Recent Awards

African Community Economic Development of New England (ACEDONE) will meet with individuals and families to help determine their health needs and connect them with resources and services that meet those needs. Its population of focus will be immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in communities across the Commonwealth. It will also coordinate closely with other community-based organizations and local and state agencies to ensure that its services are additive and not duplicative. 

Agencia ALPHA will meet with individuals and families to help determine their health needs and connect them with resources and services that meet those needs. Its population of focus will be immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in communities across the Commonwealth. It will also coordinate closely with other community-based organizations and local and state agencies to ensure that its services are additive and not duplicative. 

Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center, Inc.  (BCNC) will support two staff members to attain their certification as Mental Health First Aid trainers. These BCNC staff will then facilitate a series of mental health first aid training to other staff and youth, adults, and caregivers.  This initiative will enable BCNC staff to become more attuned and better equipped to serve participants struggling with mental health issues. Ultimately Chinese immigrant youth, adults, and families will have increased access to culturally and linguistically appropriate mental health services.

Brazilian Women’s Group will meet with individuals and families to help determine their health needs and connect them with resources and services that meet those needs. Its population of focus will be immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in communities across the Commonwealth. It will also coordinate closely with other community-based organizations and local and state agencies to ensure that its services are additive and not duplicative. 

Cape Verdean Women United, Inc (CVWU) will increase access to services for marginalized intimate partner violence survivors as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The program will include care coordination services, evidence-based education on violence prevention, and specialized language services. One of the goals of the project is to create robust community dialogue around intimate partner violence and make the community aware of organizations that provide services tailored to ethnically and racially marginalized community members.

Central Massachusetts Agency on Aging will provide coordinated behavioral health services to older adults of color and their families by linking them to clinicians of the same race and ethnicity, focusing on families in which grandparents are raising grandchildren.

Centro Presente will meet with individuals and families to help determine their health needs and connect them with resources and services that meet those needs. Its population of focus will be immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in communities across the Commonwealth. It will also coordinate closely with other community-based organizations and local and state agencies to ensure that its services are additive and not duplicative. 

Codman Square Health Center (CSHC) will train and activate a corps of telehealth navigators toward the goal of integrating the telehealth experience into CSHC patient care model to provide a path to achieving better overall patient health. This initiative will help patients understand what to expect from a virtual visit, from check-in to follow-up. Telehealth navigators will help patients set up and understand how to access their online health information, access appointments, and communicate with their care team.

In partnership with the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute, DeeDee's Cry will work to develop a burial and resource guide for families impacted by suicide. The guide will create and support a more equitable and compassionate response to families impacted by suicide, especially low-income/working-class people of color.  The Suicide Loss Survivor's Healing Journey Guide will contain burial and planning funeral information, mental health resources, and local support groups. DeeDee's Cry and the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute will identify other organizations and local agencies to distribute this guide to families in need.

East Boston Neighborhood Health Center (EBNHC) will develop and pilot a culturally adapted health education and nutrition intervention program to improve rates of controlled blood pressure for economically marginalized Latinos with hypertension in East Boston. The pilot will help EBNHC assess the feasibility and effectiveness of this approach and identify ways to improve the program, such as adapting the program to a virtual format.

Ellie Fund will increase access to clinical trials for high-risk cancer patients, who have low-income, and are people of color who would not otherwise have access to cutting-edge treatments. EF is partnering with leading researchers and oncologists to change the landscape of clinical trials, by addressing patient-facing barriers and ensuring they do not exclude low-income communities and people of color. EF will evaluate the success of these measures in increasing participation among patients of color and the ability of patients to adhere to and complete treatment because of EF services.

FamilyAid will pilot a Behavioral Health Navigator program focusing on cutting through the red tape and gaining access to behavioral health services for FamilyAid children. This pilot will occur through a partnership with Boston Children's Hospital to expand access to behavioral health services to 400 children in the coming year. It will hire a Behavioral Health Navigator to build on established relationships and forge new collaborations with counseling services, school-based behavioral health staff, community health centers, and hospitals.

Fathers’ UpLift (FUL) has developed an affiliate model of its evidence-based intervention, which it hopes to use to expand its impact and capacity. FUL will recruit private clinical therapists and locally oriented mental health/wellness nonprofits to implement FUL's evidence-based interventions, along with a comprehensive measurement and evaluation tool it developed in coordination with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in 2021. FUL's goal with this programming is to productively align with, guide, and equip clinicians, mental health, and wellness-oriented nonprofits to serve black and brown men, particularly fathers.

Gándara Center will support children, youth, families, and adults who are currently lacking services or underserved by the service delivery system by increasing their ability to receive high-quality outpatient services remotely.  The initiative will strengthen the telehealth infrastructure through the use of telehealth kiosks and will subsidize the purchase of data plans.

The Heart of a Giant Foundation (HGF) will test a community-based, culturally responsive care model which will address the social determinants of health experienced by Black and marginalized families and individuals in the Dorchester and Mattapan areas, with the goal of managing and preventing hypertension outside the clinical setting. The program will provide comprehensive health care support, health education and coaching, and will incorporate digital health technologies and remote health monitoring. The one-year pilot will provide nursing and medical services, healthy behaviors and lifestyle supports, community engagement activities, and mental health services to support patients in their journey toward emotional wellbeing and health lifestyles in a holistic way.

Immigrant Family Services Institute, Inc. will meet with individuals and families to help determine their health needs and connect them with resources and services that meet those needs. Its population of focus will be immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in communities across the Commonwealth. It will also coordinate closely with other community-based organizations and local and state agencies to ensure that its services are additive and not duplicative. 

The Immigrants’ Assistance Center (IAC) will outreach to members of immigrant communities in order to support increased testing and vaccination at places of employment and community health centers, provide direct personalized education to Black and Brown immigrants in their native language, and broaden awareness in the immigrant community about how to stay safe and slow the spread of the disease. Through this initiative, IAC aims to serve as a trusted source of information to immigrant communities about the importance of vaccination and provide guidance and direct services for every step along the way, from testing to vaccine follow-up.  

International Institute of New England will meet with individuals and families to help determine their health needs and connect them with resources and services that meet those needs. Its population of focus will be immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in communities across the Commonwealth. It will also coordinate closely with other community-based organizations and local and state agencies to ensure that its services are additive and not duplicative. 

La Colaborativa will expand the Chelsea Desea Sonar program to older teens who experience mental health triggers from the pandemic. Chelsea Desea Sonar (Chelsea Wants to Dream) is a mental health support program designed for newly arrived, unaccompanied, immigrant, and refugee children ages 9-13, teens, and their families and caregivers.  This project will address the cultural and societal barriers to mental health for youth of color and provide alternative mental wellness regarding the stressors of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lawyers for Civil Rights will meet with individuals and families to help determine their health needs and connect them with resources and services that meet those needs. Its population of focus will be immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in communities across the Commonwealth. It will also coordinate closely with other community-based organizations and local and state agencies to ensure that its services are additive and not duplicative. 

MABVI will pilot a partnership with The Dimock Center and New England College of Optometry (NECO) to increase access to low vision examinations and support services for patients with experiencing vision impairment who have low-income and are Black, Indigenous, and other people of color . The project will increase patient engagement with exams and comprehensive services resulting in patients being able to better manage activities of daily living and more fully adjust to living with vision loss.

Making Opportunity Count will develop the Diversified Provider Pipeline Project for college graduate students who are Black or Hispanic enrolled in the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program at Fitchburg State University.  This project will help students satisfy graduation requirements, increase the visibility of providers of color, and better support underrepresented communities who are often unable to find providers who look like them or share their cultural experiences.  This initiative will begin to increase the workforce diversity at MOC and maximize the quality of services offered by the organization.

The Massachusetts COVID-19 Maternal Equity Coalition will conduct a strategic planning process that aims to create and sustain a multi-sectoral, interdisciplinary, community-driven group devoted to improving the health outcomes of Black birthing people. The resulting report will provide recommendations for opportunities and best practices on how stakeholders can collaborate to build bridges across the silos in maternal health.

Massachusetts Health Quality Partners (MHQP) will partner with community leaders from the Chinese, Indian, and Vietnamese communities in Massachusetts to better understand factors related to Asian patients reporting lower patient experience scores compared to other populations. MHPQ will develop a report and propose recommendations to improve Asian subpopulation patient care experiences. Recommendations will include ways to improve access to quality care or mitigate/eliminate healthcare disparities.

MLCHC submitted this proposal on behalf of the Health Equity Compact. The Health Equity Compact is a group of Black and Latinx healthcare leaders with lived experience who seek to dismantle systemic barriers to equitable health outcomes by transforming care delivery and influencing health policy.

The Health Equity Compact will conduct 20-24 stakeholder interviews with leaders from state and municipal agencies, health care provider organizations, health insurers, employers, unions, and advocacy groups. These interviews will support the Compact to better understand these different stakeholders' current health equity-related interests and priorities, work, and desires for change at the state level. The interviews will also assess the reactions of these stakeholders to the policy proposals currently being formulated by the Compact. The Compact will then develop a report on stakeholder perspectives on the health equity policy proposals identified by the Health Equity Compact.

Neighborhood Birth Center (NBC) will lead a community-centered design for Boston’s first birth center through a series of charrettes to engage the community in envisioning a safe space for pregnancy and birth care. This feedback and input will lead to designing materials (renderings, videos, website) that will enable NBC to translate the vision onto the physical space. Through this initiative to develop and build a new model for birth centers that explicitly interrupts structural racism and heteropatriarchy, NBC will expand relationships with community members.

Plummer Youth Promise (PYP) will measure the impact of its evaluation practices to ensure that they incorporate dismantling injustices faced by marginalized populations. PYP will ensure that its evaluation practices collect demographic data in respectful ways, assess for discrimination-related trauma, document barriers to care, and report outcomes and identify other best practices.

The Public Health Institute of Western Massachusetts (PHIWM) will plan and assess the Massachusetts State Behavioral Health Roadmap through an equity lens for Hampden County. This project will involve engaging diverse stakeholders: families, youth, care providers, health care staff, and leadership. The findings will inform local, regional and statewide action through potential organizational policies and practices, state regulations, and legislation.

Quincy Asian Resources, Inc. (QARI) In partnership with Walker Therapeutic and Educational Programs (Walker), will offer a series of fun educational group activities for middle and high school students in the Quincy Public Schools (QPS) and a set of educational workshops for their parents or caregivers. This new program called “Getting the Teens Out” (GTTO) is born out of QARI’s overarching strategy to bring together QARI's linguistic and cultural competence with Walker's mental health expertise to benefit teen immigrant clients.

Resilient Sisterhood Project will assist the BCBSMA Foundation staff in conducting a focus group to understand the needs, concerns, and challenges facing organizations of color and organizations working in communities of color.  The focus group will also help the Foundation identify potential solutions to change the systems, policies, and structures that perpetuate racial inequities in health in Massachusetts.

Resilient Sisterhood Project will create an evidenced-based protocol for health practitioners and community-based advocates to address the broad spectrum of reproductive health needs of formerly incarcerated Black women. This protocol will guide health care practitioners, community organizations, and formerly incarcerated women to ensure that women can access the reproductive medical services they need and mitigate the trauma of prison medical treatment.

In collaboration with Health Law Advocates, the Rian Immigrant Center will launch a Medical-Legal Partnership for Immigrants (MLPI) with community health centers (CHCs) in order to increase the number of immigrants that can access urgently needed legal assistance to protect their interwoven health care and immigration rights. Rian and HLA will partner with medical providers (hospitals and CHCs) to identify and refer patients who need legal assistance from HLA and/or Rian to address health care access and/or immigration needs.

Rian Immigrant Center will meet with individuals and families to help determine their health needs and connect them with resources and services that meet those needs. Its population of focus will be immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in communities across the Commonwealth. It will also coordinate closely with other community-based organizations and local and state agencies to ensure that its services are additive and not duplicative. 

Somali Parents Advocacy Center for Education’s (SPACE) initiative will build resilience among Somali-American families and increase their understanding of the public health and health delivery system. SPACE will host workshops and conversations, training, and hands-on experiential learning about health, wellbeing, physical fitness, nutrition, preventive health care, and natural environmental physical supports.  These events will create a foundation to deepen culturally appropriate comprehension and advance new behaviors related to living a healthy lifestyle.

The Joint Committee for Children’s Health Care in Everett (JCCHCE) seeks to support new moms beyond the health insurance enrollment to ensure that they receive the help they need to navigate the complexities of parenthood. The pilot will support expectant/new moms, within each of the JCCHCE language groups--Portuguese, Spanish, Haitian Creole, and English. Each mom will be assigned to a staff member who will work to determine their needs to support a healthy environment for mom and young child.

THRIVE will develop a pilot to provide high-quality ongoing mental health service to THRIVE community members to address underlying trauma or long-term impacts of incarceration. THRIVE will partner with Lowell House to support individuals while still incarcerated and serve as a consistent point of contact when their detention is over to navigate community resources and services and help coordinate mental health care services.

Transhealth Northampton (TN) will develop a pilot program to examine the effectiveness of a consulting model for gender-affirming care. This program will expand access by educating and supporting providers.  Under this model, the provider can reach out to Transhealth for a provider-to-provider consultation to ask specific questions about patient care.  In addition to individual consultations, Transhealth will create training and educational toolkits to expand the project’s reach and reach out to local primary care offices, medical groups, community health centers, and other local organizations to educate them about the program and invite them to participate.

True Alliance Center will meet with individuals and families to help determine their health needs and connect them with resources and services that meet those needs. Its population of focus will be immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in communities across the Commonwealth. It will also coordinate closely with other community-based organizations and local and state agencies to ensure that its services are additive and not duplicative. 

This project has been developed by two Associate professors at UMASS Amherst and will be implemented in collaboration with the Ascentria Care Alliance, based in West Springfield.

This project will implement an evidence-based intervention to reduce stress, anxiety, and depressive symptoms and improve coping skills, self-efficacy, social support, and family well-being among Ukrainian and Afghan refugees resettled in Hampden County. Reducing their mental health burden by promoting community strengths and utilizing culturally tailored support will help these refugees to adjust to their new environment and actively engage in the community and employment.

Volunteers in Medicine Berkshires (VIM) will articulate, evaluate, and promote its comprehensive healthcare approach to serve as a model in increasing access to quality care and eliminating structural racism and racial inequity in health for economically, socially, ethnically, and racially marginalized residents of the Commonwealth.  VIM believes that many elements of its care model help increase access and eliminate racism, and the Special Initiative grant will help the organization test this assumption.

Volunteers in Medicine Berkshires will meet with individuals and families to help determine their health needs and connect them with resources and services that meet those needs. Its population of focus will be immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in communities across the Commonwealth. It will also coordinate closely with other community-based organizations and local and state agencies to ensure that its services are additive and not duplicative. 

We Are Better Together Warren Daniel Hairston Project will provide comprehensive emotional and mental health services in a leadership development framework designed specifically for women who are the relatives and caregivers of perpetrators of community violence. This program will help support these women to contend with the realities of their grief and anger while providing support to their relatives - who are victims or incarcerated or about to re-enter society.