Tara Health Foundation

Tara Health Foundation

Ruth Shaber, MD, established Tara Health Foundation in 2014 after a career as an OB/GYN and healthcare executive. The San Francisco-based foundation was designed as a 100% mission-aligned vehicle structured to spend out its entire corpus, directing its roughly $34.5 million pool exclusively toward gender, economic, and racial justice (Altss estimate). Shaber leads the foundation alongside Board Chair Michael Penn, aligning clinical and corporate discipline with philanthropic capital. Tara Health deploys its capital predominantly through direct venture capital strategies, making investments in companies that align with its justice mission. The foundation concentrates on healthcare services and related sectors, leveraging Shaber's clinical background. Its investment posture is reinforced through active participation in impact-investing networks including Confluence Philanthropy, Mission Investors Exchange, and The ImPact, which expand its co-investor and deal-sourcing pipelines. The foundation also holds an allocation to the CCM CRA Qualified Investment Fund, suggesting a fixed-income component within its broader deployment. The foundation maintains a compact governance footprint, with Rachel Robasciotti — founder of Adasina Social Capital — serving on the board and Stasia Obremskey acting as Managing Director of RH Capital. While total assets remain undisclosed, the roughly $34.5 million corpus places the foundation in the small-to-mid-sized institutional category. Tara Health has incubated field-building efforts such as Rhia Ventures and the Orchid Capital Collective, translating philanthropic capital into specialized investment and advocacy platforms. Recent years have positioned the foundation as a regular participant at Confluence Philanthropy forums. Tara Health's architecture diverges from perpetual foundations by mandating a full spend-out of its corpus. This finite-horizon structure creates urgency in deployment and forces a concentrated, high-conviction portfolio rather than a perpetual endowment's approach to intergenerational capital preservation. The foundation's integration with impact-investor networks also blurs the line between family-office style direct investing and traditional grant-making, operating more like a mission-driven venture platform than a standard charitable trust.