Wholespire and the South Carolina Office of Rural Health (SCORH) received a grant from the BlueCross® BlueShield® of South Carolina Foundation, an independent licensee of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, to improve the health of South Carolina’s economically vulnerable citizens.
The project will expand upon the current work of both agencies to address the root causes of poor health outcomes across the state. Wholespire and SCORH each have a strong track record of using a coalition-driven approach to effect health transformation in local communities. The two agencies collectively work with coalitions in 38 counties across South Carolina.
The grant will support this work for four years across the state. The primary components of this project will be the creation of a technical assistance model that includes scalable training and coaching, and capacity building, and financial support for urban and rural coalitions across the state to improve population health.
This initiative will build off the successes of SCORH’s Blueprint for Health program and Wholespire’s Let’s Go 3.0 mini-grant initiative that also were funded by the BlueCross® BlueShield® of South Carolina Foundation.
Blueprint for Health allowed SCORH to offer funding of up to $25,000 to 12 communities to bring together rural community leaders from multiple sectors to collaborate on solutions to the root causes for poor health and build capacity at the local level to solve community health issues.
Let’s Go 3.0 mini-grants offered funding of up to $5,000 each for projects that increased access to healthy foods and safe places for physical activity through policy, systems and environmental change projects.