From Recovery to Resilience: Announcing the Valerian Fund’s Strategic Focus on Climate and Women’s Health
In many ways, this new chapter for the Valerian Fund began years ago, with a moment of fragility. When I was a child growing up in Massachusetts, I became ill from an environmental cause. It was through this that I learned firsthand how deeply our health is tied to the world around us. Years later, working in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, I saw that truth magnified at scale: external shocks, whether environmental, climatic, or man-made, can devastate lives and systems in an instant. Yet they are not inevitable. They are preventable, but only if we have the foresight, evidence, and will to act.
After more than twenty years as both a practitioner and funder in women’s health, I felt called to use this year--a year of profound upheaval in global health– to pause and reflect on what lasting, equitable impact really means. That reflection brought me back to the principles that have guided my work from the beginning: keeping my aperture focused on equity, honoring the calling to care, and sustaining a practice of continuous curiosity.
These values brought renewed clarity to my work. I began to see how my lifelong commitment to women’s health must evolve to meet the realities of a changing climate. Climate change is a daily reality that threatens women’s health across the life course: from pregnancy complications linked to extreme heat and air pollution, to increased malnutrition and infectious disease due to crop loss and water insecurity, to disruptions in maternal and reproductive health services when climate disasters strike.
Recognizing this interdependence has inspired a new direction for the Valerian Fund: a focused strategy to address the impact of climate change on women’s health and rights, and to harness the power of strategic philanthropy and investment to accelerate resilience.
This evolution has been deepened through collaboration with Nicole Ippoliti of Bitton Global Advisory, whose expertise at the intersection of climate resilience, gender equality, and women’s health helped shape and sharpen this new strategic direction. We are now centering our work on three pillars that, together, ensure that women’s health and rights are safeguarded against the impacts of climate change:
Research, Advocacy, and Policy Reform
We champion evidence generation that quantifies how climate change affects women’s health and initiatives which translate that evidence into action through advocacy and policy reform.Infrastructure
We support the development of health facilities, systems, and supply chains that can withstand climate extremes while ensuring women have continued access to care.Workforce Development
We invest in the people who make resilience possible: the health workers who are first responders whenever a climate disaster strikes. Initiatives which strengthen climate-health healthworker training, expand social protection mechanisms, and improve access to mobile diagnostic and treatment tools are critical in ensuring providers can safely and sustainably anticipate and respond to climate-related health risks.
Our mission remains the same as it has always been: to build the soil where women’s health and well-being strengthen the foundation of resilience so that communities don’t just endure, but thrive.
