* School districts move to healthy scratch cooking featured [1]
Two school districts, Othello and Cheney, demonstrated amazing commitment to making significant change to improve the health of the children they serve. Their work, and partnership with Empire Health Foundation, is featured in a recent newspaper article [1]. EHF's investment in re-training their food service workers as part of our Obesity Prevention initiative, is one segment of a multi prong strategy not only in the schools but also in the communities. Cook for America, our partner that designed the "scratch cooking boot camp" that new school districts will go through next year, was recently featured in an ABC Nightline segment (click here to see the article and video [2]).
* Request for Proposals Released
Empire Health Foundation (EHF) has released a Request for Proposal (RFP) to invite applications from community-based multi-sector partnerships interested in applying for grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation [3] (RWJF) that will be announced in the spring of 2012. The deadline to submit a proposal is February 20, 2012, 5:00 p.m. Click here to learn more [4].
* Our Spring 2012 Responsive Grant Program will open on March 1, 2012 at 8:00 a.m. PST. Applications will be due at 5:00 p.m. PST on Friday, March 30, 2012.
For more information about this program please visit our Responsive Grants Page here: http://empirehealthfoundation.org/apply-grants [5].
* Grantmakers in Health Grant Writing Assistance award
In 2011, EHF awarded a $30,000 grant to the Washington State Department of Health (DOH) to build grant writing capacity in the department to more effectively pursue national funding opportunities created by the Affordable Care Act. The award was made possible in large part by a matching grant from Grantmakers in Health [6] in sponsorship by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. EHF and DOH collaborated on preparing the matching grant proposal, which DOH successfully utilized to land a Community Transformation Grant [7] of ~$3.2 million. This year in 2012, EHF was again awarded an additional GIH matching grant with which the foundation will partner with the HCA and other state agencies in several new exciting opportunities.
* Our leverage effect
On top of the $1.5 million in direct grants in 2011, the EHF team invested approximately $150,000 in seed funds (for grant writing and local matching funds) and staff time to help bring in over $1 million additional grant funds to the 7 counties, as well as a total of over $4 million to the state. We have worked hard to build strong relationships and collaborate with other funders.
* Focus on Underserved Communities
As an example of that leverage, EHF granted about 10% ($160,000) of its grant budget to underserved communities such as tribes. We also helped collaborative partners bring an additional $530,000 in out of the region funding to those communities, which is the equivalent of 40% of our direct grants budget.
* Responsive Grant Awards announced
Our appreciation to all of the fantastic organizations and agencies working in our seven counties to improve health and wellness. The foundation received a record number of applications this round, and the strength of the applications continues to rise. 32 organizations have been awarded [8] grants totaling nearly $400,000. The grants represent a wide range of issue areas, geography, and a range of underserved communities such as the tribes. As always, we encourage of our applicants to engage our team.