Mother Cabrini Health Foundation Supports The Vulnerable Communities

The foundation asked organizations across the state to apply for financing through an open process in the spring of last year, getting over fifteen hundred letters of interest from returning grantees and new organizations. Approximately half of the grants were worth more than a quarter of a million dollars. The foundation is the largest private funder for around forty-five to fifty percent of supported projects.

Mother Cabrini Health Foundation Supports The Vulnerable Communities

The awards address a variety of pressing health needs and social determinants of health across New York State, in addition to COVID-19 assistance. These include programs that improve mental health counseling access, increase the availability of nutritious food in food deserts, improve access to healthcare and transportation, assist older adults with technology access, strengthen veteran services, and provide scholarship support as well as remote learning opportunities. Housing, employment aid, and translation services are being promoted, as are developments in telehealth technology and expanded legal and social services.

Community-based organizations, food banks, healthcare providers, nursing homes, schools, federally qualified health centers, and trade associations are among the recipients, which are addressing the needs of low-income individuals and families, seniors, youth and young adults, persons with special needs, immigrants and migrant workers, veterans, formerly incarcerated individuals, and young children, pregnant women, and new mothers.

About twelve million dollars will be spent on housing and general services for people with disabilities, including a grant to the various institutes that take responsibility to provide people with suitable housing and other related facilities to expand mobile primary care services for people with disabilities and to various medical centers also to improve autism treatment for children.

This comes on top of the twenty million dollars in financing for emergency COVID-19 programs approved earlier in 2021. In total, the foundation’s hundred and sixty million in 2021 financing will support about five hundred projects aimed at improving health and human services at a time when demand is at an all-time high. The foundation has provided almost five hundred million in grants in the three years since its foundation.

The hundred and forty million dollars in new grants will support programs in 2022, with around fourteen million dollars going to three-year strategic efforts aimed at improving oral health access and outcomes, increasing availability and access to quality healthcare, and funding programs that provide young children with the health and educational resources they need to succeed in underserved communities.

We must continue to address the challenges communities across New York State are facing, including food and housing insecurity, lack of access to primary healthcare, including vaccines, lack of equity within the healthcare professions, and racial and economic healthcare disparities made worse during COVID-19, after nearly two years of recovery from a pandemic that hit vulnerable populations the hardest. We must continue to fund the full spectrum of programs that help people and communities stay healthy.

The grants, which is around fifteen million dollars itself, are given to assist its new program that has been developed especially for children that need special care, which in turn will also ensure children and families have a seamless transition from hospital to home and some reading initiatives also around the state to reverse literacy loss caused by the pandemic total around twenty-one million dollars.

A grant to the various mental health projects around the state also to renew support for its family-related projects, which provides guidance and resources to equip families and schools to address youth mental health services, was one of the eighteen million dollars allocated to programs serving youth and young adults over the age of twelve.