Aligning Dollars with Values: Community-engaged Grant Making for Health Equity

Abstract Information: From 2008-2022, the Meharry-Vanderbilt Community Engaged Research Core gave over $500,000 in small grants to community-based organizations and academic researchers. These grants supported the development of mutually beneficial partnerships and the implementation of community engaged research projects. In 2022, CERC leadership decided to pause the mini-grant program to assess its outcomes and consider its strategic direction as it headed into the next 5-year funding cycle. Specifically, they wanted to know if and how the grant program could be better aligned with community priorities and CERC’s health equity goals. We used document review of funded and unfunded grant applications, midterm and final grant reports, judges’ review sheets, publicly available organizational profiles, and geospatial data to assess differences between funded and unfunded organizations, as well as the outcomes produced by funded partnerships. We explored markers of equity in the process of grant making as well as the outcomes produced by the grants. We then presented our findings to a small group of academic and community partners who were convened to redesign the mini-grant program. In this presentation, we will share our framing of health equity, the findings from our study, and the outcomes of the mini-grant redesign. We will present audience members with a simple framework for assessing equity in grant-making, as well as a real-life example of how the framework was used to better align CERC’s mini-grant program with its health equity goals.

Relevance Statement: Community engagement is essential for accomplishing the goals of translational research(1) and community-engaged research (CEnR) is a widely used model of community engagement, especially in health fields. Although there are multiple ways of supporting and practicing CeNR, one important mechanism for growing CEnR is grant-making. CEnR grant-making is intended to build capacity in community organizations and university-based researchers to conduct CEnR, allow community organizations to access research services that help them answer practice-driven questions, and help researchers build community relationships that inform their research and ensure its relevance to the people it impacts (2). As with all translational research efforts, grant-making practices have the ability to perpetuate or disrupt health inequities; thus, centering health equity in the grant-making process is critical (3). The Meharry-Vanderbilt Community-engaged Research Core (CERC) funded over $500,000 worth of mini-grants to support community engaged research between 2008-2022. In 2022, core leadership decided to pause the mini-grant program in order to assess its outcomes more thoroughly, including its impact on health equity. They then convened a group of university-based researchers and community partners to redesign the mini-grant program, with the intention of launching a new version of the program in Fall 2023. Central to the redesign are equity considerations. But how to think about equity in this process? When defining “equity” in grantmaking, we consider equity ends (i.e., does the research have the potential to impact health equity?), as well as equity means (i.e., are we providing funding in such a way that we are disrupting other forms of inequality?) In this presentation, audience members will hear the outcomes of our mini-grant program evaluation, learn how we framed and evaluated health equity, and how that framing informed our redesign. This presentation will expand upon existing knowledge in evaluation of clinical and translational research, and contribute to conversations regarding funding equity in non-profits. The methods and tools we used to conduct our evaluation are methodologically rigorous as well as being widely accessible, meaning that audience members are likely to encounter ideas, frameworks, and/or evaluation methods that they can easily adapt to their own projects. It is our goal that our evaluation complies with AEA’s standards of evaluation equality across all relevant domains and concepts. Standards that are especially relevant to this presentation include being explicit in our values (U4), the use of practical procedures (F2), commitment to clarity and fairness (P4), and sound designs and analyses (A6). 1. Horowitz CR, Robinson M, Seifer S. Community‐based participatory research from the margin to the mainstream: are researchers prepared? Circulation. 2009; 119(19). 2. Alexander L, Sullivan C, Joosten Y, Lipham L, Adams S, Coleman P, Carpenter R, Hargreaves M. Advancing community-engaged research through partnership development: Overcoming challenges voiced by community-academic partners. Progress in Community Health Partnerships, 2019; 14(3). 3. Boulware LE, Corbie G, Aguilar-Gaxiola S, Wilkins C., Ruiz R, Vitale A, Egede L. Combating structural inequities – diversity, equity, and inclusion in clinical and translational research. The New England Journal of Medicine, 2022; 386.