Please join us in congratulating the six organizations awarded capacity building grants by Archstone Foundation in the last quarter:
- Corporation for Supportive Housing
- Project Open Hand
- Visión y Compromiso
- Via Care Community Health Center
- Meals on Wheels Diablo Region
- Humboldt Senior Resource Center
These grants, for $50,000 each, advance our strategic plan to promote equitable, coordinated care for older adults. The funded projects will implement evidence-based programs, improve internal operations, plan new activities, and upgrade technology.
For the first time, we asked applicants to describe how their work ties to our Three T strategy areas – Teams, Training, and Technology – in an effort to maximize progress toward our strategic plan.
Our annual capacity building program offers grants for direct operational support that helps nonprofits work more efficiently and effectively long-term. This year, we received 102 letters of inquiry and invited nine full proposals. With this year’s awards, we have funded 26 capacity building projects — 19 of them focused on serving historically marginalized older adults and reducing health disparities.
Meet the Grantees and Their Projects
Corporation for Supportive Housing, which promotes the creation nationwide of affordable housing combined with social services, will adapt and deliver its Medi-Cal Academy training to a cohort of five counties and continuums of care (CoCs, the Housing and Urban Development unit for housing services), teaching them how to contract with providers and implement the new CalAIM housing-related community supports for older Medi-Cal beneficiaries experiencing homelessness. The training aims to improve the capacity of multiple organizations to deliver services to unhoused older Californians and maximize the impact of CalAIM and other Medicaid programs.
This project aligns with our strategic focus on training by leveraging one organization’s system knowledge to educate and equip staff at multiple organizations.
Project Open Hand, which provides medically tailored meals and groceries to older and homebound people in San Francisco and Alameda County, will be able to serve more clients by conducting a review and assessment of its operations. These include nutrition and food operations and compliance units and opportunities for future diet/meal growth. As a result, Project Open Hand will respond more nimbly to future changes, enabling efficient and cost-effective operations.
This project aligns with our strategic focus on teams by refining workflow systems.
Visión y Compromiso, which maintains a network of promotores and community health workers across the state, will be able to increase its capacity to provide CalAIM’s new enhanced care management and community supports services by strengthening its internal infrastructure, upgrading technology, and training staff to maintain records, measure outcomes, and invoice managed care plans for services. The organization hires, trains, and supervises 125 promotores who reach more than 1.5 million primarily Spanish-speaking Latino residents each year, including older adults and their family caregivers. The people served live in both urban and rural areas and large immigrant communities and are often low-income, uninsured, and underserved.
The project aligns with our strategic focus on training by building a deeper relationship with a well-established community health worker training organization with a focus on Latino Californians.
Via Care Community Health Center will undertake a strategic planning and implementation process that will increase its capacity to coordinate and integrate health care and social services for a growing population of older adults with multiple chronic needs. It will create two new teams: the 50+ Integration Team will lead capacity building activities and monitor progress and findings and the 50+ Care Team will pilot an integrated care coordination model for older adults with multiple chronic medical issues and persistent social determinants-related needs. Via Care provides healthcare services at 16 clinics in East Los Angeles, serving a predominantly Spanish-speaking population.
The project aligns with our strategic focus on teams by improving integrated care coordination for Latino older adults with chronic care and social needs in community-based clinics.
Meals on Wheels Diablo Region, which helps 7,500 older people in Contra Costa County annually, will implement new software to track and manage client information, enabling efficient internal and external data sharing. The organization will centralize and standardize its intake and evaluation process, improving its ability to identify clients’ needs, demographics, services received, and outcomes.
This project aligns with our strategic focus on technology, as it leverages improved technology to enable coordinated care of older adults.
Humboldt Senior Resource Center, which provides services, information, education, and recreation to older people, their families and caregivers in the Eureka area, will replace its onsite network server with a cloud-based server – enhancing both security and privacy of client data.
This project aligns with our strategic focus on technology, as it leverages technological improvements to enable more efficient, effective care of older adults.
Going Beyond the Grant Dollars
In addition to these grants, we support capacity building through our ongoing partnership with Catchafire, a nonprofit that matches professionals willing to donate their time with nonprofit groups seeking those skills. This year, we were able to invite new organizations at any point during the program year to ask Catchafire for capacity building project support. This change allowed us to immediately provide some support to all of the more than 100 organizations that applied for capacity building funding. Within one week of our invitation, we saw a spike in registrations, with 20 new organizations signing up with Catchafire.
Forty-two organizations that serve older Californians have completed projects using Catchafire in the past year. Translation of material from English into other languages is the most popular project, with organizations like USC’s National Center for Elder Abuse, LeadingAge CA Foundation, and Choice in Aging, each receiving support with multiple translation projects. Other top uses of Catchafire volunteers were for website improvements, copyediting, and financial planning.
Upcoming Capacity Building Funding Opportunities
The next opportunity to apply for capacity building grants will begin in July 2024. If you represent a non-profit organization providing direct support for older adults and their caregivers in California and are seeking capacity building support, please review the funding guidelines on our website or reach out to speak with one of our program officers about your work.
Carly Roman, Gerson Galdamez, and Jasmine Lacsamana also contributed to this post.
