Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation: July 2024
The Special Initiatives grant program provides organizations with a one-time grant of up to $50,000 to pilot or launch a new project over a one-year period. This grant is intended to fund projects that empower communities to advance health equity.
The Commonwealth Fund: May 2024
The Commonwealth Fund recently released its 2024 State Health Disparities Report underscoring the racial and ethnic health disparities that persist across the United States. The report also outlines policy recommendations to make U.S. health care more equitable.
Birth Equity Funders Summit: Aligning Strategies to Advance Equitable Birth Outcomes
This summit, designed exclusively for funders, provided comprehensive strategies, tools, playbooks, and deep learning opportunities, while fostering immediate implementation and collaboration. Acknowledging the underrepresentation of professionals from ethnically marginalized backgrounds, including BIPOC grantmakers, we supported, empowered, and created a safe space for these voices. Participants took away tangible insights and clear expectations for advancing equitable birth outcomes.
Lessons from an Equity Toolkit Workshop: Facilitator Perspective on Participatory Engagement
The Blue Shield of California Foundation is a long-time multisector collaborative funder with a health equity focus. Increasingly, we find that multisector collaboratives are a powerful vehicle to change systems toward racial equity. We heard from our partners and grantees a strong need for tools and resources that provide several outcomes: to establish equity at the collaborative level, to outline an arc of learning to help place a collaborative on an equity spectrum, and to provide tools to help collaboratives move deeper into equity. To support this work, the Equity in Collaboration Toolkit was developed in partnership with Cristobal Consulting. Its goal is to help multisector collaboratives see where they are taking concrete actions to center equity—and where they are not—through an embedded equity assessment.an embedded equity assessment.
CareQuest Institute: August 2023
CareQuest Institute is offering 10 grants of up to $125,000 to fund projects that are working to address systemic barriers to oral health, including access to oral health, for people with disabilities.
Bristol Myers Squibb Foundation: August 2023
The Bristol Myers Squibb Foundation is issuing a special request for concepts focused on addressing lung cancer care disparities for Indigenous communities. They are currently seeking concepts for ideas for multiyear grants that pilot/test innovative models of community-based care to increase access to services and improve lung cancer outcomes across the lung cancer care continuum.
New York State Health Foundation: August 2023
A new data analysis from the Urban Institute finds nearly half of New Yorkers with medical debt owed $500 or more and may still have medical debt appear on their credit reports under current credit reporting practices. Last month, the New York State Legislature passed a bill, still under the Governor’s consideration, that would prevent all medical debt from being included in credit reports.
As More Americans Gain Health Care Coverage, Advocates Fight for Higher-Quality Insurance
People’s Action and our allies fought hard to win health care for millions through the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid expansion. 91 percent of Americans now have health insurance, even though there is still work to do to ensure everyone can get coverage, particularly immigrants and those living in holdout non-expansion states.