Deadline: 28-Jan-22
The Special Olympics Inclusive Health Innovation Subgrants, supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and bound by all federal guidelines, are intended to help increase and normalize inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities (ID) in mainstream health care and health promotion services and activities. These subgrants are limited to organizations in the United States.
Special Olympics, Inc. (SOI) is the world’s largest sports organization for people with ID. Over the 25 years Special Olympics has offered health programming, they have made life-changing and life-saving strides in health. However, people with ID continue to live with significant unmet health needs and health disparities vis-à-vis the general population.
People with ID face significant barriers in accessing health promotion and disease prevention (HPDP) services, from fitness and physical activity to health education adapted to their needs. These barriers exist in health delivery settings, too — training programs in medicine and other health professions rarely include classroom or practical content on how to provide care for people with ID. Such realities exist across sectors and cause these health disparities to persist.
Strategies
Organizations across the public health system can take action to remove barriers and improve access for people with ID to their services, as their patients, customers, beneficiaries, and clients. Four primary strategies include:
- Welcoming Spaces: Ensuring your programs and physical spaces are accessible and welcoming to people with ID.
- Communication: Ensuring your communications, including written and spoken language, materials, and interactions with the community are accessible to people with ID.
- Awareness and Training: Understanding your community and training your staff on the barriers and challenges faced by people with ID, including on how to remove them.
- Sustainable and Intentional Inclusion: Building intentional and sustainable inclusion by changing organizational culture to value and understand inclusion.
Eligibility Criteria
Inclusive Health Innovation Subgrants will allow eligible organizations to:
- institute organizational changes, including through resource development and dissemination, that sustainably increase the access that people with ID have to health care and health promotion services in the US,
- expand on existing efforts or develop new efforts, including advocacy efforts, to change health programs and services in the US to better meet the needs of people with ID, and
- identify and document inclusion success stories and promising practices.
For more information, visit https://inclusivehealth.specialolympics.org/
