Kent County Community Awards

The Community Commitment Fund was established as a result of a 1997 Consent Decree formed during the merger of Blodgett Memorial Medical Center and Butterworth Health Corporation. The Community Commitment Fund provides targeted contributions to improve the health of medically underserved and economically disadvantaged populations in Kent County through health programs, services, and grantmaking dollars.

Corewell Health’s community commitment grant-making funding is used to fund three benefit processes: a rapid response fund to address emerging needs in the community, a data-driven multi-year grant award, and the neighborhood-level participatory research “Our Neighborhood, Our Health.”

To address timely and urgent needs for Kent County nonprofit organizations requiring immediate action, this grant fund is available for organizations responding to unanticipated needs, events, opportunities, or challenges. Examples may include:

• Unexpected key staffing changes
• Preparing or responding to an emergency response
• A new opportunity to meet a need aligned with our Community Health Needs Assessment (PDF)
• Crisis management
• Other

The Rapid Response Fund is currently in a pilot phase and will be opened to the community in 2026.

For more information, email communitygrants@corewellhealth.org.

We are looking to support impactful projects that advance equity and improve the health and well-being of residents in Kent County, Michigan. We seek to award eligible organizations whose work directly or indirectly addresses and improves outcomes in at least one of the following strategic priority areas:

• Access to care: Ability to get to, receive, and use all aspects of care that are medically necessary for a healthy life to their full extent, without experiencing barriers due to language, mobility, race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and other factors.
• Mental health: Mental health care and emotional well-being support(s).

You may access the Kent County Community Health Needs Assessment (PDF) for additional information, data, and examples of needs in these priority areas. Priority will be given to organizations or projects whose focus is on communities most impacted by the organization’s area of work and strategic priority area.

Our Neighborhood, Our Health (ONOH) is an approach to improving the health of a neighborhood where residents are asked to identify pressing health concerns and their solutions. It is a scalable, collaborative, place-based model built upon community-based participatory research principles. We focus on developing a framework for neighborhood health that relies on neighborhood-driven solutions to neighborhood-identified health needs with broad institutional support in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Once neighbors prioritize health needs, the Community Advisory Board supports disbursing mini-grants to neighborhood organizations that meet those needs. Today, the ONOH model is implemented in the Roosevelt Park Neighborhood of Grand Rapids, supported by the Hispanic Center of Western Michigan as the Backbone Organization and a Community Advisory Board, The Roosevelt Park Wellness Collective.

For more information on 2025 mini-grant priorities and grant awards, please visit the Roosevelt Park Wellness Collective Facebook page or email Rafa Castanon at rafa.castanon@corewellhealth.org.