Grant Partners

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.  

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.

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.