Funding Opportunities

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) is committed to improving health equity in the United States. RWJF has deepened its focus on partnering with affected communities to promote health equity and combat structural racism as the most fundamental barrier to health in America. One of the ways the Foundation does this is through Evidence for Action (E4A), a national program that funds action-oriented health equity research, which prioritizes community knowledge and facilitates the relationships and governance structures that build community power, ownership of research, and systems change. To make progress toward racial and Indigenous health equity, we work toward upstream solutions that target the root causes of inequities, like housing, education, food access and affordability, employment, and healthcare, all of which drive economic and other forms of opportunity. Core to this approach is the recognition that communities most impacted by systemic inequities hold valuable cultural assets, knowledge, power, lived experiences, and leadership necessary for creating meaningful change. Research that is centered in and directly partnered with affected communities is a vital step toward shifting power imbalances within the system of knowledge production, policy advocacy, and issue prioritization. The purpose of this call for proposals is to meet the current moment through two approaches: to support timely, actionable health equity research that has been interrupted by shifts in federal funding; and support community-driven research that uplifts the knowledge, expertise, and power of historically marginalized racial and Indigenous communities to develop or test solutions that advance racial and Indigenous health equity. We seek to build an actionable body of evidence to construct fair systems (i.e., laws, policies, norms, practices, and power dynamics) that determine resource distribution and support health equity. E4A will fund Rapid Response Research grants at least to partially offset losses in federal funding for existing research, as well as New Research Support for action-oriented research to address ongoing threats to racial and Indigenous health equity.