HCA Healthcare Announces HCA Healthcare Foundation’s $1.38 Million Grant to Girl Scouts

HCA Healthcare, Inc. (NYSE: HCA), one of the nation’s leading healthcare providers, today announced that the HCA Healthcare Foundation will donate $1.38 million over the next three years to Girl Scouts of the USA (GSUSA) to start work on creating a series of workshops aimed at addressing mental wellness among girls. The curriculum is aimed at helping girls better understand mental wellness and provide them with skills to strengthen their resilience and support their peers.

“The HCA Healthcare Foundation has a long history of partnering with Girl Scouts in Middle Tennessee and other communities,” said Joanne Pulles, vice president of community engagement at HCA Healthcare and president of the HCA Healthcare Foundation. “We are honored to continue this partnership with Girl Scouts on a national scale to create a new research-based initiative to help all girls be more resilient and take action to strengthen their own mental health.”

The grant will support Girl Scouts’ Mental Health 101 workshops, comprised of Getting to Know Your Emotions for fourth through fifth graders, Finding Your Voice for sixth through eighth graders, and its Peer Support workshop for ninth through twelfth graders. These workshops, which are under development now and launching the summer of 2023, will be created in collaboration with National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) subject matter experts. Visit www.girlscouts.org/mentalwellness for more information.

“Developed with the understanding that girls are especially impacted by societal pressures and the current youth mental health crisis, these workshops will have a direct impact on the girls we serve and beyond,” said Savita Raj, chief program officer, GSUSA. “Girl Scouts is grateful to HCA Healthcare for their investment in girls’ mental health – an area that needs to be a priority for our country.”

The HCA Healthcare Foundation has a history of supporting Girl Scouts – first in 1998 with the Girl Scouts of Middle Tennessee council, which was one of the Foundation's first class of grants to Middle Tennessee organizations. In 2017, the Foundation was an inaugural supporter of Girl Scouts of Middle Tennessee’s Troop 6000, an initiative that serves girls experiencing homelessness and is modeled after similar troops nationwide.

HCA Healthcare is committed to promoting mental wellness for its patients, colleagues, and communities. With approximately 2,300 sites of care, including 182 hospitals, in communities across 20 states, HCA Healthcare uses the knowledge and data from more than 300,000 annual behavioral health patient encounters to make positive advances in the ways it provides care to its patients.