Supporting Rural Health Care: Our Work with Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs)

Nonprofit Nav has partnered with a range of community health causes, and Zufall Health and Family Health Care offer two clear examples of that work. Each is a Federally Qualified Health Center with a strong mission, and each needed something different to carry it forward. At Zufall, the focus was strategy and infrastructure: listening deeply across the organization, then shaping a three-year plan to keep its systems in step with its rapid growth. At Family Health Care, the focus was philanthropy: understanding how the community saw the organization, then building the case and the machinery to invite that community to give. Different starting points, same approach. In each engagement, we grounded the work in research, built the strategy alongside the people who would carry it, and left the center more capable and self-reliant than when we began.

Zufall Health: Matching Infrastructure to Impact

Zufall Health has grown from a one-night clinic into fourteen sites across seven counties in New Jersey, serving more than 50,000 patients a year. Growth at that pace can outrun an organization’s strategy, and Zufall was determined to keep its infrastructure in step with its reach.

Nonprofit Nav opened with a wide listening phase involving the following activities:

• Focus groups with providers and foundation leaders
• Interviews with board members and executive leadership
• A stakeholder survey targeting patients and community partners
• Comparative study of peer health centers.

That research gave leadership a clear, shared view of where to focus, from patient access to internal operations.

Nonprofit Nav then facilitated a strategy session built around the SOAR framework where board members and staff voted on priorities together until four initiatives emerged: sharpening Zufall’s public reputation, strengthening revenue and operations, modernizing digital infrastructure, and investing in its people. Nonprofit Nav also helped Zufall articulate its first formal set of organizational core values and led an organized abandonment exercise that identified practices the organization was ready to retire so its teams could concentrate on what mattered most.

The result was a three-year strategic plan with specific objectives, timelines, and named owners, built for board-level review at every meeting rather than a once-a-year check-in. Revenue cycle improvements and expanded telehealth are already underway, and a new medical assistant apprenticeship program is in motion.

Family Health Care: Turning Trust into Philanthropy

Family Health Care has served families across rural Michigan since 1967, offering integrated care regardless of ability to pay. But philanthropy had never been part of its model. As grant funding grew less certain, FHC needed to know whether donors would choose it at all, so Nonprofit Nav set out to answer that question directly.

Nonprofit Nav ran a community survey and a series of focus groups to test awareness and perception. The findings pointed to a clear opportunity. People who knew Family Health Care championed it, and one called it “a hidden gem,” yet many in the community still thought of it mainly as a safety net rather than a provider worth choosing on its own merits. That gap was the opening. From the research, Nonprofit Nav built and tested a set of value propositions that gave voice to what supporters already felt but had never heard put into words, turning quiet goodwill into a case for giving.

Two health centers, two very different starting points, one result: a clear path forward that the organization owns. Zufall Health walked away with a three-year strategic plan, a fresh set of core values, and priorities its board can steer at every meeting. Family Health Care walked away with a working philanthropy engine, from value propositions and a donor database to a monthly giving program with real supporters behind it. In both cases, the work was built to last beyond our engagement, because a plan only matters if the team can carry it. That is the throughline of how Nonprofit Nav serves FQHCs. We meet each center where it is, translate its mission into strategy and sustainable funding, and leave it stronger and more self-reliant than we found it. Health centers across the country face the same pressures these two did, and we would welcome the chance to help more of them turn their mission into lasting impact.