About: Robert Phillips
Website: http://www.calendow.org
Profile: As director of the Health and Human Services program at The California Endowment, Phillips leads the foundation’s efforts to develop initiatives to reduce barriers to efficient, effective functioning health systems that promote the health of low-income communities and communities of color. In this capacity, Phillips serves as the foundation lead on many of The Endowment’s major funding initiatives such as the foundation’s Community Clinics Initiative (CCI) and Covering California’s Kids (CCK) program. CCI aims to strengthen the state’s safety net system of community clinics and the Covering California’s Kids program supports efforts throughout the state to simplify enrollment and expand health coverage to all of the state’s nearly 800,000 kids without health coverage. Phillips joined The Endowment in August 2006. He was appointed Director of Health and Human Services in January 2009. Prior to joining The Endowment, Phillips was a Principal at Carter Phillips LLC, a public affairs firm that specializes in strategic communications and public affairs consulting to nonprofits, government and labor unions. Phillips’ diverse public policy and advocacy background includes his service as a senior associate at Policy Link, a national nonprofit research and advocacy organization, where he provided strategic development and direction for the organization’s initiatives on health disparities and asthma. Phillips also was a capital strategies regional coordinator and political coordinator/organizer for the Service Employees International Union in Oakland, CA, and Washington DC, and a senior health policy analyst for the AFL-CIO in Washington, DC. He is a former board member of the California Transplant Donor Network, and the former Secretary/Treasurer of the Board of Trustees of the Alameda County Medical Center. Phillips is a resident of Oakland, CA, and received his bachelors in Political Science/Economics from Morehouse College in Atlanta, his masters in Public Affairs from the Maxwell School of Citizen and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, and his masters in Public Health from Harvard University’s School of Public Health. He is currently a doctoral candidate in Health Policy at the UNC-Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health.