Dan Tuttle
Director of Health
Nothing happens without health, yet our society has not treated it like the priority it is. I’m hopeful that our work can meaningfully advance health equity for our youngest children and oldest adults.
Dan Tuttle began consulting with the Stupski Foundation on our strategy in 2016 and joined the staff in 2018. He leads the Foundation’s grantmaking team to transform serious illness care and improve early brain development, which has awarded $70 million since 2017. He and his team partners with health care providers, payers, community-based organizations, government agencies, and advocates. They aim to improve the developmental trajectory of young children and ensure that people with a serious illness can live in comfort and with dignity. Of particular importance to Dan and his team is investing in a safety net in which people of color are respected, their care wishes are heard, and their needs are met with compassion.
Grantmaking Highlights
Early Brain Development
Dan is dedicated to seeing Stupski’s partners achieve system-wide financing and policy wins to better serve their communities in the long term. In 2017, Dan built the case for investing in early brain development as a new issue area to intervene during the years that have outsized impact on long-term health and education equity, which the Stupski board of directors approved. He has been fortunate to work with pathbreaking Bay Area partners transforming pediatric well-child checks into deeper interactions that support whole family well-being. Those programs reach more than two-thirds of children covered by Medicaid in Alameda County and are on the way to becoming standards of care within San Francisco. Understanding that the family context is the most critical factor in early childhood development, Dan and his team also invested in the University of California San Francisco’s work to build the case for a dyadic care Medicaid benefit.
Serious Illness Care
In Hawaiʻi, Dan funded the development of the country’s first Medicaid community-based palliative care benefit in partnership with Hawaiʻi’s Medicaid authority, MedQUEST Division, to raise the statewide standard for serious illness care. Nearly two dozen other states have expressed interest in copying this work. In the Bay Area, Dan also led a three-year, $14 million investment in health systems to build their serious illness care capacity, launched in 2019.
Career & Academic Achievements
Previously, Dan was a senior project manager at Dalberg Global Advisors, a management consultancy focused on the social sector. His clients included development banks, multilaterals, large foundations, and global technology and payment companies. He is currently a board member of Dalberg Catalyst, which designs and implements systems solutions that address the interrelated nature of global problems and their root causes. He once spoke Spanish, Swahili, Mandarin, Melanesian Pijin, and Microsoft Excel. In 2019, he published “Rewriting Stella,” an illustrated novel in Shakespearean sonnets. Dan holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Arizona and a Master in Business Administration and a Master of Science in environment and resources from Stanford University. He is a proud Truman Scholar and Flinn Scholar.
