Allegany Franciscan Ministries (Palm Harbor, FL)

Eighteen individuals have been named to the 2019‐2020 Fellowship for the Common Good in Overtown, Lincoln Park, and Wimauma, Florida. The Fellowship is a 12‐month leadership development program for community residents. It is part of an initiative launched by Allegany Franciscan Ministries, designed to create healthier, safer, and more connected communities.

The 2019‐2020 Fellowship cohort includes six resident leaders from each Common Good Community:

  • Lincoln Park—Henrell Wilson, Cynthia Ashley, Ionis Jefferson, Benjamin Braxton, Jarius Gilliam, Gregory Jones
  • Overtown—Kenneth Mobley, Octavia Yearwood, Cecilia Stewart, Anitrice McKinnis‐Jackson, Akie Smythe, and Beatriz Laracuente
  • Wimauma—Ebony Cohen, Rhony Hernandez, Samuel Badger, Latrice Scott, Nicole Allen, and Angela Crawford

The Fellowship develops civic leaders who will take action to advance their communities. Fellows receive

civic leadership education and individualized coaching, and engage in peer networking and community

in Florida and Louisiana. The 2019‐2020 Fellows are the third cohort of the Fellowship. Allegany Franciscan Ministries has invested nearly $1 million to offer the Fellowship through 2020.

The Common Good Initiative was launched in 2014 to work with people in Lincoln Park, Wimauma and Overtown, Florida to build healthier, safer, and more connected places where everyone thrives. More than $11.5 million has been invested in the three communities to date, leveraging significant additional resources.

For more information about the Fellowship and the Common Good Initiative, click here.

Contact: Brittney Frazier
Phone: 727.507.9668
Email: bfrazier@afmfl.org

The Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan Foundation (Detroit, MI)

The Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan Foundation recently awarded nine grants under their Community Health Matching Grant program. Among the grantees are:

  • Catherine’s Health Center—to integrate a community health worker as part of the multidisciplinary care team in a safety net clinic. ($50,000)
  • Central Michigan University, Delicia Pruitt, MD—to educate vulnerable populations through clinician patient/family discussion intended to effectively remove knowledge barrier to appropriate End of Life care. ($25,000)
  • Health Department of Northwest Michigan—to promote mothers’ mental health, reflective capacity, and sensitive parenting. ($50,000)
  • Henry Ford Hospital—to assess preliminary efficacy, acceptability, reach, and implementation of the Contraception Counseling and Referral in the Emergency Department Intervention. ($50,000)
  • McFarlan Charitable Corporation—to provide comprehensive primary health care, focused on the special needs of vulnerable older adults ages 55 and older. ($50,000)
  • Michigan League for Public Policy—to measure child well-being and use that data and information to inform policy and programs to improve the lives of children. ($50,000)
  • Michigan State Medical Society—to provide physicians, medical students, health care providers, and all other persons interested in biomedical ethics issues with educational opportunities on relevant biomedical issues. ($36,000)
  • Project Healthy Communities—to improve health by decreasing risk of preventable chronic disease. ($50,000)

Contact: Jacqueline Paul
Phone: 202.868.4804
Email: foundation@bcbsm.com

California Endowment (Los Angeles, CA)

The California Endowment announced its President’s Youth Council (PYC), an advisory body of youth leaders to provide authentic youth perspective, thought leadership and candid feedback on The California Endowment’s strategies in pursuit of health and justice. Created by President and CEO Robert K. Ross, MD, seven years ago, the 12-member PYC is a genuine effort to integrate youth input and decisionmaking into The Endowment’s current 10-year Building Healthy Communities plan and its next strategic plan to launch in April 2021.

The PYC and their hundreds of activist youth colleagues networked across California have demonstrated how connecting young leaders across the state can lead to positive, state-level and statewide policy change. A prime example of this is evidenced by the success of California’s common-sense school discipline reform efforts to move dollars from incarceration to prevention, for which youth played an integral role and resulted in significant local and state policies.

The PYC is supported by two foundation staff who provide meeting logistics and structure and meets three to four times annually. Members range in age from 16-25 years old and each serve an average of three to six-year terms. PYC members are diverse, represent underserved communities across California, and are nominated by their respective communities to serve on the council.

For a complete list of PYC members with their photos and bios, click here.

Contact: Jeff Okey
Phone: 213.928.8622
Email: jokey@calendow.org

 

Connecticut Health Foundation (Hartford, CT)

A group of Hartford, Connecticut social service organizations teaming up to reduce infant mortality and improve outcomes for families of young children and a collaborative of agencies in Waterbury, Connecticut working to better serve frequent emergency department visitors will receive grants from the Connecticut Health Foundation intended to support more systematic links between community-based organizations and local hospitals.

The grants grew out of the recognition that much of what influences people’s health happens outside the clinical care system, in people’s everyday lives. The funding from the Connecticut Health Foundation is intended to help community-based organizations build their capacity to overcome some of the barriers to developing deeper links between health care and social service organizations, including differences in service delivery, funding, and data collection. Each collaborative of community-based organizations will receive a $75,000 grant and technical assistance for the first year of this work.

The two groups receiving the funding are:

  • Catholic Charities Archdiocese of Hartford, in partnership with The Village for Families and Children and the Hispanic Health Council—these organizations will develop a better system for home visiting services for pregnant women and families of young children. Their work will build on a project they are already undertaking with Saint Francis Hospital and Medical Center and the Hartford Department of Health and Human Services, with funding from the state Office of Early Childhood, to develop a home visitation system in Hartford, Connecticut that will provide a single point of entry for potential clients, refer them to the appropriate agency, and use a shared database between the agencies to identify how to best use resources.

    The funding will help develop their capabilities to work in a more systematic way with Saint Francis, including potentially piloting a model in which the hospital would contract with community-based organizations to help improve the health and well-being of their shared patients.
     
  • Greater Waterbury Health Partnership, working with Center for Human Development and New Opportunities, Inc.—these organizations will create a community care team, a model for bringing together health care and social service providers to better address all the needs of people who frequently seek emergency room care. Waterbury, Connecticut’s two hospitals, Saint Mary’s and Waterbury Hospital, are currently overwhelmed by re-admissions and unnecessary emergency room visits because patients’ nonmedical needs are not being met in a systemic way.

    The funding will help the hospitals, StayWell, and the community-based organizations develop the infrastructure necessary to create a community care team that can successfully share patient data and address patients’ medical, behavioral health, and nonmedical needs, particularly housing and transportation.

In addition, the foundation awarded three grants totaling $220,000. They are:

  • Community Catalyst—to provide technical assistance to faith-based grassroots advocacy organizations in Connecticut that are involved in supporting policies that will advance health equity, with the goal of building the organizations’ capacity for successful advocacy. ($60,000)
  • Connecticut Voices for Children—to ensure that children can be as healthy as possible. This includes a focus on ensuring that eligible children are insured through HUSKY (the state’s name for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program), identifying and addressing barriers to families maintaining coverage, and ensuring that health reform efforts advance health equity. ($110,000)
  • Hispanic Health Council—to advance sustainable ways to support the workforce, including helping to assure that the state’s implementation of a voluntary certification process for community health workers is successful, providing education and skill-building for community health workers about the coming certification process, and working with state agencies and commercial insurers on ways to pay for community health worker services in a sustainable way. ($50,000)

Contact: Arielle Levin Becker
Phone: 860.724.1580 x 16
Email: arielle@cthealth.org

Health Foundation of Central Massachusetts (Worcester, MA)

The Health Foundation of Central Massachusetts recently awarded Activation Fund grants totaling almost $800,000. These grants will support a wide range of health-related projects throughout Central Massachusetts.

The grants awarded are:

  • Abby’s House—to identify unmet advocacy and health needs of their clients and to expand access to services through collaborations. ($75,012)
  • Ascentria Care Alliance—to expand its low-cost Immigration Legal Assistance Program from limited to full representation in immigration matters. ($81,600)
  • Community Legal Aid—to hire a housing attorney who will raise funds by representing low income tenants in eviction and conditions cases where attorney’s fees can be collected from the landlord. ($86,482)
  • Friendly House—for the purchase of a refrigerated van to transport meals for its After School and Summer Meals Program for low-income children. This project is in partnership with the City of Worcester. ($34,160)
  • GAAMHA, Inc.—to hire a part-time Positive Behavior Supports clinician for its community-based day programs located in Gardner and Orange, Massachusetts. ($43,288)
  • LUK, Inc.—to utilize telehealth to increase access to behavioral health services and family visitations in the North Central area by implementing telehealth. ($104,648)
  • Neighbor to Neighbor Massachusetts—to ramp up their door-to-door grassroots organizing to assist in complete counts for the 2020 Census and to re-engage the Worcester, Massachusetts community. ($100,800)
  • Quaboag Valley Community Development Corporation—to train three staff members in order to provide first-time homebuyer assistance to expand its offerings related to financial skills building. ($28,000)
  • Quinsigamond Community College (QCC)—to develop and implement an Oral Health Career Pathway for students in Dental Assisting Programs at three local secondary and post-secondary schools into the Dental Hygiene Program at QCC. ($45,809)
  • Seven Hills Foundation—to create a new workforce training program with sustainable farming as a potential career path for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. ($109,903)
  • South Middlesex Opportunity Council (SMOC)—for the installation of an automatic fire sprinkler system and handicap accessible features in a building that SMOC is renovating. The renovation will create new single room occupancy units for 14 low-income homeless or formerly homeless single unaccompanied adults in recovery. ($84,000)

Contact: Daniel P. Germain
Phone: 508.438.0009 
Email: dgermain@hfcm.org

New York Community Trust (New York, NY)

The New York Community Trust awarded $8.2 million in grants to 56 organizations in all five boroughs of New York, NY. Health-related grants include:

 

  • Catholic Charities Community Services—to provide vision care and social services for immigrants and older adults with visual disabilities. ($100,000)
  • Citizens Budget Commission—to propose solutions to New York’s health insurance coverage gap. ($60,000)
  • Citymeals-on-Wheels—to advance the long-term stability of the city’s largest provider of home-delivered meals for isolated and frail older adults. ($75,000)
  • City University of New York—to train recovering substance users to provide peer support. ($300,000)
  • Columbia University, Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons—to study spinal cord stimulation as a potential treatment for people with Parkinson’s disease. ($226,000)
  • Fountain House—to develop coordinated treatment plans that include medical, behavioral health, and psychosocial rehabilitation services. ($200,000)
  • Fund for Public Health in New York—to better care for black women in New York City hospitals by providing training for health care institutions. Clinicians will practice addressing life-threatening complications during childbirth using robotic mannequins, and peer educators will coach pregnant women on their rights in maternity care. ($300,000)
  • Health Research—to study aeruginosa, a fatal, drug-resistant bacterium that grows in relatively sterile settings like hospitals. ($307,000)
  • Matters New York—to advocate for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities in the transition to Medicaid managed care. ($150,000)
  • New York School-Based Health Foundation—to help downstate school-based health centers transition to Medicaid managed care. ($100,000)
  • New York University, Rory Meyers College of Nursing—to train primary care nurses who work in community settings to identify and treat addiction and other behavioral health problems. ($285,000)
  • Osborne Association—to educate policymakers and nonprofits about the needs of formerly incarcerated older adults. ($100,000)
  • Weill Cornell Medicine—to study the effects of beta blockers on older adults with heart failure. ($200,000)

Contact: Amy Wolf
Phone: 646.214.1004
Email: aw@nyct-cfi.org

New York State Health Foundation (New York, NY)

The New York State Health Foundation (NYSHealth) has selected six organizations across New York for grant awards totaling more than $728,000 to help them adopt or spread OpenNotes.

OpenNotes is an international movement to give patients access to visit notes written by their doctors, nurses, or other clinicians. Established in 2010, OpenNotes creates partnerships toward better health and health care by giving everyone on the medical team, including the patient, access to the same information. When patients have access to their own visit notes written by health care providers, they better remember what was discussed during the visit; feel more in control of their care; are more likely to take medications as prescribed; and can share notes with their caregivers.

These awards will support federally qualified health centers, multispecialty group practices, hospital-affiliated physician groups, independent physician practices, and other non-hospital health care settings statewide in implementing OpenNotes—ensuring that more New Yorkers will have access to their own notes.

Grant recipients are:

  • BronxCare Health Integrated Services System Inc.
  • Care For The Homeless
  • Community Health Center of Richmond, Inc.
  • GHVHS Medical Group, PC
  • Institute for Family Health
  • Upstate Family Health Center, Inc.

NYSHealth also awarded a grant to the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where the national OpenNotes program office is based, to provide technical assistance to the six organizations as they undertake their projects.

Email: info@nyshealth.org

Obici Healthcare Foundation (Suffolk, VA)

Obici Healthcare Foundation announced $3.6 million in grants to help health safety-net providers deliver quality care for all residents of Western Tidewater, Virginia and creation of a partnership with the Center for Nonprofit Excellence to strengthen local nonprofits.

A strategy of the foundation’s Access to Healthcare Initiative is to offer support for health safety-net providers who deliver comprehensive care to uninsured and medically underserved populations. Safety-net providers include emergency rooms, free and charitable clinics, local health departments, Federally Qualified Health Centers, community health centers and other providers that deliver care to a significant number of uninsured and underinsured patients.

  • ForKids Inc.—to strengthen health care access for families experiencing homelessness. ($123,000)
  • The Genieve Shelter—to fund Direct Services for Victims of Violence, a project that aims to serve victims of domestic and sexual violence, human trafficking and stalking in six localities within Virginia. ($50,000)
  • Horizon Health Services Inc.—to address social determinants of health of its patient population and to build needed infrastructure. ($510,000)
  • The Up Center—to provide a continuum of individual and group-based mental health and substance abuse counseling services to Western Tidewater, Virginia residents. ($388,050)
  • The Western Tidewater Community Services Board—to continue integrated psychiatric services at Western Tidewater Free Clinic and for RN Child Crisis Case Management services. ($687,068)
  • Western Tidewater Free Clinic—to provide continued access to comprehensive health care for the uninsured and underinsured. ($1.4 million)

As part of its Capacity Building Initiative, the foundation awarded a $385,100 grant to the Center for Nonprofit Excellence, a capacity-building organization with a mission of strengthening nonprofits to realize the potential of the community. The goal of the Capacity Building Initiative is to provide greater opportunities for nonprofit organizations to continuously impact communities. Through its partnership, the foundation and Center for Nonprofit Excellence will work together to assist organizations in various organizational areas, including strategic planning, fund development, program evaluation, financial management, and sustainability.

The remainder of the funding was awarded to three additional one-year grantees: Virginia Legal Aid Society, Southeast 4-H Educational Center, and The Children’s Center.

Contact: Diane Nelms
Phone: 757.539.8810
Email: dnelms@obicihcf.org

Paso del Norte Health Foundation (El Paso, TX)

The Paso del Norte Health Foundation awarded six grants totaling more than $1.1 million under the Mental Health and Emotional Well-being Priority Area – Think.Change Initiative. The purpose of the Think.Change initiative is to reduce the stigma associated with mental illness, increase training for mental health providers and explore structural changes in the region’s behavioral health treatment system.

Funded organizations are:

  • City of Alamogordo—to improve the Alamogordo, Texas area mental health continuum of care for justice-involved persons by implementing a Mobile Crisis Response Team, engaging Peer Recovery Specialists, and coordinating crisis response/intervention resources. ($211,603.57)
  • Comision de Salud Fronteriza Mexico – Estados Unidos—to implement data informed actions and strengthen ROTMENAS behavioral health system of care collaborative in Ciudad Juárez, provide evidence-based training in programs; for professionals and lay health workers in Ciudad Juárez, and to advocate for policy change related to mental health service systems within the state of Chihuahua. ($161,129.22)
  • Emergence Health Network/El Paso MHMR—to provide evidence-based and evidence-informed trainings for at least 450 educators and law enforcement officers in the community. ($222,667.81)
  • Family Service of El Paso, Inc.—to provide National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) evidence-based programs and to strengthen NAMI – El Paso as a central mental health advocacy and education provider in the region. ($304,809)
  • Techo Comunitario, A.C.—to implement the Triple P evidence-based program in 10 at risk neighborhoods in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. ($45,100)
  • Texas Tech Foundation, Inc.—go provide technical and program implementation support in consultation with the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute to create the Child Psychiatry Access Network for the El Paso, Texas region and to expand the telemedicine program in collaboration with local school systems. ($165,000)

Contact: Enrique Mata
Phone: 915.218.2617
Email: oremata@pdnfoundation.org

Stupski Foundation (San Francisco, CA)

The Stupski Foundation announced more than $14 million in investments to seven local health systems to support and enhance comprehensive serious illness care programs across San Francisco and Alameda Counties in California and support patients nearing the end of life.

The investments represent the largest regional commitment to date from Stupski as it seeks to transform how people experience the end of life in the communities we call home. It believes that everyone who is diagnosed with a serious illness should receive care that respects their wishes and allows them to live out the remainder of their lives with comfort and dignity. Its grantee partners are working on projects that will primarily increase the Bay Area’s ability to provide palliative care both in hospitals and at home.

Stupski’s partners include Alameda Health System, Chinese Hospital, Kaiser Permanente, Sutter Health, Washington Hospital, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center.

Contact: Dan Tuttle 
Email: dan@stupski.org.

The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation (Owings Mills, MD)

The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation announced more than $8 million in additional new grants. The following are its health-related grants:

  • Choptank Community Health System—to support the expansion of its Federally Qualified Health Center, which provides medical, dental, and behavioral health services. ($450,000)
  • Engage—to support the expansion, to the Bay area, of this organization’s model that works to reduce the isolation and loneliness of older adults. ($300,000)
  • Family and Children’s Services of Central Maryland—to support the expansion of West End Place, a shelter for people escaping intimate partner violence and elder abuse. ($1,000,000)
  • Israel Religious Action Center—to provide comprehensive case management and wraparound services for immigrant women who are escaping domestic violence. ($110,000)
  • Maternal and Family Health Services—to support general operations as it delivers essential medical services to women, children, and families through information, education, and direct care across a 16-county network. ($200,000)
  • Mid-Shore Council on Family Violence—to support general operations as it provides intervention and prevention services for those escaping domestic violence through shelter, counseling, and legal services. ($50,000)
  • Mom-n-PA—to support the general operations of this two-day dental clinic, which will provide treatment for 2,000 patients and connect them to a dental home. ($25,000)
  • PACE Southeast Michigan—to support the construction of a new PACE (Program for All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly) Center, which will provide comprehensive health care services for chronically ill older adults with the goal of helping them remain independent. ($500,000)
  • United Hebrew Geriatric Center—to support renovations and technology upgrades to its housing facility with the goal of improving transitional care for older adults after being discharged from the hospital. ($200,000)
  • West Hawai‘i Community Health Center—to support the renovation of a community health center, which will increase access to medical, behavioral, and oral health care for rural communities on the western side of the island of Hawai‘i. ($650,000)

Contact: 410-654-8500.

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