Open Society Foundations: Roma Healthy Start Grants

Deadline: 30 March 2018

Open Society Foundations is seeking proposals for its Roma Healthy Start Grants to improve pregnancy and birth outcomes, eliminate racial disparities in infant mortality, reduce low birth weight and preterm births, reduce maternal depression, and address the social determinants that affect Roma maternal and child health.

Through this Call for Proposals the Public Health Program and the Early Childhood Program at Open Society Foundations would like to support community-based organizations to model equitable maternal and child health services while applying the Nurturing Care Concept, and elevating these models at policy level.

Eligibility Criteria

Through this call they are looking for inspiring examples of collaborations across sectors designed to improve the health of Roma children and mothers in CEE countries with high Roma population, including but not limited to: Bulgaria, Hungary, Macedonia, Romania and Serbia.
They are looking for collaborations across sectors, whether longer-term or more recently established, that have achieved success judged according to different dimensions relevant to women’s and children’s health, such as the efficiency, effectiveness or sustainability of the collaboration. They are also looking for ideas to set up new collaborations.
All proposals will be reviewed using the following criteria:
- supports efforts to reduce the longstanding two-to-one disparity in infant mortality rates between Roma and non-Roma;
- embraces a comprehensive, integrated, and cross-sectoral approach focused on achieving developmental milestones that include prenatal and perinatal care, access to children’s health care, home visiting programs, and family and parenting resources;
- the initiative can be headed by a health sector provider, or with a health sector provider as a partner;
- the main stakeholders of the collaboration—including local government, health professionals, child protection specialists, and others—have agreed in principle to the proposal and participation in the intervention process;
- the collaboration ensures an active involvement of Roma civil society organizations;
- integrates human rights, child rights, gender equality, equity considerations, including participation and voice of the Roma community, within the implementation.
- seeks to address the social determinants of health—political, social, economic causes of health inequities within and between countries;
- incorporates data and documentation on the collaboration including evaluations, surveys, reports, and other information on which to build case studies;
- the final result of the funded proposal across sectors is to be well-established with related processes and institutional mechanisms which would result in sustainable policy changes.