The BUILD Health Challenge: Improving Health through Community, Health System and Public Health Collaboration

The BUILD Health Challenge has announced that it will award up to $7.5 million in grants and low-interest loans over two years to support up to 14 community-driven efforts. BUILD stands for Bold, Upstream, Integrated, Local and Data-Driven, words that represent the core principles of the Challenge. These core principles serve as guidelines for the types of strategies the Challenge hopes to support: strategies that are innovative when facing complex problems, that focus on social, environmental and economic factors rather than direct service, that are committed to true partnerships between many different players in community health, that focus on solutions that are led by an urban community, and that use data to identify the needs of their communities and to measure their impact.

Eligible to partnerships located in cities with populations greater than 150,000, the awardees will also be given support in the form of technical assistance, coaching and networks of health innovators. The BUILD Challenge will give two types of awards: planning and implementation. These awards are designed to support community collaborations that strengthen partnerships among hospitals, nonprofits, local health departments and other community organizations around health in low-income neighborhoods. The partners in the BUILD Health Challenge are the Kresge Foundation, the Advisory Board Company, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the de Beaumont Foundation.
 

Round 1 of applications for the Challenge are due by January 16, 2015.  Invitations will then be extended to a number of select applications for Round 2 on February 20^th.  Awardees will be announced in June 2015.