Williamsburg Health Foundation

Williamsburg Health Foundation

The foundation was established in September 1996, seeded by the proceeds from the affiliation agreement that merged Williamsburg Community Hospital into Sentara Healthcare. Deanna Van Hersh serves as President and CEO, overseeing an organization whose board draws investment governance from senior professionals at Morgan Stanley, Chesapeake Wealth Management, and Old Point National Bank. The institution occupies a specific legal niche: a health-conversion foundation whose entire corpus was created by a single nonprofit-hospital transaction. The endowment supports a grants-based deployment model rather than a direct-investment or private-equity strategy. The portfolio spans public equities, fixed income, and alternative allocations managed through fund-of-funds structures, secondaries, and limited direct commitments — a construction shaped by Finance Chair Douglas Myers and Trustee Mitchell Harry, both Morgan Stanley veterans. Geographic deployment is exclusively local; every grant flows to service providers and programs operating within the Greater Williamsburg region of Virginia, with a mandate tied explicitly to health outcomes. The board integrates advisors from multiple Tidewater financial institutions. Trustees include Felicia Stovall, a Senior VP at Chesapeake Wealth Management, and Cheri Green, a private wealth advisor at Old Point National Bank. The foundations's professional network ties extend through Grantmakers In Health, the Council on Foundations, and the Virginia Funders Network. The office sits at 4801 Courthouse Street, with the Jeanne Zeidler Meeting Room named for the former CEO. The foundations's signature structural feature is its single-transaction origin. Unlike endowments that accumulate over decades of donor gifts, this corpus derives entirely from one hospital sale, making its governance uncommonly concentrated. The board operates with direct ties to the buyer — Sentara's Director of Patient Care Services, Beth Davis, holds the board chair role — creating an ongoing governance link between grantor and the hospital system that generated the endowment.