Inclusive of multi-year grants, SLHI awarded more than $1.9 million to its Community Funding Partners in FY2015.

2015 marked the second year of our call for transformational projects to fund, and the first year of a proposal review process that included the Arizona Community Foundation. In response to compelling proposals, SLHI funded three Innovation Grants (included in the total above), with Arizona Community Foundation funding a fourth. They are:

1. The Arizona Community Action Association for its development of Raise Arizona – a business-led, voluntary Living Wage Initiative. Similar to the already popular and effective “Local First Arizona” campaign, the initiative establishes a point of pride for businesses to tout paying their employees a living wage, and to use their voluntary effort as a means of distinguishing themselves in the marketplace in comparison to competitors. People living in poverty are inextricably tied to poor health. Raise Arizona can be part of the solution.

2. The City of Phoenix/FitPHX for its effort to encourage “physical activity prescriptions.” The same team that brought Phoenix the increasingly popular Meet Me Downtown weekly walk and run is expanding efforts to encourage and enable access to physical activity options by working directly with physicians to recommend and write physical activity prescriptions. Each prescription will be issued by a pediatrician and will include free or discounted access to city rec centers and/or recreational programming. Respected doctors become the source of advice to move healthfully and the conduit to the places and spaces to get people moving well. The innovative program concept builds on similar case studies of doctors prescribing the purchasing of discounted healthy local foods.

3. Cultivate South Phoenix (CUSP) received its grant for the purpose of creating a Community Food Hub for South Phoenix. CUSP will convert vacant and neglected properties, improve access to fresh and healthy foods, enhance the capacity of local growers to process and distribute their produce, and contribute to developing policies, systems, and business models for long-term sustainability.

And, thanks entirely to collaboration with and generous funding from the Arizona Community Foundation…

4. The Rightcare Foundation is receiving $100,000 from ACF to launch an immediate resuscitation program at senior living communities around the Valley. The goal is to improve neurological outcomes of sudden cardiac arrest. “Health Innovations are a growing part of ACF’s philanthropic portfolio,” says Jacky Alling, Chief Philanthropic Services Officer at the Arizona Community Foundation. “We are very pleased to engage in this work with SLHI to encourage and support some very creative solutions that improve community health.”