We support communities in developing safe, affordable housing, improving access to nutritious, locally produced foods, and planning resilient local solutions to address other needs essential to community health and well-being.
Housing, food systems, and other basic needs – commonly called the “social determinants of health” – are among the most powerful influences on the health of people and their communities.
Through our work with partners across the state and a review of community health assessments and county-level data, we know that access to safe, affordable housing and nutritious, locally produced foods are leading health-related needs in many Montana communities.
Communities understand their needs best. For this reason, through the Healthy Montana Communities Initiative, we develop close partnerships with communities to learn about their specific needs and support them in identifying promising strategies, partnerships, and financing to address them.
We prioritize work with rural communities in recognition of the fact that they have traditionally been underserved in these areas and face unique barriers to addressing these needs.
Read the Healthy Montana Communities Initiative announcement.
See project summaries from our early grantees.
Learn More
Our Approach
Through the Healthy Montana Communities Initiative, we provide grants, technical assistance, and low-interest loans to support communities in planning and developing economically viable projects.
- We provide smaller grants and technical assistance to support community-led planning addressing identified housing, food, or other clearly defined, high-priority needs related to the social factors that impact health.
- For well-planned projects that address significant health-related housing or food system needs, we provide larger grants and low-interest loans to support capital costs, business startups, or other creative, community-driven approaches. For large projects, we will generally not be the majority funder. Instead, we will provide strategic investments that facilitate securing full financing.
Because we can only meet a small fraction of the needs in our state, we emphasize planning and strategic investments that help communities bring together new partners to design and finance the development of new projects. For example, we support partnerships between community developers, health care and public health agencies, and others to create permanent, self-sustaining solutions to housing, food, and related needs.
In selecting projects to support, we consider the community’s need, its readiness for the project, the feasibility of the proposed programming, and the resources that can be leveraged.
Funding is by invitation only – we do not accept unsolicited proposals.
Contact
If you have a question about this initiative,
please email our program team.