The Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota Foundation recently announced that it has awarded more than $3.4 million in grants to 21 nonprofit organizations across Minnesota. The grants are for one or two years and range from $25,000 to $100,000 per year.

Improving access to quality early education

Sixteen of the grants are part of the Foundation’s Healthy Start program, focused on improving access to quality early childhood care and education throughout the state. This effort has been a focus of the Blue Cross Foundation for more than 20 years, due to the well-known connection between education and health.

“Research shows that quality early childhood care and education results in better health from childhood to the adult years,” says Bukata Hayes, chair of the Blue Cross Foundation board and vice president of racial and health equity at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota. “Increasing access to early childhood care and education also means that families across the state – particularly families of color, Indigenous families and those with low incomes – receive critical support. These efforts all contribute to ongoing progress toward racial and health equity.”

These grants will support things like:

• Connecting BIPOC and low-income families with high-quality early childhood programs and childhood screenings
• Providing culturally responsive and trauma-informed trainings and mentoring to child care providers
• Engaging with parents and providers about the impact of social determinants of health
• Addressing bias and stereotyping in the child care system, with the goal of retaining providers and reducing or eliminating early childhood expulsions – a critical racial equity issue
• Recruiting and supporting multi-lingual providers in all child care settings
• Supporting providers in gaining foundational employment skills and credentials
• Providing support to New American caregivers navigating the child care system
• Ongoing development of Minnesota’s first Ojibwe immersion cooperative child care center
• Creating a culturally relevant, Hmong-centered pre-K curriculum that will be publicly available for all teachers and early childhood family education programs

“These grants address a critical need,” adds Carolyn Link, president of the Foundation. “We are proud to partner with our grantees in prioritizing early care and education in the communities we serve – efforts that will benefit all Minnesota children and the broader health system.”

Increasing access to health care coverage and strengthening nonprofit capacity

Additional grants were also awarded to help strengthen and build nonprofit capacity, and to increase health care coverage across Minnesota as part of the Foundation’s Access to Coverage program.

Learn more

A full list of grantees can be found here. To learn more about the Blue Cross Foundation, visit www.bluecrossmnfoundation.org