Suzanne Koepplinger, director of the Catalyst Initiative at the Minneapolis Foundation, straddles worlds. The world of philanthropy, with its paperwork, processes and tidy benchmarks, can feel like a separate world from the visceral, complex and raw challenges of real life. With the Catalyst Initiative, Koepplinger bridges the divide. And support from the Bush Foundation in recent years has amplified the initiative’s impact.
A catalyst is an agent that provokes or accelerates significant change or action. And that’s just what the Catalyst Initiative was designed to do when the George Family Foundation launched it in 2014. For two decades, the foundation led efforts to transform healthcare to include integrative health and healing approaches. But they still weren’t seeing the results they had hoped for.
“Bill and Penny George were frustrated with the glacial pace of change at the systems level,” says Koepplinger. “So they decided they needed to come at it from both directions — from the top down and from the bottom up.” In 2014, they hired Koepplinger (a former George Family Foundation grant recipient in her capacity as executive director of the Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center) to work on the grassroots angle, with the aim of building integrative health and healing from the ground up. And the Catalyst Initiative was born.
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