Massachusetts Community Health & Healthy Aging Funds
Greater Health Equity Through Structural Change
Who We Are
The Massachusetts Community Health and Healthy Aging Funds is a statewide initiative to re-distribute funding to communities that have historically not benefited from health investments. Health Resources in Action serves as the fiscal agent in collaboration with Massachusetts DPH.
What We Do
The Funds use equitable grantmaking practices to invest in community-centered policy, systems, and environmental change approaches that disrupt and remove barriers to health by addressing structural and institutional racism, poverty, and deep power imbalances.
Our Impact
82
Grants Awarded
$45.9 Million
Funds dispensed to communities
200
Cities and towns served
Program Overview
The Funds aim to address health and racial inequities by focusing on these principles:
- Social determinants of health significantly influence health outcomes.
- Policies, systems, and environments often stem from structural and institutional racism.
- To achieve equity, these forms of oppression must be understood and dismantled.
What is Equitable Grantmaking?
Equitable grantmaking is a practice where we intentionally design funding processes to address systemic inequities and ensure that all communities and groups have fair access to funding.
Funding Streams
Policy, systems, and environmental (PSE) change strategies are a way of making sustainable, lasting change within a community to support healthy environments and behaviors across populations. These strategies create or change infrastructure and modify the contexts in which people live to improve community conditions that promote health. PSE changes are often made in combination with each other.
With a focus on the multi-sector domains of age-friendly communities, the Healthy Aging Fund addresses social determinants of health using policy, systems, and environmental change approaches to ensure that older adults have the opportunity to remain active, independent, safe and involved in their community.
A Community Health Improvement Plan (or CHIP) is a long-term effort to improve the health of a community. The CHIP is based on the results of a community health assessment (CHA), which studies the health-related needs and strengths of a community. CHIPs aim to respond to CHA results, bring together resources and stakeholders, and create a shared framework for community health.
Equitable grantmaking in action
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PSE: Harborlight Community Partners’ advocacy contributed to the passage of 42 housing-friendly policies and ordinances — 27 at the local level and 15 at the state level. Their Housing Stewards program equips residents with the tools they need to be advocates and is offered in English and Spanish.
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Healthy Aging: Southeast Asian Coalition of Central MA’s Healthy Aging-In-Place project advocates for the implementation of culturally-relevant services and programs with partner organizations, as well as engaging and training elders and their caregivers for self-advocacy.