Sisters Health Foundation

Sisters Health Foundation

Sisters Health Foundation launched in 1996 with the proceeds from the sale of St. Joseph's Hospital in Parkersburg, West Virginia, to a for-profit operator. The transaction created a conversion foundation — a structure common in the 1990s but unusual in its durability — charged with reinvesting hospital assets into community health rather than acute care. The Congregation of St. Joseph sponsors the foundation as one of its ministries, and the foundation's service map covers Calhoun, Doddridge, Jackson, Mason, Pleasants, Ritchie, Roane, Wirt, and Wood counties in West Virginia, plus Athens and Washington counties in Ohio. Executive Director Renee Steffen leads a lean grantmaking team that includes Associate Director Marian Clowes, who manages responsive and basic-needs programs. The foundation runs three core grant portfolios: responsive grants, which fund nonprofits addressing immediate health and human-service needs; an oral health initiative that supports dental access across its service region; and the "Healthy Communities" portfolio, which deploys multi-year general operating support to organizations working on nutrition access, built-environment improvements, and substance-use disorder treatment. Sisters Health Foundation was an early funder of the Mid-Ohio Valley's coordinated response to the opioid crisis, including supporting recovery-to-work programs and neonatal abstinence syndrome interventions. Geographic concentration is strict — nearly all dollars stay within 110 miles of Parkersburg. The foundation also participates in pooled-fund collaborations through the Appalachia Funders Network, where Clowes co-chairs the steering committee. The foundation's endowment size is undisclosed, but IRS filings show annual grantmaking in the $2M–$3M range, which places it among the larger health-conversion foundations in central Appalachia. The investment portfolio is managed as a traditional nonprofit endowment, with the board setting a spending policy rather than returning capital to a family. Adjacent structures include the Sisters of St. Joseph Health & Wellness Foundation, a sister entity also sponsored by the Congregation. Steffen and Clowes both hold board roles with Philanthropy West Virginia, the state's philanthropic membership association. As of the most recent reporting cycle, the foundation lists no professional-investment-staff hires beyond the core program team. What distinguishes Sisters Health Foundation structurally is its conversion-foundation origin — nearly three decades post-sale, it remains a health-equity investor on hospital-adjacent capital, with none of the healthcare-system conflicts that constrain hospital community-benefit offices. The foundation does not operate clinics, does not bill insurance, and does not report to a health-system CFO. That independence lets it fund upstream interventions — farmers markets, walking trails, recovery housing — that a hospital C-suite typically won't prioritize. Succession planning is not publicly detailed, though the dual-director structure with Steffen and Clowes provides operational redundancy uncommon in foundations of this size.