Woman Philanthropists: Tiffany Benjamin Of Humana Foundation On How To Leave A Lasting Legacy With A Successful Nonprofit Organization

The contributions of women philanthropists have reshaped communities and catalyzed change, yet their stories often remain untold. Women bring unique perspectives and approaches to philanthropy, using their resources, networks, and influence to address a wide range of global challenges — from education and healthcare to social justice and environmental sustainability. How do these women navigate the complexities of philanthropy to achieve meaningful impact? In this interview series, we are talking to diverse women philanthropists who have initiated impactful projects or led significant charitable endeavors, to share their insights and inspire others to take initiative and help solve pressing global and local issues. As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Tiffany Benjamin.

In her role as CEO of the Humana Foundation, Tiffany Benjamin guides the Foundation in establishing new ways to co-create healthy communities, sustain advances in health outcomes, and eliminate unjust differences in health and health care. She brings a strong understanding of the social determinants of health and a passion for closing systemic gaps in education and employment, wealth and financial security, social connectedness, and food security.

She comes to Humana from Eli Lilly and Company, where she was President of the Lilly Foundation and Senior Director, Social Impact.

Thank you for making time to visit with us about a ‘top of mind’ topic. Our readers would like to get to know you a bit better. Can you please tell us about one or two life experiences that most shaped who you are today?

My mother’s work had a tremendous effect on who I became as a person, as well as on my career path. She was a social worker who worked with HIV/AIDS patients in the 1980’s — a time when there was a great deal of fear and ostracism of those patients, with few people willing to care for them. This was in pre-HIPAA days, so when I was a child, I would sometimes accompany her when she spent time with those patients. She would sit with them and listen to their stories — people who were dying, who had visible lesions on their bodies and were often surrounded by their chosen families, not their biological ones. Those experiences taught me to see kindness and goodness and feel empathy for all people. It also taught me to be brave in caring for those who have been deemed undeserving of love and care. All around us, people were saying really offensive things about HIV/AIDS patients. But my mom went ahead and showed love and respect for them despite how deeply unpopular it was to do.

Another transformative experience was a summer I spent after my first year of law school, interning at the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama working on death penalty and other appeal cases. One case I assisted with involved a woman who was in prison with a life sentence for a crime she did not commit. By visiting her in prison and spending time listening to her story and then scouring the court records, I was able to find the evidence needed to prove her innocence. Bryan Stevenson and his team were able to use that evidence to successfully appeal her case and secure her freedom. That experience taught me the value of listening — of sitting with people and hearing their truth. A very powerful lesson that has stayed with me throughout my life.

You are a successful leader. Which two character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success?

I am direct. I tell it like it is. I am also deeply empathetic and try to really see and connect with people, no matter who they are. Those are the traits that I believe have been most helpful in my life and career.

What’s the most interesting discovery you’ve made since you started leading your organization?

In philanthropy, we like to talk and hear about our successes. What I’ve learned is the importance of talking about the things that have not worked at all or as well as expected. Acknowledging the failures is essential to figuring out how to do it better the next time round. People are often surprised when I speak about initiatives that aren’t going well; but it’s also been interesting to see the really positive response to our willingness to talk about the efforts that didn’t work out along with our wins. It shows that we’re trying new approaches and learning and growing as we do.

Can you please tell our readers more about how you or your organization intends to make a significant social impact?

Making a significant impact is the Humana Foundation’s north star. We center everything we do around the real impact our efforts have on the lives and communities we serve. We test, we learn and scale health and healthcare solutions to drive more equitable health outcomes for diverse populations of children, seniors and veterans through grantmaking, research and partnerships. We use quantitative and qualitative measures to assess impact and have a chief impact officer whose job it is to determine the most effective approaches for measuring and ensuring that the work we are doing has the intended effect across our portfolio. But impact only matters when people feel that their lives or situations have improved. So ultimately, we want to make sure that people are feeling that the initiatives we support are changing their lives for the better. That matters as much, if not more, than any quantitative measure of success.

What makes you feel passionate about this cause more than any other?

There are many reasons I am passionate about health equity work. As mentioned earlier, experiencing the care my mother gave to HIV/AIDS patients and growing up in a family culture where helping marginalized people was the norm shaped my commitment to that cause. Another experience that was important in cementing my passion was the love and care my father received from hospice nurses when he was dying after he had a serious stroke. My father was a poor Black man who was often not seen as deserving because of his skin color and economic status. And yet, those healthcare workers showed him such love and respect, and made his last days such a gift. That has stayed with me constantly in the past 13 years since his death. Everyone deserves to feel loved, respected and valued no matter their socioeconomic circumstances. I feel passionate about the work Humana Foundation does because it’s all about that. We are working to ensure all people receive the mental and physical healthcare they rightly deserve by removing the barriers and boundaries that have created systemic and structural disparities in getting that care.

Without naming names, could you share a story about an individual who benefitted from your initiatives?

One of our partners is OATS, a nonprofit we fund that works with older adults to provide technology tools and training to help enrich their lives and promote social engagement. A couple of years ago, I visited one of their Senior Planet centers in Ohio that the Foundation had supported and spent time with seniors who were attending a technology training program.

I met this one woman who told me how important this center and these classes have been for her. For a long time she had been intimidated by technology and embarrassed to ask for help, especially since her grandkids would tease her and tell her she was too old to learn when she asked them to teach her how to use a digital program. Their attitude and her lack of skills made her feel devalued and incompetent. But since finding this center she had gained both skills and a community of fellow learners. She proudly showed me the different ways she could go online to pay her bills, search the internet for information and use Facebook to connect with her family and friends. She talked about the sense of autonomy and pride she now had because of her new abilities. Her story proved to me yet again the power in giving people the space and skills to have agency and believe in their own capabilities. It was wonderful to hear how this woman’s disposition, confidence and connectedness had been positively changed through the program. It also made me want to give her grandkids a good talking to.

We all want to help and to live a life of purpose. What are three actions anyone could take to help address the root cause of the problem you’re trying to solve?

Number one is to spend time with someone who is different from yourself and listen to their lived experience without judgement.

The second thing is to have a curious mindset and invest time in reading and learning about an issue so that you have an in depth understanding of the problem.

And thirdly, use your voice in whatever room you’re in. Voting is really important. But so is getting involved in the work and encouraging others to do so. For example, if you belong to a religious organization, speak up if you see a need or an opportunity where your group could help an underserved population. If you’re in school, consider ways you and your fellow students can volunteer to support a community organization that is helping others different from yourself.

My overall message is to not be afraid to go into spaces where there are people you’re not used to associating with. There is something really powerful about interacting with individuals unlike yourself because you’ll find, while there are differences, there are also many commonalities. The best way to increase equity is through connectivity and proximity.

Based on your experience, what are the “5 Things You Need To Create A Successful & Effective Nonprofit That Leaves A Lasting Legacy?”

1 . Patience. Change takes time. When you’re trying to impact health, as we are, you can’t expect to see improvements quickly. It takes years, sometimes decades. Recognizing the need to be there for the long-term to make real change, Humana Foundation grants extend between three and five years, and longer if deemed necessary.

2 . Risk-taking. If you want to make change, you have to take risks knowing that you might fail and there will be people who might not agree with what you’re doing. At the Foundation we fundamentally believe in being bold and taking risks. One example of this is our willingness to make major changes. Originally we had a very broad health equity focus. In order to have greater impact, we have increasingly narrowed our focus to the specific areas of mental health and nutrition, as well as certain geographies. That meant walking away from grantees we had long-term and very visible partnerships with and doing things differently from what we’d previously done. It required that we address issues and populations we had not worked with before like veteran’s and children’s mental health. Changing our focus and strategy was a huge risk but it was also necessary to effectively respond to the needs of the communities and the cause we serve.

3 . Being nimble. The ability to be agile and nimble is critical for success. For example, we built out an entire new grant making system last year because we found that our prior system was demanding too much work on the part of grant applicants. While our intent had been that any group should have the opportunity to apply for a grant, we heard feedback that the application process was too long and involved for many organizations to comply with or be worth their while. Being nimble enabled us to rethink and change our process. We now have a two-tier application system that includes a short form application and then, those who become eligible, respond to a longer form application.

4 . Listening and responding. Philanthropists sometimes impose their idea of what a community needs when they may have it all wrong. A good example of this was a story I was told about a nonprofit that wanted to increase attendance for a maternal nutrition program to improve maternal health outcomes. They decided the problem was that women didn’t have transportation to get to their appointments so the nonprofit invested in a bus to drive the women to their classes. But the women were still not showing up. It turned out that while transportation may have been part of the problem, there was also a pack of wild dogs roaming the community that was scaring the women from walking and waiting on the street for the bus to pick them up. So instead of asking and understanding the real barriers to attendance, they were focused on and solving for the wrong problem.

5 . A data-driven approach. Your initiatives can’t be sustainable unless you’re measuring their effect and measuring the things that matter. Data is needed to show if the program is making a difference and if it’s not, it enables you to pivot and try a new approach. However, recognizing that many grantees have limited health equity tracking mechanisms, we also partner with academic institutions to test and learn. We currently have research partnerships with the University of North Carolina, Yale and the University of Texas examining effective and equitable solutions for preventing and reducing disparities in nutrition-related conditions and addressing mental health needs among diverse and underserved seniors, veterans and school-age children.

How has the pandemic changed your definition of success?

There were several important lessons I learned from the pandemic. One was the critical need for relationship building. During the pandemic, the initiatives that were most effective were those where the relationships were already strongly established because now we were in a crisis and we needed to really trust each other. By doing so, we further solidified those partnerships. It made me very aware of the importance of building those strong relationships in a post-pandemic world. And while we’ve been slow at emerging from the trauma, I see that there are real attempts at learning to connect with each other when we may have had more transactional interactions prior to the pandemic because we now understand more fully how critical they are to health and success.

It also taught me to be more flexible in my thinking about a problem. Whereas pre-COVID, I may have out-of-hand rejected an idea or approach, I learned that just because you think one thing is the focus, you really don’t know what’s coming around the corner so it’s advantageous to continue to be open to different possibilities because there can be an event that completely changes everything.

How do you get inspired after an inevitable setback?

That’s both a simple and tricky question for me to answer because setbacks never stop me. I just keep going. Not every day is going to be a win. You’re inevitably going to fall down. You’re going to build initiatives that will crumble; you’re going to create something and someone’s not going to like it. But if you’re playing the long-game, which I am, then you keep your eye on the ultimate prize which is changing lives and making this a more equitable world. When you live in the service of people and in genuinely wanting to improve their circumstances, then it doesn’t really matter when you fail once or twice. It just means you need to get up and try again. It’s not a zero-sum game. It’s not a short-game. We’re working for the long haul.

We are very blessed that very prominent leaders read this column. Is there a person in the world who you would like to talk to, to share the idea behind your non-profit? He, she, or they might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)

Change comes from ordinary people so it’s not about celebrity or power or title, it’s about who has the energy and will come along on the change journey with us. There’s no one person I want to talk to about the Humana Foundation and our cause. I would share our story and ideas with anyone who gets up every day trying to make the world a better place or wants to but are unsure how to do it.

You’re doing important work. How can our readers follow your progress online?

You can follow the Humana Foundation on LinkedIn here, or visit our website here.

Thank you for a meaningful conversation. We wish you continued success with your mission.

About The Interviewer: Vanessa Morcom is a millennial mom of three and founder of Morcom Media, a performance PR shop for thought leaders. She earned her degree in journalism and worked for Canada’s largest social enterprise. She can be reached at vanessa@morcom.media