Article
The award
On July 7, the American Hospital Association named Sky Lakes the 2026 winner of the Foster G. McGaw Prize for Excellence in Community Service, which comes with $100,000 for programs that advance the prize’s goals. The Baxter Foundation sponsors the award, and the AHA administers it. Children’s National in Washington, Grady Health System in Atlanta and Valley Children’s Healthcare in Madera, Calif., were finalists and receive $10,000 each.
Sky Lakes has 176 licensed beds and serves more than 80,000 people spread across 10,000 square miles of southern Oregon and northern California. That scale and geography make its approach relevant to many independent and rural hospitals.
What Sky Lakes built
- A wellness center that grew outward. It began as an employee program and now offers the community lifestyle medicine, nutrition counseling, fitness challenges and mental health support.
- Local food systems. Partnerships support programs such as an online market for locally grown food, along with nutrition education and support for farmers.
- Public spaces. The hospital has helped develop parks, improve trails, add art and build playgrounds.
- Tobacco policy. With partners, it backed local rules including tobacco-free parks and events and retail licensing, plus cessation programs.
- Career pathways. School partnerships offer job shadowing, hands-on learning and paid student ambassador roles, aimed at rural workforce shortages.
Lessons for other hospitals
Several features of the Sky Lakes model translate well, even for organizations with tight budgets.
- Start inside. Testing a program on employees first builds evidence and buy-in before spending on the broader community.
- Use partners for reach. Most of the work runs through local organizations, which spreads cost and builds trust the hospital could not create alone.
- Link community benefit to workforce. Career pathway programs serve the community and help fill hard-to-recruit roles, a return boards can see.
- Act on policy, not only services. Local rules on tobacco and public spaces can change conditions for an entire county at low ongoing cost.
For executives facing new scrutiny of nonprofit community benefit, this is a useful reference. Programs like these are easier to defend when they connect to measurable goals such as chronic disease rates, local hiring and access, and when results are tracked from the start.
Archive entry for Jul 8, 2026, added Nov. 11, 2026.