Show Your Work is a 7-part series from the Health Trust on how we operate, how we make decisions, and why we think the community deserves more than our word for it.
For years, the Trust operated with a simple philosophy: do good work, and the community will notice.
It was well-intentioned. It was also wrong.
Doing work quietly is not the same as doing it transparently. An organization that manages $308 million in community assets, makes funding decisions that affect nearly 100 organizations, and monitors one of the region’s most consequential health care transactions cannot assume that good intentions are self-evident.
We know questions exist. Some are practical: Where does the money come from? How do you decide who gets funded? What does it cost to run the organization? Others are harder: Is the Trust politically motivated? Are funding decisions fair? Why does so much money go to Banner? These are reasonable questions, and they deserve real answers. Not “trust us.”
So we wrote the answers down.
Our new FAQ, found under How We Work, covers the questions our community actually asks, including the ones that come with a sharp edge. We did not write around the uncomfortable parts. The Banner distribution is explained in full. The operating budget is broken down. The question about whether we only fund organizations we already know is answered directly. The information is there.
We also launched a Research and Data page that collects the original research, community assessments, focus groups, and policy analysis that shape how we make decisions. The youth well-being infographic. The Pathways to and Through Houselessness report. The State of Our Health survey. The REMI report on Medicaid and the economics of health care in Wyoming. These are not internal documents. They are public because if we are asking the community to trust our judgment about where to invest, the community should be able to see the information we are basing that judgment on.
This is not a pivot. The work has not changed. The commitment to Natrona County has not changed. What is changing is the expectation that the community should simply take our word for it.
There is more to come. Future posts in this series will break down exactly where the money goes, what it costs to run the organization, how investment decisions get made, and why the endowment grows even as we spend. We will continue publishing research as it is completed. Later this year, we’ll be investing in public programming in our Collective Space that brings community members and organizations into direct conversation with the work.
None of this will resolve every question or satisfy every skeptic. But there is a difference between claiming to be accountable and actually being accountable. We are trying to close that gap.
The work still matters. It just has to speak out loud now.
