Announcing Round 10 of COVID-19 Grants Totaling More Than $4.7 Million

With this 10th round of grantmaking from the CDP COVID-19 Response Fund, we are supporting domestic and international organizations working on medium- to long-term recovery from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, with a particular focus on:

• Boosting mental and physical health.
• Mitigating economic impact.
• Providing equitable access to and accurate information about the vaccines.
• Supporting health care systems/infrastructure.

We are funding 10 additional grants for a total of $4,754,218. The full breakdown includes $2,001,039 in domestic grants to five organizations and $2,753,179 in international grants to five organizations as follows:

• Amref Health Africa – $500,000 to accelerate COVID-19 vaccine deployment to priority populations to save lives and mitigate the effects of COVID-19 in Machakos and Kajiado Counties in Kenya. These counties are among the top 10 hardest hit with the pandemic in the country. Successful implementation of the project will result in increased vaccine confidence in the general population, a critical mass of health workers with capacity to deploy the vaccine and improved uptake among priority groups.
• Community Organized Relief Effort (CORE) – $1 million to increase direct access to COVID-19 vaccinations for Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) and marginalized communities that lack basic health services, rank highest on the CDC’s social vulnerability index and/or are hotspots experiencing high positivity rates. CORE will build on a year of managing the nation’s largest nonprofit organization-administered COVID-19 testing program and provide more technical assistance to Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHC) for faster, safer and more equitable vaccine distribution in BIPOC communities.
• Direct Relief – A second grant of $500,000 to build out its Cold Chain Initiative with a focus on expanding the reliable energy supply and Low Global Warming Potential (L-GWP) cold-chain capacity of health facility partners throughout the Caribbean. Direct Relief will also create a regional distribution hub to rapidly mobilize medical materials and resources to enable equitable access to vaccines and medications for vulnerable people living in the region.
• For the Children – $250,000 to use their vetted network of volunteers to further cultivate sustainable community-driven recovery by partnering with CarePortal, an online platform that matches the needs of the child welfare community with fulfillment partners (For the Children chapter network), and growing a mentoring program to help meet the social and mental health needs of children experiencing family-induced childhood trauma.
• Healthcare Ready – An additional $201,039 grant for identifying and implementing lessons learned regarding the complex and urgent COVID-19 vaccination efforts. This work educates government and community decision-makers and influencers on vaccines – from how they are developed to strategies to protect individuals and communities – and provides resources and technical assistance to implement equitable distribution.
• Hispanic Federation – $250,000 to support community health centers across the country in their dissemination of COVID-19 vaccine education and immunizations. The grant will also fund advocacy for community health centers and community-based organizations to be vaccine distribution sites to better reach residents in the areas they serve.
• IsraAID – $253,179 to bolster resilience among disaster-affected communities by offering targeted training and support to frontline workers (including teachers, religious leaders, community workers, health care workers and social workers) so they have more tools to address the acute challenges facing their community stemming from COVID-19. Efforts will focus on mental health and psychosocial stressors, self-care and burnout prevention and information on COVID-19 vaccines.
• National Association of Free and Charitable Clinics – A second grant of $300,000 to ensure that COVID-19 vaccines and testing are delivered equitably through support of their member clinics throughout the United States.
• Project HOPE – An additional $1 million grant to leverage COVID-19 global training infrastructure. Project HOPE has developed a mental health resiliency program tailored for health care providers. This program uses a training-of-trainers model to help health workers develop resilient behaviors/strategies for dealing with the serious mental health pressures from their work. The program is multi-lingual, with the long-term goal of deploying it during natural disasters and humanitarian crises, giving health workers a critical lifeline when needed most.
• Resolve to Save Lives/Vital Strategies – $500,000 to combat COVID-19 in African countries by facilitating country readiness for immediate COVID-19 vaccine roll-out. Three focus areas for technical and financial assistance are vaccine microplanning, crisis communications and coordination of national vaccine deployment. By providing early support in these key areas, this project allows countries to rapidly provide access to quality COVID-19 vaccination services among priority, vulnerable groups and establish the foundation for expanded national COVID-19 vaccination programming.

To date, this round of grants is the largest for the CDP COVID-19 Response Fund. It includes two $1 million awards, which are the biggest single grants we have made from the fund to this point.

Since the inception of the fund in March 2020, we have deployed $26,562,562 through 154 grants to 143 different organizations.