Deadline: 28-Feb-21
The Community Benefit – Ministry Grant Fund, funds restricted grants for projects that align with MercyOne Dubuque’s mission, values and community health needs assessment.
The overall process for funding projects must support MercyOne Dubuque’s Mission to “serve with fidelity to the Gospel as a compassionate, healing ministry of Jesus Christ to transform the health of their communities.” One way that MercyOne plans to accomplish this is to pursue opportunities to collaborate with their community partners to assure access to services for persons most in need.
Objectives
Grants must clearly meet at least one of the following community benefit objectives:
- Improve access to health care services
- Enhance public health
- Advance increased general knowledge
- Relieve the burden of government to improve health
These objectives include activities or programs that do the following, per IRS regulations:
- Are available broadly to the public and serve low-income consumers
- Reduce geographic, financial, or cultural barriers to accessing health services, and if they ceased would result in access problems (for example, longer wait times or increased travel distances).
- Address federal, state, or local public health priorities such as eliminating disparities in access to health care services or disparities in health status among different populations.
- Leverage or enhance public health department activities such as childhood immunization efforts.
- Strengthen community health resilience by improving the ability of a community to withstand and recover from public health emergencies.
- Otherwise would become the responsibility of government or another tax-exempt organization.
- Advance increased general knowledge through education or research that benefits the public.
- Grants must aim to serve populations primarily within MercyOne Dubuque’s service area.
Internal (MercyOne) Grants must also:
- Primarily benefit the community rather than the organization. This means, the program must be one open to community/public participation, not just MercyOne Dubuque patients
- Result in measurable expense to the organization.
- Not qualify as capital expenditures per internal guidelines.
Eligibility and Funding Parameters
- Grants are for a one-year term; no multi-year commitments will be considered.
- Organizations may apply in consecutive years.
- Organizations may only submit one grant application per cycle year.
- Requests for the same program in subsequent years are allowed and will be considered
- Grants will be cash contributions, restricted, in writing, to programs that meet Mercy’s criteria for Community Benefit.
- Grants will be distributed beginning in August 2021.
- Grants may be for any amount, however average awards typically range between $1,000 – $10,000
- Approved recipients must agree to provide a detailed narrative account of how the grant funds were used and how the grant benefited the target populations and achieved the overall goals of the program by July 2022.
- There are not sufficient funds available through the grant fund to fund all requests; as a result, even projects that meet all the criteria and parameters may not receive a grant and grants may be awarded for a lesser amount than requested.
- Award Recipients must agree to publicize their grant award through social media and traditional media outlets using the MercyOne logo and crediting MercyOne for the funds.
Criteria
The applications will be evaluated by the following criteria:
- Requesting organization must be able to provide proof of non-profit 501(C)3 status.
- Grants must address a specified need in MercyOne Dubuque’s most recent Community Health Needs Assessment. Priority consideration will be given to programs targeted at affecting the “significant community health needs identified” in the document. Programs addressing other identified needs in the document will be considered
For more information, visit https://www.mercyone.org/dubuque/giving/mercyone-dubuque-foundation/community-benefit-ministry-grant-fund
