The Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation: July 2025
The Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation announced a new grant opportunity: the Advancing Community Driven Mental Health grant program. This program will fund five community-based organizations with grants of up to $100,000 per year for two years, starting in December 2025, to improve and increase access to community based mental health services for adults experiencing mild to moderate mental health distress and practical problems of daily living, and develop the skills of a non-clinical workforce.
Georgia Health Initiative: July 2025
The Georgia Health Initiative released a new report titled “The Public Health Emergency Medicaid Unwinding: Georgia’s Redeterminations Experience,” which explores promising practices and lessons learned during the unwinding of Georgia’s Medicaid coverage. It also highlights ways these findings can support ongoing efforts to strengthen health coverage access in Georgia.
Reflecting on the Intersections Initiative
For organizations like the St. Joseph Community Partnership Fund (the Fund) and Prevention Institute (PI), GIH conferences have served as a critical space to bring together advocates across sectors and spark new ideas to address complex health issues. Inspired by a PI-led session on upstream prevention and health equity at GIH’s March 2016 annual conference, the Fund noted the promising landscape for a grantmaking initiative that could focus on root causes of poor health and dismantling systems of inequity, and a partnership was born.
Will We Hear the Voices of the LGBTQ Community?
Across the United States we are seeing a coordinated campaign to restrict lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) rights and limit access to affirming, lifesaving health care. According to the Equality Federation, nearly 400 anti-LGBTQ bills were introduced across the country in 2021, and over 240 bills have already been filed in 2022. These policies directly impact the health and safety of members of the LGBTQ community. Recent data from The Trevor Project show that 66 percent of LGBTQ youth, including 85 percent of transgender and/or nonbinary youth, report that recent debates around state laws to restrict the rights of transgender people have negatively affected their mental health.
It’s Time to Converge on Narrative Change for Racial Justice and Health Equity
Philanthropy is increasingly embracing narrative change as a tool for building public and political will to advance equitable policies and structural change. Yet philanthropic narrative investments to advance racial justice and health equity are still relatively new and disparate. The work is often siloed, lessons and insights are not often shared across efforts, and there is also a wide range of definitions of narratives, perspectives, and approaches on how to shift them.
Building a Better Bridge Between Funders and Communities
We are experiencing a watershed moment for philanthropy-funded social change efforts in the United States. The partnerships, knowledge, and resources that funders leverage have never been more important in contributing to the conditions that communities need for everyone to thrive, without exceptions. With such a rapid pace of change happening all around us, how can funders make the most of their role in supporting and advancing large-scale, transformative impact? The answer is to look forward with the benefit of hindsight and with partners who understand where and how to take those next steps.
The Ethel and James Flinn Foundation: June 2022
The Ethel and James Flinn Foundation is accepting proposals from nonprofit organizations that deliver mental health care and services in southeast Michigan (Wayne, Oakland, Macomb, and Washtenaw).
