Trustbridge Hospice Foundation

Trustbridge Hospice Foundation

Trustbridge Hospice Foundation was established in 1978 as the fundraising and endowment arm of what is now Florida's largest not-for-profit hospice provider. The foundation exists to cover the cost of patient programs and specialized services that fall outside the reimbursement boundaries of Medicare, Medicaid, and commercial insurance. Community philanthropy, municipal grants — including funding from the Town of Jupiter — and partnerships with health systems like Baptist Health South Florida form the asset base, rather than a single-family wealth origin. The foundation directs its deployed capital toward four distinct channels: direct subsidies for uncompensated hospice and palliative patient care, professional education through the Fellowship in Hospice and Palliative Medicine at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, pediatric and bereavement support programs, and community-based initiatives operated alongside clinical partners. Its physical footprint spans five Florida counties through owned assets that include the C.W. Gerstenberg Hospice Center in West Palm Beach, regional offices in Fort Lauderdale and Boca Raton, and a network of Trustbridge Resale Stores in Palm Beach and Broward Counties that generate recurring operating revenue. In 2024 the foundation's parent entity affiliated with Empath Health, a move that consolidated two of Florida's largest not-for-profit hospice and home-health networks. That affiliation expands the foundation's durable reach into the Gulf Coast through Empath's existing infrastructure while preserving its independent fiduciary board. The foundation maintains deep local ties through long-term chamber memberships — 20-plus years with the Palm Beach North Chamber of Commerce — and recurring grants from municipal and health-system partners. Unlike a traditional grantmaking foundation, Trustbridge Hospice Foundation operates as an integrated funding utility inside a clinical delivery organization. Its endowment corpus directly underwrites operational shortfalls in end-of-life care, making it structurally closer to a healthcare-system reserve fund than to an independent private foundation. That embedded architecture means allocators evaluating the foundation are essentially evaluating the philanthropic risk-capacity layer of a not-for-profit healthcare enterprise.