Healthy Communities Grant Program

Supporting a Culture of Wellness and Prevention

Together we can change health outcomes in our communities. The Wellmark Foundation seeks to support communities to develop, implement, and enhance local-level wellness and prevention programs. These programs should be population-based, i.e., they work with a non-patient population versus targeting patients already in a clinical setting.

Successful proposals will focus on primary prevention and reflect the priority health needs of the community/geographic area of focus you and your applicant team define. Potential indicators of priority community health needs might be found through a community health needs assessment or state epidemiological health data. Our current grant offerings do not request proposals involving disease management or treatment as the primary emphasis.

Tools like The Community Guide or U.S. Preventive Services Task Force may help grant applicants justify project plan choices and make stronger funding requests. In focusing funding on wellness and prevention, the Foundation includes in that category health promotion, health education, disease prevention, and injury prevention.

The Foundation sees its roles in promoting a wellness and prevention agenda as:

• A provider of resources to encourage the application of proven (evidence-based) wellness strategies in our two states.
• A supporter of community initiatives designed to create long-term, positive changes in health status or policy education to advance prevention and wellness gains.

The Foundation takes a multi-dimensional approach to wellness and prevention, supporting projects and programs that intervene at the individual, community, and systems levels. Projects at all levels are both welcome and encouraged.

Individual interventions might focus on resourcing the community to adopt and implement proven prevention strategies, supplemented by direct individual interventions such as screenings, when needed to fill prevention gaps or address health disparities.

Community interventions could focus on educational campaigns to increase knowledge and influence attitudes regarding health risk behaviors and the community’s most pressing preventable health issues.

Systems interventions might focus on setting the stage for positive behavior change through the support of policy and/or environmental changes.

Within this context, the Foundation will consider proposals within the following wellness and prevention-based examples:

• Improving infant morbidity/mortality by providing access to recommended prenatal care for high-risk mothers and parental education.
• Increasing physical activity and improved nutritional intake (across the lifespan) through community-based programming (complementary of our childhood obesity prevention funding).
• Developing and educating youth to make healthy lifestyle choices and avoid high-risk behavior (i.e., sexual, tobacco use, substance abuse).
• Implementing population-based interventions to increase demand for and access to evidence-based preventive health screenings and recommended immunizations.