Kresge’s Health Program recently welcomed Jan M. Delatorre as a new program officer. Delatorre, who most recently served as a program officer at the Michigan Health Endowment Fund, will support the team’s grantmaking work with a focus on the Climate Change, Health and Equity initiative. In this Q&A, Communications Officer Kate McLaughlin asks Delatorre a few questions to get to know him and to hear how he will approach his work at the foundation.

Q: What personal and professional experiences do you bring to the work you do at Kresge?

A: I bring a mix of public health, philanthropy, community partnership and lived experience to my work at Kresge. Before joining Kresge’s Health Program, I worked at the Michigan Health Endowment Fund, where I focused on expanding access to healthy food, wellness opportunities and community health supports for children, families and communities. I also worked with the Michigan Public Health Institute as an affiliate to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, with a focus on nutrition, chronic disease and HIV prevention.

But I also bring something more personal: my perspective as a naturalized American, a Filipino-American. In Filipino culture, the smallest unit of government is called the barangay. The word comes from balangay, a kind of boat used by early Austronesian communities. That image has always stayed with me. A community is not just a place on a map. It is a group of people navigating conditions together.

In the United States, we are not all “in the same boat.” Race, income, immigration status, geography, disability and political power shape how people experience crisis. But we are in the same storm. Climate change, public health failures, food insecurity, economic instability, and disinvestment affect all of us, though not equally. That distinction matters. It pushes me to think about solidarity without flattening difference. It reminds me that the work is not just to help people survive the storm, but to ask who has been given a strong boat, who has been left without one, and who gets to design the vessels we need next.

Professionally, that means I try to bring humility, curiosity and a systems lens. Communities already hold knowledge, memory, relationships and solutions. The work is not about coming in with all the answers. It is about listening well, understanding context, building trust, and helping move resources and power closer to the people doing the work.

Q: Kresge’s Health Program takes a broad view of health. How do you think about the intersection of factors like climate, food access and financial security and the role they play in community health?

A: I think these issues are deeply connected. Climate, food access, housing, income, transportation and financial security are often discussed as separate topics, but people experience them together in daily life.

For example, a family dealing with extreme heat may also be dealing with high utility bills, poor housing conditions, limited access to healthy food and transportation barriers. A neighborhood with limited access to grocery stores may also be facing flooding, air pollution, disinvestment and weak public infrastructure. These are not separate problems. They are overlapping conditions that shape whether people and communities can be healthy.

This is where the barangay idea is useful to me. If we understand community as a shared vessel, then health is not just an individual outcome. It is about the strength of the vessel itself: the relationships, institutions, public systems, cultural practices, physical infrastructure and local economies that help people stay safe and well.

I also think about E.F. Schumacher’s idea in the book Small Is Beautiful. Schumacher challenged the assumption that bigger systems are always better systems. He argued for human-scale approaches that respect local context, dignity and ecological limits. That idea feels very relevant to public health.

Large institutions matter, but they often miss what people experience at the neighborhood level. Sometimes the most important health infrastructure is small, relational and close to the ground: a trusted community organization, a neighborhood food model, a local clinic, a mutual aid network, a community health worker, a cultural space, or a resident-led effort to respond to heat, flooding or food insecurity.

For me, the point is not that small is automatically better. Scale matters. Policy matters. Public investment matters too. But systems need to be rooted in real communities. The strongest health strategies connect the small and the large: local wisdom with public systems, neighborhood trust with institutional resources, and community leadership with policy and investment.

Q: You’re stepping into this role at a pivotal moment for public health. What do you see as the greatest opportunities for impact in the communities Kresge’s Health Program serves?

A: One major opportunity is to help strengthen the local ecosystems that actually produce health. Public health departments matter, but they cannot do this work alone. Community-based organizations, residents, health centers, schools, local governments, artists, organizers and health systems all play a role.

The greatest opportunity is to support communities in building the kind of local infrastructure that allows them to navigate crisis and seize opportunities with more power, dignity and choice. That includes climate resilience, food systems, health access, housing stability, community safety and economic security. These are not separate lanes. They are all part of the same ecosystem.

The barangay image is helpful here too. A boat only works if people understand their roles, trust each other, and have what they need to move. In many communities, people have been asked to weather enormous storms with underfunded systems, fragmented services and institutions that are too often disconnected from lived experience. Kresge has an opportunity to support work that repairs those connections and helps communities shape the systems around them.

I also think there is an opportunity to move public health from a reactive model to a more community-anchored model. Too often, public health is asked to respond after harm has already happened. We need to invest earlier, closer to community, and in ways that address root causes. That means supporting prevention, resilience, organizing, cultural work and the behind-the-scenes relationship-building that makes systems change possible.

Schumacher’s thinking pushes me to ask a practical question: Are our systems serving people, or are people being forced to serve systems? That question feels urgent in public health right now. The opportunity is to build systems that are more human, more local, more accountable, and more capable of meeting the realities people are facing.

Q: What does meaningful partnership with communities look like to you, and how do you ensure that the people most affected by health inequities have a genuine voice in the work?

A: Meaningful partnership starts with respect. That sounds simple, but it has real implications. It means communities are not just consulted after the strategy is already written. They help define the problem, shape the priorities, decide what success looks like, and identify what kinds of support are actually useful.

It also means being honest about power. Philanthropy has resources, access and influence. Communities have lived experience, relationships, local knowledge and solutions that are often underfunded or ignored. A strong partnership does not pretend those power differences do not exist. It names them and works to shift more decision-making, flexibility and trust toward the people closest to the work.

Community is not abstract. It is relational. It is made up of people who know each other, depend on each other, disagree with each other, care for each other and navigate real conditions together. If we take that seriously, then community voice cannot be treated as a checkbox. A listening session is not the same as shared power.

For me, genuine voice means people can influence decisions, not just share stories. It means their knowledge changes the strategy, the funding, the evaluation, and the way institutions show up. It means philanthropy supports the small, relational, local work that often holds communities together but is rarely funded at the level it deserves.

We may not all be in the same boat, but we are in the same storm. Meaningful partnership means making sure the people who have been closest to the storm are not just invited to describe the damage. They are resourced and trusted to help design what comes next.