The Partnership for Better Health invites community members to reimagine how access to health care, quality affordable housing, food security and transportation can better meet the needs of everyone, by exploring new methods of advancing equity.
Donor Name: Partnership for Better Health
State: Pennsylvania
County: Selected Counties
Type of Grant: Grant
Deadline: 02/02/2023
Size of the Grant: $15,000
Details:
As a community foundation, the Partnership for Better Health strives to serve as a catalyst, advocate, and collaborator to establish health as a shared priority, toward ensuring that everyone has what they need for good health. Grants are available to community groups that forge strategic partnerships with new organizations and local residents to address the issues of access to affordable health care, affordable quality housing, food security, and/or transportation.
Proposals should demonstrate a deep commitment to engaging and building upon the experiences and leadership capacities of local residents, who have lived experiences within the project’s selected focus area. Projects should go beyond the engagement of traditional stakeholders, to mobilize the vision and capacities of residents at the grassroots level, who have the greatest understanding of the current challenges and the most to gain from innovative new solutions.
Project Focus
This new project focuses on a systems framework for change. Systems work speaks to the daily values and methods that aid the collective action of individuals and organizations as they seek to address community challenges. Critical components from their research on systems work and core principles to be applied through this funding opportunity include:
- Fostering Connection
- New connections and relationships foster the creation of a positive collective group identity. Connections may occur through dialogues, focus groups, town halls, action planning, meal sharing, celebrations and other meaningful interactions with residents and key stakeholders who are directly impacted by shared community concerns and conditions. Emerging and established resident leaders are collectively mobilized by their common interests and are mutually supported in their capacities to envision and effect change. As success and direction builds over time, the initiative works to foster connection with other complimentary and like-minded groups.
- Reconfiguring Power
- Engagement and empowerment of residents with direct lived experience with the selected issue are a focus for the proposed collaborative. While a host organization may serve as a backbone support to the initiative, the host is deliberate in ensuring that community residents and leaders set the agenda – decision making and action planning become resident-participant driven. Hosts may foster a sense of belonging, provide a gathering space, assist in the background with coordination of meetings, while also learning, listening and growing in their process of supporting resident mobilization. In most cases (unless they are leaders with lived experience) hosts avoid functioning as leading drivers, planners or saviors. Rather than focus on charitably serving others, for example through social service provision, hosts focus on sharing and reconfiguring power – to empower people in new ways.
- Embracing Context
- The group recognizes that long-standing community challenges are typically complex and ever changing. A fixed model for social change or an established solution that worked well in one community context may play out quite differently in another setting. The group is encouraged to shift and adapt its direction within the context of its current community environment, structures and systems. The group embraces its varied contexts and unique capacities.
Eligibility Criteria
Eligibility Community organizations who meet the criteria below are encouraged to apply.
- Applicants must be a legal entity and are preferred—but not required—to be registered as a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization.
- Applicants must be able to provide a detailed plan of how they will engage multiple stakeholders throughout each phase of the project.
- Applicants must be able to facilitate the entire project within their geographic service area and be able to report results based on the Partnership for Better Health’s service area.
For more information, visit Advance Health Equity.
