Community Partnerships
The Wisconsin Partnership Program supports community-driven work and recognizes that successful research and interventions depend on engaging communities as partners. Our community grant programs prioritize community voices, needs and lived experiences, and aim to enhance community members’ ideas and efforts with new knowledge and scientific evidence, ultimately resulting in interventions and policies that move health forward.
Community Grant Programs
The Wisconsin Partnership Program currently administers a number of recurring competitive community grant programs, each with a unique approach to improving health and advancing health equity. Our community grant programs support projects that improve health and advance health equity in diverse populations and geographic areas across Wisconsin, including the state’s most underserved and marginalized communities. Grant programs support large-scale, evidence-based, community-academic partnerships that have the potential to create sustainable changes to systems, policies and environments that impact health; build capacity within Wisconsin nonprofits; expand efforts to improve maternal and child health outcomes and strengthen community resilience.
Our community partners are addressing many factors that influence health, such as socioeconomic status, neighborhood and physical environment, education and employment. Community grantees are leading initiatives to reduce health disparities and improve health care services across diverse communities and populations, including efforts to improve health and well-being in rural communities, address the health needs of the state’s aging population, and increase access to treatment and care for people struggling with substance use disorders.
Grantmaking Approach
The Wisconsin Partnership Program’s approach to community grantmaking is informed by feedback from applicants, grantees and other stakeholders as well as research regarding best practices for achieving sustainable change. The following values have guided the development of our grant programs:
- No one organization is capable of successfully tackling the complex health issues we face. This work is most effectively done through collaborations and partnerships.
- The perspectives and experience of those impacted most are crucial to both understanding and solving complex challenges.
- The Wisconsin Partnership Program, due to its unique position within the University of Wisconsin, can provide access to a myriad of university-based resources of value to communities across the state.
Advancing Health Equity
Research and evidence continue to demonstrate that within health, there are disparities between and among groups based on where people live, socioeconomic status, and other nonmedical factors that contribute to poor health outcomes. To address this, the Wisconsin Partnership Program is committed to incorporating health equity into our grantmaking and awards. All of our Requests for Proposals ask applicants how health equity is addressed in their work.