Through the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Local Funding Partnerships (LFP) program, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) collaborates with local grantmakers to improve health outcomes for the most vulnerable among us. Local grantmakers propose a funding partnership by nominating community initiatives that offer creative solutions to critical health or health care problems.

Since 1988 RWJF has awarded over $106 million in LFP* matching grants to support innovative health and health care projects put forward by local funders. We have funded 299 projects together with more than 1,200 local funding partners. These projects have challenged established practices, engaged new coalitions and offered ambitious improvements in systems and services.

RWJF invites grantmaking organizations including independent and private foundations, family and community foundations, corporate foundations, and other philanthropies to recommend projects for this funding partnership. Through LFP, local grantmakers may leverage funds from RWJF to implement new community programs that address serious health issues.

This program, which is funded through the Foundation’s Vulnerable Populations Portfolio, addresses some of society’s most daunting and seemingly intractable health problems head-on at the community level. LFP grantees make progress because their partners include those outside what is traditionally viewed as the health sector and apply fresh thinking and new ideas to long-standing issues. This approach can produce immediate and lasting improvements in people’s health and creates change where previous efforts have failed. Successful LFP programs work across many different sectors: housing, education, social services, criminal justice and health care.

Factors outside the health care system such as poverty, violence, inadequate housing or education contribute significantly to poor health for the most vulnerable people among us. Many Americans—particularly low-income children, adolescents and families, the elderly, and racial and ethnic minorities—get lost in a tangle of costly, often ineffective services that may address only one aspect of the health challenges they face.

Local funders may be the first to identify these concerns and to help find effective solutions. Often grantmakers convene groups that typically do not work together, such as organizations from both inside and outside of the health sector. Broad-based community coalitions may stimulate breakthrough ideas and benefit from early collaboration with local grantmakers. Any nonprofit agency seeking an LFP matching grant for their proposed project should discuss its proposal with a local funder, who may then choose to nominate the project.

*From 1988-2007 the program was known as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Local Initiative Funding Partners (LIFP) program.

For more information see Funding Partners.

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