Our Behavioral Health Division picked up a cool $2M (federal) grant from the AZ Department of Housing last month. This $2M plus the $2M we received several months ago, now equals $4M that we’ll be able to use in our bridge subsidy voucher program.

Just like in sales, the cornerstone for making public health progress is to sharpen your focus on your target market. That’s just what our Arizona Health Disparities Center will be doing when they execute our new $500K grant to reduce diabetes, cardiovascular disease and other conditions among targeted populations in Arizona. The grant will allow us to identify and address policy, systems, and/or environmental changes and then use a community driven process and applying comprehensive, evidenced-based approaches to achieve health equity improvement. We’ll develop and implement a community action plan; provide trainings to strengthen and build capacity; build partnerships with policymakers; and assist in the development of linguistically and culturally appropriate programs and materials.

The same shop also got a Minority Health State Partnership Improvement Grant. This grant $140K/year for 3 years will support the development of a health equity strategic plan; assist targeted high-risk populations to implement policy, system, and environmental change strategies; and to improve the availability of socio-economic and health data on racial and ethnic minority populations in Arizona.