Foundation for a Healthy St. Petersburg

Foundation for a Healthy St. Petersburg

Founded in 2013 by President and CEO Dr. Kanika Tomalin, the Foundation for a Healthy St. Petersburg emerged from the sale of Bayfront Health Systems, a nonprofit community hospital, to Health Management Associates. Tomalin, a former Deputy Mayor of St. Petersburg, structured the entity to deploy its asset base exclusively toward closing racial health gaps in Pinellas County. The foundation's model ties its entire corpus — including a corporate stock and bond portfolio — to place-based health-equity initiatives. The foundation operates primarily as a grantmaker and programmatic funder, targeting the social drivers of health such as housing, economic opportunity, and education. It deploys capital through community grants, runs the Center for Health Equity at 2333 34th Street South, and collaborates with entities like Orlando Health Bayfront Hospital on targeted health initiatives. Its geographic mandate is hyperlocal, focused entirely on Pinellas County, with specific partnerships on Community Redevelopment Area (CRA) and tax-increment financing (TIF) projects alongside the City of St. Petersburg. The foundation's professional network includes active membership at the Champion level in the St. Petersburg Downtown Partnership and engagement with the St. Petersburg Area Chamber of Commerce. Its leadership is divided between Tomalin, who operates as CEO, and Board Chair Bridgette Heller. The asset base, an estimated $150 million (Altss estimate), is invested across corporate stock and bond portfolios, managed to sustain perpetual grantmaking for local health equity. Its structural differentiator is a closed-loop monetization model: a nonprofit hospital sale generated a permanent foundation whose entire AUM is geographically and missionally constrained to one county. Unlike broad-based conversions that funnel healthcare proceeds into diversified endowments, the Foundation for a Healthy St. Petersburg ties its corpus and operational focus exclusively to dismantling racial health disparities in the community where the original hospital operated.