Grant Partners

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.

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.

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.

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.

Family Health Center of Worcester will develop a formal plan to install a telehealth console on the Community Builders property, increasing access to primary care and behavioral health services for households without access to the internet or technology in their home.

This grant is made in relationship to the Going Beyond Health Care grant program.

Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless will continue to partner with Lynn Community Health Center to assist referred families with food and housing assistance and develop a short-and long-term plan for continuing to address their health-related social needs.  

This grant was made in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

YMCA of Metro North will support the Lynn Youth Mental Health Collaborative, a partnership between the Lynn YMCA and Lynn Community Health Center. The partnership will include the following components: a Youth Mental Health Clinic; embedded Trauma-Informed Care practices in all Lynn YMCA Youth Programs; resource-sharing fairs to connect families to outside services; and a “Rx for the Y” providing parents with free Y memberships to increase physical activity.

This grant was made in response to COVID-19 pandemic

United Teen Equality Center (UTEC) will support the Circling Home pilot project, a new comprehensive behavioral health project for incarcerated and/or probation and parole-involved young adults (ages 18-25), extending from pre- to post-release without interruption in service or care provider. UTEC serves young people who have not succeeded in other shorter-term programming or who may have been underserved by the judicial system; many of their clients have active substance use issues or are diagnosed with a mental illness. By improving the continuum of care through the reentry process, UTEC expects to improve recidivism and health outcomes.

Immigrant Family Services Institutes will build a sustainable program to provide counseling and case management to community members experiencing social and emotional difficulties.  Through training and technical assistance,  service providers will be educated on Haitian mental health needs and stigmas and on best practices for promoting individual and community-wide mental health.

This grant was made in response to COVID-19 pandemic

The Regional Environmental Council will bring fresh, local produce to the Community Builders properties and will develop a no/low contact mobile pre-order model to ensure safe and uninterrupted access to healthy foods. It will provide culturally and linguistically responsive training to increase access to food security resources including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the state’s Healthy Incentives Program (HIP).

This grant is made in relationship to the Going Beyond Health Care grant program.

The Food Bank of Western Massachusetts, in partnership with Holyoke Community Health Center and other health care providers in Holyoke and Springfield, will screen and match food insecure community members with counseling, referrals, emergency food and other non-food resources to address the social determinants of health.

This grant was made in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Essex Country Community Organization 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.

Bridge Over Troubled Waters will train four counselors in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) and establish DBT groups for homeless youths. DBT teaches methods to acceptand tolerate? negative emotions as opposed to just focusing on the alteration and dissolution of negative emotions. DBT imparts young adults with critical behavioral skills to utilize independently, in order to increase focus on long-term aspirations: finishing their education, securing a job, and attaining housing.

Family Services of the Merrimack Valley will provide emotional health workshops, enhanced case management, and expanded crisis helpline services, and will facilitate community-wide emotional wellness resources. These services are designed to help residents access support services and provide them with skills to be resilient in the face of this ongoing crisis.

This grant was made in response to COVID-19 pandemic