickly as needs arise,” Seabury said. “It was very important to me that the foundation be receptive to what nonprofit partners are going through, and when partners ask us to work together, I wanted to be able to say ‘yes, we can do that.’”   

Seabury recalled her experiences on the other side of the table, when she was applying for funding versus granting it. Inflexibility and an unwillingness to listen on the part of philanthropic partners damaged relationships and made important work difficult, if not impossible. 

“It hampers the nonprofit world when philanthropy isn’t innovative, open and ready to embrace emerging initiatives,” Seabury said. 

Want more? 

Learn about the Delta Dental Foundation.