Continuing its mission to connect, support and inform efforts to improve the health of individuals and communities in Arizona, Vitalyst Health Foundation is proud to announce this year’s Spark Grants. Spark Grants are designed to support organizations with a desire to collectively affect change in their communities. Eleven grants totaling $214,00 were awarded to Arizona-based collaboratives that are working to spark creative, systemic ways to improve community health.

The 2022 Spark Grant recipients are:

The ASU Foundation – Arizona Commission for Deaf & Hard of Hearing will explore systems-level solutions to untreated hearing loss in adult Arizonans with limited income. The project addresses two critical elements of a healthy community – health care access and social cohesion – by exploring ways to ensure affordable, accessible, equitable and high-quality hearing health care for Arizonans with limited income.

Arizona Town Hall will work together with partners to increase voter participation in primary elections, as 75 percent of Arizonans are not currently participating in primary elections.  This will be a non-partisan effort and will not imply any support or opposition to any candidates or campaigns.

Body and Soul Sovereignty, United will address disparities in health outcomes negatively impacting American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) women, especially related to maternal and infant mortality rates. The project seeks to center and empower AIAN women in accessing and receiving quality healthcare from Western healthcare providers and institutions.

Covenant Health Network will lead support the AZ Senior Healthcare Workforce Development Collaborative working together support both short- and long-term solutions to the post-acute care (PAC) staffing crisis, the collaborative aims to advocate for federal policy change that would permit a foreign worker pilot program in PAC facilities in Arizona. This would allow immigrants and their families to enter the U.S. to provide direct care for Arizona’s elderly, increasing the supply of caregivers to meet the needs of a growing aged population.

Down Syndrome Network will lead a collaborative and use this grant to identify a solution for adults with Down Syndrome to ensure they receive integrated health care services, including accurate diagnosis, care and referrals to community health resources.

Lincoln Institute for Land Policy will convene groups to assess current and future water needs of Colorado River Basin communities, economies, and the environment. This collaborative will address the capacity building needs and interests of Tribes along the Basin and will provide an overview of Tribal water priorities, existing water management capacity, existing and anticipated capacity needs, and options for building Tribal capacity.

Lutheran Advocacy Ministry of Arizona will convene The Hunger Policy Workgroup and explore how hunger policy advocacy might be more effective and ultimately successful if all hunger advocates in Arizona collaborated on policy initiatives for the 2023 Arizona legislative session.

One‐by‐One Foster & Kinship Solutions will host a statewide discovery process to increase community capacity to identify and address issues affecting community health and well-being in more informal kinship caregivers when compared to legal and foster caregivers and identify areas of policy and practice to improve access to services in informal kinship settings

Sun Produce Cooperative will work to identify ways to reduce barriers and build the farm-to-school and farm-to-hospital pipeline, which would provide fresh food options to students in schools and patients in care facilities, and support local agriculture.

The Arizona Partnership for Immunization (TAPI) will lead a collaborative effort to assess the barriers and gaps in education and administration of vaccines for first-time mothers in practices that offer prenatal services and use this information to develop approaches to engage both parents and prenatal providers, which could not be designed and implemented by one organization or stakeholder.

Eyes on Learning, a statewide children’s vision health initiative of the Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust, proposes partnering with a group of diverse children’s vision health partners in a dedicated collaborative to develop a plan to attack the inequity gap for school-age children in low-income communities to receive comprehensive eye exams, diagnosis, and treatment, effectively closing the loop for their vision health.

“Vitalyst is excited to see this year’s Spark Grants recipients continue to work toward larger systems change,” said David Martinez III, Vitalyst’s Director of Community Engagement. “We look forward to seeing these coalitions prepare, plan, and solidify their strategy to work on a wide range of issues that impact community health and that especially tie to Vitalyst priorities of civic health, food systems, housing, and healthcare integration.”