The AAMC Center for Health Justice Building Trust and Confidence Through Partnerships Grant

Background
The AAMC Center for Health Justice focuses on the intersection of population health, community health, and health equity and prioritizes community collaborations and engagement. Building confidence in a vaccine, whether among health care personnel or local community members, more broadly, requires bidirectional communication, an equitable exchange of information and ideas, and opportunities to demonstrate that the health care, biomedical, and public health systems that produce, allocate, distribute, and dispense the vaccine are worthy of a community’s trust.

The AAMC was awarded a cooperative agreement with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to support building confidence in COVID-19 vaccines. As part of the Building Trust and Confidence Through Partnerships grant program, the AAMC Center for Health Justice is fostering the promotion of greater and stronger cross-sector collaboration between academic medical centers, their local public health departments, social service agencies, and local community-based organizations to support both near- and long-term responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The goals of this grantmaking opportunity are to create and enhance effective partnerships, build trust and bidirectional communication, build vaccine confidence and trust within health care and local communities, and ultimately increase the number of individuals who receive the COVID-19 vaccine.


Eligibility Criteria
To be eligible for an award:

• The primary applicant must be from an AAMC-member institution. The primary applicant must also partner with at least one of the following: a local/state public health department, social service agency, and/or local 501c(3) nonprofit community-based organization, including faith-based organizations).
• Your core team can include up to five individuals and must have representation from each of the partnering organizations.

Awards
Pending the availability of funds, the AAMC will provide grants ranging from $50,000 to $75,000 to support successful applicant institutions and their partners for the award period of 12 months. Award amounts will vary based on need and project type.

Funding will be based upon the submission of a successful joint application demonstrating a well-conceived partnership to support innovative activities not limited to:

• Developing patient- and community-engaged COVID-19-related projects to gather information crucial to developing effective local partnership and communication strategies to build trust and confidence.
• Leveraging relationships with local community- and faith-based organizations to develop messaging that is relevant to communities that have been historically under-resourced and marginalized and that recognizes the varying socioeconomic needs and differing levels of trust in health systems and government (Ensure these materials are at the appropriate reading level for broad audiences and available in multiple languages using processes beyond translation that include a cultural understanding of specific communities with limited English proficiency).
• Locating testing and vaccine distribution within historically under-resourced and marginalized communities, ideally co-located with trusted community organizations.

How To Apply
Applicants must submit a brief proposal online that describes the project. The proposal should contain the following information:

• Project/program title
• Description of the project team and partner(s)
• Description of proposed activities and timeline of the project
• Detailed budget and budget justification of the project, including how the funds will be allocated
• An evaluation plan of proposed activities
• Commitment to attend quarterly virtual learning collaborative meetings and submit all deliverables in a timely manner
• Attached letters of support from a member of each of the applicant organizations’ leadership team

DOWNLOAD THE FULL REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS HERE.