The Health Fund Board of Directors today approved $4.9 million in new grants to strengthen capacity among nonprofits and collaboratives, along with strategic projects addressing statewide health needs in Michigan.
This includes 20 new grants totaling $3.6 million through our Capacity Building Initiative, 14 of which were awarded under our Organizational Capacity Building focus area, which invests in specific, key improvements nonprofits need to better serve their communities and achieve their missions.
Organizational Capacity Building projects focus on internal capacity and fall into four categories; evaluation and learning, organizational development, organizational infrastructure, and technology enhancement.
“Michigan communities rely on nonprofits to meet a wide range of their health needs. These grants aim to provide trusted community cornerstones with resources to work effectively and collaboratively in pursuit of better health for Michiganders,” said Veronica Marchese, Senior Program Officer for Capacity Building.
Funded projects stood out among a highly competitive field because of their alignment with the Health Fund’s areas of focus, their readiness to move forward with improvements, and their potential to support significant impact on the health of communities.
For example, a grant to Children’s Advocacy Centers of Michigan will support succession planning and long-term stability for 15 Children’s Advocacy Centers, which provide critical services throughout the state to children who experience abuse.
By the end of the grant, each center will have an emergency transition plan, steps for longer-term succession planning, and tools to engage boards and staff. This advanced planning will help these organizations sustain their operations, support their staff, and continue providing uninterrupted services for children and families, in the event of a leadership change.
Meanwhile, a grant to PACE Southeast Michigan will help strengthen behavioral health expertise across PACE’s interdisciplinary care teams, which serve older adults with complex medical and behavioral health needs.
The project responds to a growing need within the PACE model, which increasingly serves participants presenting with co-occurring behavioral health, substance use, and chronic medical conditions. By building this expertise, PACE aims to improve care coordination, strengthen collaboration between behavioral health and primary care, and increase the organization’s ability to address behavioral health needs internally.
An additional six grants will support projects through our Collaborative Capacity Building focus area, which includes investments to help groups of partners collaborate more effectively to address local, regional, or statewide health issues.
Funded projects this year include multi-partner efforts to strengthen food security in the Thumb, relaunch a collaborative coalition of organizations providing sexual health support for adolescents, and establish a centralized community health hub serving Sanilac County.
One grant to the Oakland County Health Division will create a shared structure to examine findings related to preventable deaths in the county. Right now, different teams lead reviews focused on overdose, suicide, fetal/infant, and child deaths.
By bringing these review processes together under a collaborative framework, the project aims to identify gaps across the lifespan that could be contributing to preventable deaths — and ultimately move from reviewing deaths to preventing them.
Apart from Capacity Building grants, the board authorized nearly $1.3 million in funding for five special projects. These grants address important health needs in Michigan that are closely tied to our mission and Strategic Framework goals but fall outside the specific scope and strategies of our primary grant programs.
This includes a grant to Michigan State University that will expand an existing enhanced case management support program for kinship caregivers — relatives or close friends who are raising children when parents cannot. Many are grandparents or other older adults who must manage their own health and financial needs while navigating legal, financial, health, and educational systems for children, often with little or no formal support.
This project will build out a case management service currently focused on eight counties and make it available to communities statewide, serving approximately 1,100 caregivers during the two-year grant period and bringing vital federal funding to Michigan in the process.
Alongside our 2026 grant cohorts through our Healthy Aging (link) and Healthy Kids (link), these grants brought the total funding approved by our Board at its November meeting to $23.9 million.
Visit our grant database to learn more about these and all our current and past grants. A complete list of our Capacity Building and special project grants can be found below.
CAPACITY BUILDING GRANTS
Organizational Capacity Building
Affirmations Community Center
The Trailhead Project — $154,830
Autism Alliance of Michigan
MiNavigator Program — $300,000
Children’s Advocacy Centers of Michigan
Sustained Stability through Succession Planning — $38,500
Chippewa-Luce-Mackinac Community Action Human Resource Authority
Improving Rural Healthcare Access Through Technology-Enabled Transportation Coordination — $80,734
City of Romulus
Romulus Senior Connect and Capacity Expansion Initiative — $39,850
Community Action House
Organization-Wide Project Management Software Implementation — $109,551
Grow Benzie
Force Multipliers Backbone for Benzie County Health Collaboratives — $98,481
Habitat for Humanity of Oakland County Inc
Modern Systems for Healthy Aging: Strengthening Technology to Support Senior Home Repair — $300,000
Hegira Health, Inc.
Strengthening Governance to Expand Behavioral Health Access — $104,285
Oakland Livingston Human Service Agency
Document Control and Data Infrastructure to Improve Care Coordination and Compliance — $117,500
PACE Southeast Michigan
Building Behavioral Health Workforce Capacity Across PACE Southeast Michigan — $72,930
Remembering Cherubs
Strengthening Systems for Sustainable Growth — $61,080
Thumb Community Health Partnership
Strengthening Organizational Capacity Through Evaluation Systems and Tools — $215,000
Unite Up DBA unitē Mental Health & Wellness
Building Rural Behavioral Health Access Systems — $286,500
Collaborative Capacity Building
Access Health, Inc.
Regional Health Alignment: Building Sustainable SDoH Infrastructure in West Michigan — $300,000
Four County Community Foundation
Thumb Food Security Collaborative — $300,000
Michigan Organization on Adolescent Sexual Health
Michigan Coalition on Adolescent Sexual Health (MiCASH) 2.0 — $300,000
Nonprofit Network
Michigan Trauma-Informed Capacity Building Center Collaborative — $197,650
Oakland County Health Division
Learning from Preventable Deaths Using the Collaborative Framework for Prevention — $299,721
Sanilac County Health Department
Maple Valley Community Center Collaborative — $289,523
SPECIAL PROJECT GRANTS
Metro Solutions Inc.
Leadership for Mental Health — $100,000
Michigan Association of Community Mental Health Boards DBA Community Mental Health Association of Michigan
Using Industry Best Practices to Develop an Alternative Clinical Social Work Licensure Exam — $299,544
Michigan Health Council
Advancing Evidence-Informed Workforce Strategies — $149,107
Michigan State University
Healthy Aging Through Kinship Care Navigation in Michigan — $697,895
President and Fellows of Harvard College; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Michigan Participation in Harvard Health Reporting Fellowship — $29,000