The Healthiest County in America Just Told Me Helping Africans Is Out of Scope

By Kathryn Born, Founder & Executive Director, Dusoma Foundation

Last week I got a very polite letter. The Los Alamos Community Foundation had reviewed my application to its FY2027 Health and Wellness grant cycle and, after “a thorough and thoughtful review,” decided that my organization’s work “with Africa is admirable, but the connection to how this work will meet local needs and improve health and wellness in our community was weak.” The foundation gently noted that my nonprofit is “new to the area,” and suggested I try the Arts Council.

What a joke. Anyway, so here ya go, quick primer I generated, sources at bottom.

Follow the money, because it goes in a circle

The Health and Wellness money that LACF hands out does not come from Los Alamos. It comes from the Anchorum Health Foundation in Santa Fe, and Anchorum’s money comes from selling a hospital.

St. Vincent was a public community hospital from 1973 until 2008, when it was handed to CHRISTUS Health, a Catholic system headquartered in Irving, Texas. The ACLU of New Mexico, Planned Parenthood, Equality New Mexico, and the National Women’s Law Center formed a coalition to oppose that deal, because Catholic hospitals operate under the bishops’ “Ethical and Religious Directives,” and the hospital would not put its promises about reproductive care in writing. They lost. In 2023, Anchorum sold its remaining half of the hospital to CHRISTUS for more than $500 million, to be paid out over a decade.

So a community asset, built with decades of tax-exempt revenue from Northern New Mexico patients, was converted into a private endowment. Its tax filings for the fiscal year ending June 2024 show net assets of roughly $465 million. It is now, by its own description, the largest foundation in New Mexico.

Here is where it gets interesting. In that same fiscal year, Anchorum paid out about $26.3 million in grants. Twenty million of that, seventy-six percent, went to one recipient: CHRISTUS St. Vincent Medical Center. The buyer. The purpose was a “Clinical Support Fund,” and by the hospital’s own account roughly half of it went to finishing a cancer center building. Anchorum has committed $109 million to that fund over ten years.

Read that again. The foundation sold the hospital for $500 million, then began handing the money back to the hospital to build the hospital’s buildings. Of the $200 million Anchorum has promised to “deploy into the community” over the decade, more than half is already earmarked for the company that wrote the check. The remaining roughly $300 million stays in the endowment, generating tax-free investment income, indefinitely.

I am not a lawyer. I am told this is all perfectly legal. That is my point.

What the Catholic hospital doesn’t do

CHRISTUS Health’s own policy, as reported by Rewire News Group, restricts IUDs, contraception except for narrow medical purposes, sterilization, IVF, and abortion. A CHRISTUS spokesperson told Source New Mexico in 2023 that at St. Vincent, oral contraceptives “cannot be used solely for birth control.” The Santa Fe New Mexican has reported that CHRISTUS St. Vincent does not offer vasectomies in Santa Fe. In March 2023 the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a doctrinal note instructing Catholic health care institutions not to provide gender-affirming medical care.

This is the institution that receives three out of every four dollars Anchorum grants. I could not find a single Anchorum grant to an LGBTQ health organization or a reproductive health provider in its published filings. Perhaps I missed one. I’d be delighted to be corrected.

Meanwhile, Anchorum does not accept unsolicited proposals. It is invitation-only. The largest health funder in the state has, structurally, closed its door to anyone it hasn’t already decided to talk to.

The trickle that reaches the Hill

What does Los Alamos get from this half-billion-dollar machine? Anchorum’s 2024 filing lists a $150,000 “Donor Advised Funds Agreement” with LACF. Donor-advised funds, for the uninitiated, are the one charitable vehicle with no legal payout requirement at all; a Michigan study found 35 percent of them paid out nothing in a given year. In 2025, LACF’s Anchorum-funded Health and Wellness cycle distributed $52,750. In 2026, $92,500, split among seven organizations.

Ninety-two thousand five hundred dollars. For the entire county. For the year.

Anchorum’s president and CEO was paid $581,024 in fiscal 2025, according to the foundation’s Form 990. Its top six executives together took home more than $1.7 million. One executive’s salary is six times the entire Los Alamos health grant pool. In May, the Santa Fe New Mexican reported that the foundation’s senior vice president of strategic philanthropy had departed “amid unclear circumstances,” her attorney would say only that the matter had been “resolved amicably,” and the CEO was on leave; a longtime board member was then installed as the new chief executive. Nobody explained anything. Nobody has to.

The richest, whitest, healthiest county

Los Alamos County has the highest median household income in New Mexico, $147,139, nearly two and a half times the state figure. U.S. News named it the healthiest county in America in 2021. It has the lowest child poverty rate of any county in the United States and one of the highest concentrations of PhDs on earth. It is 0.81 percent Black. That is 157 people.

And this is the community whose health and wellness a $465 million foundation, born from the sale of a public hospital, has decided to serve with $92,500, routed through a donor-advised fund, administered by a nine-member volunteer board on which the chair and the secretary both spent their careers at the Family YMCA. The Family YMCA received this year’s single largest grant.

I am not alleging anyone did anything improper. I’m sure the Y does fine work. I am saying that when a small town’s charitable money is distributed by the small town’s institutional alumni to the small town’s institutions, the result is exactly what you’d predict, and it has a name: it’s a club.

What “local” is for

The committee said my work with Africa doesn’t improve health “in our community.” I’d ask them to look at a map. The hospital that generated this money serves Rio Arriba, San Miguel, Mora, and the Pueblos: some of the poorest counties in the nation, ten minutes from the richest. Anchorum’s own stated priorities are “health disparities” and “social determinants of health.” The disparity is not in Los Alamos. The disparity is the wall around it.

“Local” is a fine principle when it means accountability. It is something else when it means a $500 million endowment can define its community narrowly enough to exclude everyone who needs it, then define it broadly enough to include the Catholic hospital that bought the endowment’s hospital in the first place.

The letter ended by thanking me “for all that you do to make the world a better place.” I appreciate that. Now I’d like to know what the half a billion dollars is doing.

Kathryn Born is the founder and executive director of Dusoma Foundation in Los Alamos and editor in chief of Starve Magazine.

Sources (for the editor; not for publication)

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