The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation seeks to improve the health and health care of all Americans. Our efforts focus on improving both the health of everyone in America and their health care—how it's delivered, how it's paid for, and how well it does for patients and their families.

We are guided by a fundamental premise: we are stewards of private funds that must be used in the public's interest. Our greatest asset isn't our endowment; it's the way we help create leverage for change.

We create leverage by building evidence and producing, synthesizing and distributing knowledge, new ideas and expertise. We harness the power of partnerships by bringing together key players, collaborating with colleagues, and securing the sustained commitment of other funders and advocates to improve the health and health care of all Americans.

To ensure that our programs are effective, we developed a framework to organize our grantmaking practices and areas of focus.

This framework recognizes that we do several different kinds of grantmaking and that improving the ways these grants work together can enhance the measurable progress we make toward our overall mission. The framework groups most of our grantmaking into four clusters we call portfolios—Human Capital, Vulnerable Populations, Pioneer and Targeted. Within the Targeted portfolio, we have chosen a group of critical issues to address—Childhood Obesity, Coverage, Public Health and Quality/Equality—by setting specific time-limited objectives, benchmarks, a plan of action, and a budget to accomplish the objective.

The rich history of the Foundation began with our founder, Robert Wood Johnson.