Healthy Communities Foundation

Before the pandemic, we understood the importance of general operating support to develop a nimble, adaptive nonprofit ecosystem that can quickly respond to crises. This year, we have all seen just how crucial this truly is.

Given the severe and disproportionate impact of COVID-19, our grantee partners and communities in our region have experienced extraordinary challenges. The dual pandemics of COVID-19 and structural racism have illuminated how inequities across the social determinants of health intersect and harm communities.

However, this is a transformative time for our grantee partners serving the Healthy Communities Foundation region. Collectively, we are in a position to boldly reimagine a health ecosystem, rooted in a values-based, community-centered health equity framework for all residents as we look ahead towards recovery. The urgency our region is experiencing requires investment in organizations with deep community trust and capacity to pursue long-term, structural solutions through an intersectional and health equity lens.

Our response strategy has been multi-faceted, agile, and adaptive, informed by real-time public health data and community insights. Read more about our COVID-19 response.

Yet, we believe we must do more.

We expect to significantly increase our total giving for 2020 (a 76% increase from 2019). Our Board recognizes our role of leaning to our grantee partners to take a community led-approach in this critical moment. Through continuous communication and engagement with grantee partners, their guidance enables us to invest in immediate and long-term health efforts that strengthen our local health ecosystem. We are drawing from our Foundation’s total assets as a signal of our collective responsibility to steward community resources in time of a pandemic.

The time is now to reimagine health – beyond the absence of illness—so communities in our region can thrive.

OUR GRANTMAKING STRATEGY

Our grant recipients’ work aligns with at least one of our grantmaking priorities below:

Learn more about our grantmaking strategy

OUR GIVING AREAS

GENERAL OPERATING SUPPORT

As part of our standing commitment to allocate the majority of our funding towards general operating support, we awarded $6.8M (a 56% increase in funding from 2019) in renewal grants to 68 organizations who were 2019 grantee partners. We prioritized substantial increases to organizations serving our Legacy & Equity Zone through their hyper-local, community-led efforts to address COVID-19.

We streamlined the grant application and reporting requirements and accelerated grant awards to these organizations so they could focus on residents’ health and well-being during this challenging time.

STRATEGIC INITIATIVES

Beyond general operating support, we plan to award more than $1M towards strategic initiatives that mitigate the economic impact of COVID-19 on immigrant and undocumented communities and increase health access for uninsured/underinsured communities.

CAPACITY BUILDING

Over the last two years, Healthy Communities Foundation has taken a collaborative approach with grantee and community partners in tailoring a capacity building approach that leverages resources and insights that strengthen organizations and invests in local health leadership. With a regional focus, more than half a million dollars will go towards capacity-building grants that invest in healthy, sustainable organizations and ecosystems and support health and well-being through an equity lens.

RAPID RESPONSE

We awarded $400,000 in rapid response grants to address urgent basic needs in the region early on in the pandemic, namely through our COVID-19 Rapid Response Fund and the Chicago COVID-19 Rapid Response Fund. We also maximized our funding impact through local city and county-wide fund collaboratives.