September 2019 Grant Announcement: Building a Groundswell for Prevention

We are proud to announce that on September 6, 2019, Blue Shield of California Foundation’s Board of Trustees approved $6.4 million in grants to 21 organizations to support community resilience as a critical prerequisite to advancing a shared value toward prevention of poor health and domestic violence.

To both support local community resilience and respond to emergent needs, the Foundation is granting $1.65 million to 10 community foundations across the state to support an accurate census and address both emerging needs and long-term well-being strategies in immigrant communities, particularly in the face of the public charge rule, which threatens to limit access to health and well-being services to millions of Californians. In addition, over 70% of Californians are considered hard-to-count because they have families with young children, are renters, or are not familiar with the census and its community benefits. It is critically important that all Californians count not only to ensure that communities receive all the health and wellness benefits they are due, but also, to promote a sense of belonging, which is an asset that increases health, builds organizing power and helps communities determine their future.

To build on two of our state’s greatest strengths, our diversity and cultural resilience, we are supporting efforts to develop and share aspirational stories and build momentum for narratives of inclusion and belonging, which can help to create a sense of community across social lines and manifest a vision of California in which people of all backgrounds, genders, and sexual orientations are free from identity-based violence. To that end, we are awarding $1 million to the Center for Cultural Power, based within the Citizen Engagement Lab Education Fund, and $700,000 to PICO California to support two statewide projects to leverage the arts and narrative change as strategies to increase community resilience and create a shared value for prevention.

To advance multisector collaboration as a key approach to engage new sectors in prevention of issues such as domestic violence, we are investing $1.5 million to continue support to the Safety through Connection cohort of multisector collaboratives, which are integrating domestic violence prevention into their work. This second round of funding will support both ongoing efforts to build leadership and collective power and to implement policy and systems change throughout very different regions and sectors.

To expand the tools and resources available to providers, we are granting $500,000 to the East Bay Agency for Children to create a Trauma Transformed Healing Network to address community trauma in four counties.

To support the entire domestic violence field in California and beyond, we are funding a statewide population data survey on domestic violence, sexual assault, and harassment through a $114,000 grant to the University of California, San Diego. We are also supporting an 18-month project through the University of Southern California School of Social Work to improve data coordination and linkages across state departments to better understand the incidence of and risk factors for domestic violence.

Additional funding will support health journalism, philanthropic alliances, health workforce planning, tools to apply community-based data, and continued research to better understand the impact of early investment in health prevention.

Learn more about our work and view a view a full list of this quarter's grants