The first step to improving the overall health of a community is listening.
Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield’s Blue & You Foundation for Healthier Arkansas has been helping the state’s cities and towns improve their health outcomes for 22 years. Through grant programs and partnerships, the foundation helps communities obtain the resources to fund and implement community-based solutions to challenges that impact a community’s overall health.
The Blue & You Foundation is a charitable foundation funded by Arkansas Blue Cross that has provided more than $60 million to fund projects that improve the health of Arkansas residents since its founding in 2001.
“It’s a separate entity, but I think the vision of Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield and what Blue Cross stands for will be incorporated into the foundation,” said Max Greenwood, vice president of government and media relations for the Blue & You Foundation.
The foundation has stayed in business and achieved success not by dictating ready-made, one-size-fits-all solutions, but by listening to the creative people in each community and helping to implement their ideas. It’s more about collaboration and sharing best practices than orders from above, Greenwood said.
“We’re really focused on community-based solutions and trying to encourage collaboration and innovation in our communities across the state,” she said.
The foundation will contribute its expertise and experience when it is helpful, Greenwood added, but even then it is more interested in bringing like-minded people together.
“I think we really leave that up to the folks on the ground,” Greenwood said. “After 22 years, we’ve obviously seen elements of programs that are going to produce successful outcomes, so I think there’s a lot of interaction in terms of sharing best practices. If we’ve seen something that’s worked in the community and there’s another community trying to replicate that, we would obviously share that information and probably put them in touch with other agencies that have done the same thing.”
Over the past 22 years, the Blue and You Foundation has supported more than 600 community partners with grants ranging from $5,000 to $20,000. In 2022 alone, the Foundation helped secure grants for a diverse group of partners and recipients, including the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, state food banks, women’s shelters, Our House, the Ozark Mission Project, Ronald McDonald House Charities of Arkansas & North Louisiana, and the United Way.
In addition, there are mini-grants of $1,000 to $2,000 to support food banks, nonprofit organizations, schools, colleges and universities.
“Every community is unique,” Greenwood said, “so we need to look at the perceptions and knowledge of health care leaders to learn what is most needed in the community so we can improve resources to truly have a positive impact.”
Some of the foundation’s partners are obvious—like the centers that provide trauma-informed emotional and behavioral health services for youth or the Arkansas Hunger Relief Alliance—while others may be more surprising.
The Blue & You Foundation has worked with the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra in Little Rock on a behavioral health program that has provided musical opportunities for more than 600 children at Arkansas Children’s as well as nursing home residents. Greenwood said live music has been shown to have a positive impact on people’s mood and can improve the overall experience in the hospital or nursing home.
Our goal is to improve the health of all Arkansans, whether or not they are members of Arkansas Blue Cross,” she added.
Currently, the Blue & You Foundation’s work is based on three “buckets,” says Greenwood: maternal health, mental health and investing in whole-person health.
For example, there is a funded program with Harmony Health Clinic in Little Rock to expand services by providing more comprehensive health and behavioral care to the uninsured, underserved, and homeless residents of central Arkansas. The Acute and Basic Child Care Simulation at South Arkansas College in El Dorado provides students with hands-on child care experience using a simulation manikin.
The Family Medicine Parent Partnership at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock is an intervention to support mothers and mitigate the negative impact of maternal depression on child development.
Newer programs include the Wolfe Street Foundation’s Youth Empowerment Project in Little Rock, the expansion of a prenatal clinic at St. Bernards Medical Center in Jonesboro, and GoVision AR, a project of the UAMS Department of Ophthalmology that provides a mobile vision clinic program for underserved children in the state.
Such programs are just the tip of the iceberg. The Blue & You Foundation has helped fund programs that support veterans and people with disabilities, combat hunger and illiteracy, improve minority representation in the medical field, help those with Alzheimer’s and dementia, address caregiver shortages, provide resources for non-native speakers, and more.
“(The foundation helps) when there are people who are unable to buy groceries or get transportation to appointments, or there is no safe haven for victims of domestic violence,” Greenwood said. “I mean, every community probably has a need.”
Greenwood added that the approval process is extensive and thorough.
“I know our people go through a very thorough process to make sure that we are not only distributing the money wisely, but that we are distributing it to entities that actually have the ability to implement the programs they want to implement,” she said.
The Blue & You Foundation’s application process is closed for this year, but includes a letter of intent process in January and an open application process that ends in February, with grant recipients notified in late spring. The Social Determinants of Health grants focus on factors that affect health outcomes, and grants will be awarded that address economic stability, access and quality of education, access and quality of health care, neighborhoods and safe housing, and social and community context.
“I would just say, look at our foundation,” Greenwood said. “Take the time to fill out a grant application because we are here to try to make your community better.”
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