The SFMMS Community Service Foundation—a charitable 501 (c)(3) organization—serves as the philanthropic arm of the San Francisco Marin Medical Society. CSF addresses pressing public health issues by providing leadership in crucial and emerging health issues, strengthening the ability of physicians to work with diverse communities, and enabling physicians to provide the best care possible to their patients through various outlets, including training opportunities and access to cutting edge materials and resources.
The SFMMS CSF has recently supported with charitable donations the following organizations: NovatoSpirit, GirlVentures, SF Marin Food Bank, Homeward Bound, American Clinicians, Academy on Medical Aid in Dying, Glide, Planned Parenthood of Northern California, Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, SFGH Foundation earmarked to fund reproductive health services at San Francisco, and General Hospital/UCSF.
The CSF board is the SFMMS Executive Committee, which makes decisions regarding these functions. SFMMS members can nominate worthy new potential grantees HERE.
CSF Funding and Distributions
The SFMMS CSF has served as a conduit for funds to and from funders and community organizations for various projects, including most of the efforts above and more. Donations are tax-deductible.
Project Examples
Pallative Care Project
The SFMMS CSF received a two-year, $40,000 grant from the California Health Care Foundation (CHCF) and Metta Fund to continue and expand our outreach and educational efforts to improve palliative care in San Francisco and beyond, with a focus on the POLST form as a means of increasing use of advance directives.
Environmental Health
A national conference on “Environmental Health in the New Century”, held at the University of California, San Francisco, drew a capacity crowd of over 400 and resulted in the formation of a national network of professionals and patients involved in the field, called the Collaborative on Health and the Environment.
Drug Policy and Education
The SFMMS CSF served as grantee for funds from the Open Society Institute for national conferences on the drug MDMA (“ecstasy”) and “New Approaches to Drug Education,” both of which drew hundreds of attendees from around the nation.
Intimate Partner Violence
The SFMMS CSF funded the development of the SFMMS guidelines on domestic violence screening and intervention. This brochure represents a concise and clinically-based approach to this complex issue, and distills knowledge from existing, much-longer documents. The brochure has been widely distributed and well-received by clinicians city-wide and beyond and was cited in the Journal of the American Medical Association as one of the best resources on this topic.
Medical Ethics
The SFMMS CSF was the recipient of a grant from the Walter and Elise Haas Fund and the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation for the development of new approaches to the issue of medical futility. The procedural model for this project was a previous effort also funded by these foundations to develop consensus guidelines on physician-hastened death. Both of these resulted in work published in the Western Journal of Medicine and have served as a template for hospital policies and have been widely discussed in the media, including on the front page of the New York Times. We have developed new policies on end-of-life issues as well and are working to increase and improve the use of POLST, the Physician Orders for Life Sustaining Treatment form.
Cancer in the Chinese Community
The SFMMS CSF was the first fiscal intermediary and partner in a multi-year project to research and improve the incidence of and response to cancer in San Francisco’s large Chinese community. We received a grant from the National Institutes of Health via the University of California, and renewed funding for a second five-year period.
Antibiotic Resistance
A conference hosted and funded by the SFMMS CSF resulted in a policy statement on overuse of antibiotics in agriculture which was published and widely discussed; a coalition of health groups working on this issue has supported more rational national policy.