HHS Awards Organizations Advancing Community-Driven Approaches for Tackling Structural Racism

HHS Awards Organizations Advancing Community-Driven Approaches for Tackling Structural Racism

Today, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), through the Office of Minority Health (OMH) announced more than $4.8 million in grants to 10 organizations under its Community-Driven Approaches to Address Factors Contributing to Structural Racism in Public Health initiative. The grant money will support a three-year OMH initiative that intends to identify new and innovative ways to address policies that may create or perpetuate health disparities and may contribute to structural racism.

“Structural racism affects the distribution of resources within racial and ethnic minority communities and thus may perpetuate health disparities,” said RDML Felicia Collins, M.D., Deputy Assistant Secretary for Minority Health. “For this new initiative, we are pleased to build upon OMH’s existing policy assessment efforts through the inclusion of community-focused, multi-sector coalitions. These community coalitions are critical for informing and guiding policy and practice change efforts addressing the impact of health disparities and structural racism within communities.”

Through this initiative, recipients will assess the impact of existing policies and practices and the implementation of new or modified policies and practices to address factors contributing to health disparities and structural racism in health services. Also, recipients will evaluate the extent to which their projects result in increased capacity of community coalitions to assess policy and practice impact within their communities. OMH ultimately expects recipients to address health disparities among racial and ethnic minority populations and to help demonstrate the impact of those efforts on outcomes and the overarching goal of advancing health equity.

This initiative builds upon OMH’s Framework to Address Health Disparities through Collaborative Policy Efforts initiative, as recipients will utilize the developed assessment framework and tools to help identify policies that may create or perpetuate disparities and contribute to structural racism.

The 10 new recipients will conduct their projects across seven states, including California, Connecticut, Indiana, Massachusetts, New Mexico, New York, and South Carolina. The project period for the Community-Driven Approaches to Address Factors Contributing to Structural Racism in Public Health initiative began on September 30, 2022.

The recipients are:

For more information about OMH, visit www.minorityhealth.hhs.gov.

The HHS Office of Minority Health (OMH) is dedicated to improving the health of racial and ethnic minority populations through the development of health policies and programs that will help eliminate health disparities. Through its demonstration projects, OMH supports the identification of effective approaches for improving health outcomes with the goal of promoting the dissemination and sustainability of these approaches.