AKRON, Ohio — A little more than a year after Summa Health was sold to a for-profit company, Greater Akron will learn Thursday night, Nov. 12, exactly how much money the new Trailhead Community Health Foundation of Greater Akron has to invest in the region’s health — and the foundation’s leaders say the figure is only the starting point.
Trailhead will announce its initial endowment at a “Report to the Community” event at 6 p.m. Nov. 12 at The Trailhead at Cascade Lofts, 21 W. North St. in Akron, according to the Akron Beacon Journal. The endowment comes entirely from the transfer of funds following the October 2025 purchase of Summa Health by Health Assurance Transformation Company, known as HATCo, Trailhead President and CEO Tracy Carter told the Akron Beacon Journal.
“We are here as a result of the sale,” Carter told the Akron Beacon Journal inside Trailhead’s new offices in the Akron Centre building at 50 S. Main St. Carter, who stepped into the top executive job in January, told the Beacon Journal the foundation is now looking beyond the sale proceeds themselves. “We are looking forward to growing the endowment with our fundraising team,” she told the Beacon Journal. “And now that we have our strategic plan, we look forward to sharing that with individuals, corporations, foundations and some government leaders to see if they would like to invest alongside us so that we can have a greater impact.”
Trailhead exists because of a condition state regulators placed on the deal. When HATCo bought Summa, one of the stipulations from the Ohio Attorney General’s Office under former Attorney General Dave Yost was that a new community foundation be created to provide funding for charitable purposes, according to the Akron Beacon Journal. Trailhead Board Chair Marty Hauser told the Beacon Journal the organization carries the same tax identification number as the former Summa Foundation, but Yost required the foundation to be moved “on the other side of a wall, if you will,” from the health system it came from.
That separation gives Trailhead a second, unusual job: it is the independent public monitor of the Summa-HATCo transaction itself. The attorney general required Trailhead to serve as monitor “to make sure that HATCo is in compliance with all of the covenants or commitments they made as part of (an) agreement with the state,” Carter told the Akron Beacon Journal. She told the paper she is the primary staff person in the monitor role, working with the board’s Monitoring & Compliance Committee, and that Trailhead is developing a request for proposals for a firm that specializes in public monitoring to help guide the work.
About 90% of the initial endowment is unrestricted money from the sale and funds transferred from the former Summa Foundation, which Trailhead will direct according to its own strategic plan, Carter and Hauser told the Akron Beacon Journal. Restricted donations — gifts donors gave the old Summa Foundation for a specific cause — make up roughly the remaining 10%, and Trailhead board members spent the months after the October 2025 acquisition talking with hundreds of those donors about how their gifts will be stewarded now.
Those conversations have largely gone Trailhead’s way. “I can count them, the handful, who don’t want to move forward” with leaving their donation at Trailhead, Carter told the Akron Beacon Journal, and none have asked for their donations back. Where a restricted gift cannot be honored as written — a donation meant for nurses in Summa’s oncology unit, for example — Trailhead cannot send the money to Summa, so it talks with the donor about honoring the intent another way. “Your intent was to educate nurses. There are lots of other ways we can educate oncology nurses in the community,” Hauser told the Beacon Journal, pointing to nursing programs at NEOMED, Stark State and other area schools. Some scholarship funds, Carter told the paper, Trailhead will not steward at all, and donors have redirected those gifts to colleges and universities directly.
Summa’s new leadership is publicly wishing the foundation well. “This is an exciting time for the Trailhead Foundation and for our community,” Summa President and CEO Jennifer Eslinger said via email in a statement reported by the Akron Beacon Journal. “Investing in the health and well-being of communities is important work and the impact of that investment will be felt for years to come. We look forward to seeing the difference Trailhead makes and are excited to watch all that they accomplish.” Carter told the Beacon Journal she met Eslinger a couple of weeks ago to introduce herself ahead of the monitoring work.
What we know — and what we’re still waiting on. What is confirmed: Trailhead will publicly announce its initial endowment on the night of Nov. 12, the money traces entirely to the HATCo purchase of Summa and transfers from the former Summa Foundation, and the foundation holds the dual role of grantmaker and independent monitor of the sale. What is still to come: the endowment figure itself, the first grant priorities under the new strategic plan, and the firm Trailhead selects to help with its monitoring work.
Akron readers following the city’s health landscape may also want our coverage of the Akron Zoo’s response to a viral AI lion-escape photo and the Summit County Jail’s second straight perfect state inspection.
What happens next is Thursday night’s announcement itself: once the endowment figure and strategic plan are public, Akron-area nonprofits, schools and health programs will get their first look at how much charitable money the Summa sale left behind for the community — and how they can compete for it.