Grant Type: Community Grant

Centro De La Comunidad/United Community Center, Inc will develop a regional model of dementia healthcare and caregiver support to improve Alzheimer’s disease detection, diagnosis and supports for Latinos in the southeast region of the state, including Milwaukee, Waukesha, Racine and Kenosha. This project will engage existing county and community organization partners to establish a regional approach for earlier detection and diagnosis of dementia while building on existing mobile assessment services, virtual assessments and caregiver support and education to reduce geographical, cultural, financial and language barriers. Dr. Melina Kavanaugh, UW Milwaukee Helen Bader School of Social Welfare is the academic partner.

Education is a building block of healthy communities. When people have access to quality educational opportunities, families and communities thrive. A grant to One City Schools supports the school’s work to advance health equity through an innovative model of early child education. One City will use the funding to develop a rigorous longitudinal evaluation of the school’s novel approach—which includes how it trains staff, engages parents and the larger community, and prepares its young children—to better illustrate how its model of early childhood education and family involvement can close educational and health gaps. Findings will be used to inform expansion of the preschool, inform the fields of early childhood education, and help support public policy and system changes around early childhood education.

Through its project, the Milwaukee Re-entry Alliance, Employ Milwaukee and collaborators will address the widespread negative health effects of incarceration by establishing a better coordinated re-entry system to support criminal justice-involved individuals.

In the span of the last 100 years, however, the Menominee Nation community has experienced severely limited access to healthy foods, with a dramatic increase in Type 2 diabetes and coronary heart diseases that occur at a disproportionately higher rate compared to the state’s average. Through this initiative, the Menominee Tribe and its Department of Agriculture and Food Systems will create a renewed food system by focusing on access to healthy food, agricultural best practices, raising livestock, Menominee cultural teachings and peer support. The initiative will work to assert tribal sovereignty through the customization of a Menominee Food Code, beginning with food safety regulation of traditional tribal food systems, while promoting healthy food consumption and economic development. By reclaiming a tribally driven food system, the initiative will support a healthy and culturally vibrant Menominee Nation.

A public health approach to family support is needed to effectively address family stress and instability that is experienced by families in some of Milwaukee’s most vulnerable communities. Through this grant, the initiative ultimately aims to improve health outcomes for children by building an integrated system of prevention, intervention and treatment services to strengthen families and help reduce the disproportionate rates of African American children in the Milwaukee child welfare system.

The RHeSUS initiative seeks to close the substance misuse treatment gap by improving treatment and care for people struggling with substance use disorders in rural Wisconsin. The team aims to enhance the care delivery capacity of rural primary care clinics and hospitals and the availability of peer recovery support to rural residents. The team aims to enhance the care delivery capacity of rural primary care clinics and hospitals and the availability of peer recovery support to rural residents. This initiative supports a new collaboration between Wisconsin Voices for Recovery, academic partner Dr. Randall Brown, professor of family medicine, and the Wisconsin Hospital Association, which will leverage its network of health systems to facilitate this work.

Nationally and in Wisconsin, there is a void of culturally and linguistically appropriate mental health services for diverse populations. This threatens the well-being of Dane County’s Latino community, whose members face significant challenges to their mental health from the psychological stress associated with racial, cultural and linguistic isolation and stigmatization. The Community Impact Grant awarded to Centro Hispano of Dane County and its academic and community partners will advance the quality of accessible linguistically and culturally competent services that support the mental health of the Latino community in Dane County. This project will help increase the number of trained professionals to serve Latino communities through a partnership with UW–Madison School of Education, specifically for native Spanish heritage speakers.

This project, Improving Assisted Living Quality through Collaborative System Change, aimed to expand current Wisconsin Coalition for Collaborative Excellence in Assisted Living (WCCEAL) efforts to establish a comprehensive and robust quality infrastructure for Wisconsin Assisted Living Communities (ALCs).The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services has developed a comprehensive system to measure and monitor quality of care received in nursing homes, but ALCs are typically not included in these efforts to measure, monitor and improve quality of care. The absence of a quality measurement system for ALCs is underscored by the fact that they are not regulated by the federal government, and as such, the standards of care and training and even the definitions of “assisted living” vary from state to state. Over the course of the project, WCCEAL membership was increased by 28 percent and three important policies were adopted by the Division of Medicaid Services (DMS) at the state level to help sustain the initiative. Additionally, new partnerships were cultivated and existing partnerships were strengthened over the course of this project.

This project, First Breath Families (FBF), aimed to fill the gap in access to perinatal smoking cessation services for low-income Wisconsin women, thereby improving the health of mothers, infants and families. FBF is a comprehensive cessation support system for pregnant women and household smokers and supports them from pregnancy through six months postpartum. Smoking during pregnancy is the leading preventable cause of adverse birth outcomes, and in Wisconsin, 15 percent of women report smoking during their pregnancies. Despite the risks associated with smoking, many women who quit during pregnancy face high postpartum relapse rates due to social challenges and lack of access to cessation services. FBF successfully expanded its evidence-based perinatal tobacco cessation program across Wisconsin, engaging 2,300 pregnant and postpartum individuals. The program achieved substantial progress in smoking cessation, increasing rates from 26 percent of participants in 2019 to 56 percent in 2023. Additionally, the program has trained 1,388 providers in tobacco screening and intervention, with high satisfaction and confidence reported among newly recruited providers. Finally, FBF expanded its reach through over 50 new partnerships, ensuring broad accessibility to cessation services statewide, including coverage in all Wisconsin counties.

This project, Central Wisconsin Health Partnership’s Collective Impact: Moving Towards Resilience, aimed to raise awareness of health inequities in Central Wisconsin and mitigate them through policy change. The Central Wisconsin Health Partnership (CWHP) includes Family Health La Clinica and Adams, Green Lake, Marquette, Juneau, Waupaca and Waushara counties. The project yielded significant results, including the hire of a Community Health Engagement Coordinator and the identification of the region’s primary health concerns, including substance use disorders, mental health, lack of transportation and chronic disease, through a comprehensive community needs survey. These outcomes led to resource allocation, educational programs and advocacy efforts including the implementation of Health in All Policy (HiAP) resolutions in some regional counties.