“Mission Partners delivered one of the most meaningful and well-thought-out strategic planning experiences that I have ever been a part of.”

– Ken Meehan (Former Board Chair and President of CARESTAR Foundation)

Clarifying Strategy to Advance Equity in Emergency Medical Services

Client: CARESTAR Foundation
Project: 2025-2030 Strategic Plan

CARESTAR Foundation is a California-based private foundation committed to eliminating racial disparities in emergency medical services (EMS) care delivery, clinical protocols, and patient outcomes. Operating at the intersection of research, practice, and policy, CARESTAR invests in clinician- and community-led solutions that demonstrate what equitable emergency response can look like — while working to scale those approaches across systems statewide.

As 2025 approached and its existing strategic plan came to a close, CARESTAR faced a fork in the road. The Board and staff were united around a central, process-leading question: how could the Foundation deepen and accelerate its impact on racial disparities in emergency medical services?

Essential clinical and community-based initiatives were underway, yet the organization needed to more clearly define its role within a complex ecosystem. At the same time, the Foundation sought to align its grantmaking, advocacy, and research around a more cohesive long-term strategy—one that reflected financial realities, preserved momentum, and translated innovation into lasting systems change.

So, CARESTAR engaged Mission Partners to guide the development of its next strategic plan.

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The Approach:
Aligning Bold Vision with Realistic Resources

Our goal at the outset was to create a practical, values-aligned framework that could support CARESTAR’s dual role—both a funder of real-world EMS solutions and an advocate pushing systems toward equity—and to ensure its investments translated into systems-level change.

Mission Partners designed and facilitated a community-informed planning process that included:

• In-depth interviews with grantees and field partners
• Listening sessions with board and staff
• Synthesis of lessons learned from prior funding investments
• Strategic work sessions to clarify priorities and long-term outcomes

By embedding deeply with the CARESTAR team, we helped surface key tensions—between urgency and sustainability, innovation and scale, ambition and capacity—and translate them into strategic clarity.

The resulting plan organizes CARESTAR’s work around four core streams within a financially sustainable framework, while remaining true to CARESTAR’S community-centered model. The strategy specifically elevates the expertise of community leaders closest to the work while providing a bigger-tent commitment that can drive measurable, long-term gains in equitable emergency care delivery across California.

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The Results:
Strategic Clarity and Organizational Alignment

The new Board-approved and community-supported strategic plan provides CARESTAR with:

• A more clearly articulated role of the foundation’s work within California’s EMS ecosystem
• Clearly defined strategic priorities aligned with mission and values
• A framework for decision-making that balances innovation with sustainability
• A roadmap for translating on-the-ground learning into durable policy and systems change

At the board meeting to approve the plan, former Board Chair and President Ken Meehan reflected on the process:

“Mission Partners delivered one of the most meaningful and well-thought-out strategic planning experiences that I have ever been a part of.”

With renewed clarity and alignment, CARESTAR is positioned to accelerate its impact — strengthening equitable emergency response systems and advancing measurable improvements in patient outcomes statewide.