The Commonwealth Fund
/OVERVIEW: The Commonwealth Fund supports research, policy development and other initiatives toward the improvement of healthcare delivery for vulnerable and uninsured people in the U.S.
IP TAKE: According to this grantmaker’s self-generated Grantee Perception Report, the Commonwealth Fund is perceived “as playing a crucial role in driving policy change, specifically by informing or contributing to the implementation of federal and state policy” for health care. It gets lower ratings, however, on responsiveness, communication and transparency. The Fund’s grants tend to go to well-known institutes and universities pursuing research and policy development toward healthcare reform in the U.S., so smaller and grassroots organizations will have a hard time getting through the door here. Recent RFPs have prioritized researchers from underrepresented groups, reflecting the Fund’s strong commitment to equity and inclusion.
This is an accessible funder that accepts LOIs through its online portal at any time. Grantseekers are advised to read instructions and guidelines carefully before submission.
PROFILE: The New York City-based Commonwealth Fund was established by Anna M. Harkness in 1918. Anna Harkness’s husband, Stephen Harkness, was an early investor in Standard Oil. Initially, the Fund’s goal was simply to “enhance the common good.” Today, this old and storied grantmaker’s mission is to “to promote a high-performing, equitable health care system that achieves better access, improved quality, and greater efficiency, particularly for society’s most vulnerable, including people of color, people with low income, and those who are uninsured.” Its grants support “independent research on healthcare issues” and initiatives to “improve health care practice and policy” in a range of program areas.
While grantmaking is mainly focused on healthcare, overlapping areas of interest include racial equity, mental health, climate change, women and girls, global health and journalism. The fund also runs a series of annual fellowships. Giving is national in scope.
The Commonwealth Fund describes itself as an “antiracist organization,” a commitment which, according to its statement of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, “extends not only to our research agenda, our grantmaking, and our communications, but also to all aspects of our internal operations and interactions — from our endowment management and hiring practices to the ways we relate to one another.”
Grants for Public Health
Across all of its specific program areas, the Commonwealth Fund’s grantmaking supports research, practice and policy with a strong focus on innovation, change and sharing research findings and information with the public and policy makers. A majority of Commonwealth’s program areas address healthcare quality and access in the U.S. These programs include the following:
Health Care Delivery System Reform seeks to advance value-based care, a system that “ties the amount health care providers earn for their services to the results they deliver for their patients, such as the quality, equity, and cost of care.” In addition to promoting this model of care across the U.S., this program area also “aims to strengthen and modernize primary health care” including the reform of payment for primary care services, especially through Medicare and Medicaid.
The Health Care Coverage and Access program area supports research and policy on “the state of health coverage in the U.S.” including legal challenges to the Affordable Care Act, existing barriers to coverage, the prevalence of high deductibles and copayments in private insurance programs, consumer medical debt and the identification and elimination of gaps in employer coverage and more.
Grants stemming from the Controlling Health Care Costs program support research, analysis and policy to “slow health spending” in the U.S. with regard to both health services and medications. Central to this program is an acknowledgement that while medical care and medications costs are significantly higher in the U.S., outcomes are significantly worse. Issues of timely importance for this program include:
The effects of the Inflation Reduction Act on current and future drug pricing;
State-level control for health costs;
The effects of patents on the pricing of medication;
“[V]ertical integration” of stakeholders including insurance companies, pharmacies and care providers.
The Federal and State Health Policy program works at both the state and national level to “equip policymakers with the evidence they need to make informed policy decisions.” This program focuses on sharing and disseminating evidence-based findings “to help bring about a higher-performing health care system.”
Advancing Medicare aims to identify “ways in which this crucial program can serve its beneficiaries more effectively and efficiently while promoting improvement throughout the health care system.” Areas of priority include but are not limited to improvements in access, value, health outcomes and “coordination between Medicare and other public programs, like Medicaid.” This program also supports the examination of “Medicare’s role in reducing or perpetuating disparities in health care” and the factors influencing the overall sustainability of the program.
Tracking Health System Performance produces free and publicly-available resources for understanding healthcare in the U.S. Through this program, the Commonwealth Fund creates and maintains its health system scorecards and a series of case studies of “promising practices and models across the country for delivering better, more efficient health care.” While a significant portion of this work is conducted in-house, this program does provide support for research and analysis of data from other Commonwealth Fund programs.
Commonwealth’s Medicaid program monitors changes to medicaid at the state and federal levels and draws conclusions about the effects these changes have on economies, health outcomes and health equity across the country. Of specific interest to this program are the effectiveness, quality and sustainability of Medicaid programs and the improvement of “the continuum of behavioral health services that Medicaid covers, especially for children and adolescents.”
One of Commonwealth’s new initiatives is Public Health, which supports independent research in a broad range of areas related to public health and “makes grants to promote better access, improved quality, and greater efficiency in health care — particularly for society’s most vulnerable, including people of color, people with low income, and those who are uninsured.” The program names areas of priority that include:
The alignment of federal, state and local healthcare regulations;
The elimination of barriers to coordinating and streamlining the work of public health agencies at various levels;
The development of models of care coordination, especially for uninsured and underinsured populations;
Advancing “community-based organizations and resources” in heath care;
Ensuring that the U.S. is prepared and equipped to provide quality care for health emergencies and pandemics.
Grants for Racial Justice and Equity
While a strong commitment to health equity for underserved people runs through all of Commonwealth’s grantmaking, the Fund’s Advancing Health Equity program specifically aims to “to eliminate unequal treatment, experience, and outcomes in health and health care for people of color by reducing systemic racism in health care policy and practice.” This program maintains three focus areas:
Eliminating racism in health care delivery through education, incentives, accreditation standards and the establishment of “regulatory requirements for inclusive community partnerships”;
The development of antiracist health care policy, including policies promote equity in care and coverage;
“Changing the mindset” of healthcare professionals and leadership and examining “how the effects of discrimination manifest in unequal treatment, outcomes, and experiences in health care.”
The Commonwealth Fund also runs two fellowships for health equity:
The Commonwealth Fund Fellowship in Minority Health at Harvard University supports physicians pursuing masters’ degrees in either public health or public administration. As many as five fellowships are awarded each year, and physicians from underrepresented groups in medicine are prioritized for this program, which prepares participants “to become leaders who improve the health of disadvantaged and vulnerable populations.” In addition to tuition and program related expenses, fellows receive an $80,000 stipend for the fellowship year. Program details and application information are available at the fellowship’s website. Annual due dates usually fall in early December.
The Pozen-Commonwealth Fund Fellowship in Health Equity Leadership at Yale University supports “clinicians committed to improving health care access and outcomes for minorities, socioeconomically disadvantaged groups, and other marginalized populations.” Fellows pursue an MBA for Executives at the Yale School of Management by attending classes and seminars on Fridays and Saturdays every-other week over a period of 22 months, enabling health professionals to continue their full-time professional roles in health care. The fellowship covers tuition costs of the program. Apply through Yale’s MBA for Executives program. Due dates typically fall at the end of October.
Grants for Mental Health
The Fund’s public health grantmaking overlaps with mental health care through the following programs:
Behavioral Health is one of the Fund’s new initiatives and was established to address “longstanding challenges in accessing mental health and substance use services, treatments, and supports.” The program currently runs subprograms for research and policy development for state-level mental health system reform and integration of behavioral health services with existing health technology systems. Current areas of specific interest include:
Expanding access to behavioral health care through Medicare and Medicaid;
Creating and supporting a diverse mental health workforce in the U.S.;
Using telehealth and digital health to increase access to care;
The coordination of behavioral and primary health care for children and adolescents.
The Fund’s Medicaid program names the integration of behavioral health services for children and adolescents as an area of priority.
Grants for Climate Change
The Commonwealth Fund names Climate Change and Health Care as one of its new initiatives. In a stark departure from the Fund’s other programs, most of which focus on health care delivery, this program “seeks to promote the decarbonization of the U.S. health care system” through policy, practice and “research to measure, compare, and reduce the health system’s carbon footprint.”
Grants for Global Health
Commonwealth’s International Health Policies and Practice Innovations program studies health “best practices from around the world” with the goal of innovating change in the U.S., where “Americans continue to experience worse health outcomes than their international peers.” The program collects health data from 11 high-income countries and compares U.S. practice, policy and outcomes to these in areas including buy not limited to access, equity, cost and quality of care.
The “flagship” of the International Health Policies and Practice Innovations program is the Harkness Fellowships in Healthcare Policy and Practice, which offer midcareer researchers from Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore or the United Kingdom the opportunity to conduct “internationally comparative research with mentorship from leading U.S. experts.” Participants also participate in leadership development activities and deepen their understanding of health systems in the U.S. This one-year opportunity consists of a stipend of $8,000 per month, with transportation and other program-related expenses covered by the Fund. Ten or more Harkness Fellowships are funded each year. This program runs an open application program and provides detailed guidelines and instructions on its webpage.
Grants for Journalism
The Commonwealth Fund supports two fellowships for health journalism in collaboration with the Association for Health Care Journalists:
The Association for Health Care Journalists International Health Study Fellowship supports “veteran U.S.-based health care journalists to pursue a story or project comparing a facet of the U.S. health care system to that of another country.” This six-month fellowship covers travel and lodging expenses to association seminars in New York City and London, plus travel to a “European country agreed upon with fellowship leaders.” Training, mentoring, some incidental expenses and membership in the Association for Health Care Journalists are al also included in the fellowship. Detailed application information is available at the association’s website, and applications are usually due in October of each year. Four fellowships are typically awarded each year.
The Association for Health Care Journalists Reporting Fellowships on Health Care Performance supports individual mid-career journalists or teams reporting on healthcare systems in the U.S. at the local, state or national level. As many as five projects are supported each year. This one-year fellowship provides guidance and mentoring and covers the costs of attending the association’s seminars and conferences. Each fellow or team receives a $4,000 reporting stipend and $2,500 at the project’s completion. Application guidelines and links are provided at the association’s fellowship page, and applications due dates tend to fall in mid-January each year.
Grants for Women and Girls
This funder does not name women and girls as an area of priority, but funding stemming from several of its programs has gone to research on women’s and reproductive health.
One grant supported the National Medical Symposium’s Edward C. Mazique, M.D., Symposium: "Black Woman Under Attack: Maternal Health and Reproductive Justice in America.” Another grantee, Boston Globe Life Sciences Media received a grant for its project entitled “Exploring the Impact of the Supreme Court Abortion Ruling on Health Access and Equity” and the Century Foundation received funding for its research project, “Promoting Better Maternal Health Outcomes by Closing the Medicaid Postpartum Coverage Gap.”
Important Grant Details:
The Commonwealth Fund’s awards grants in amounts ranging from $5,000 to $500,000, but some larger grants have gone to ongoing projects and organizations with which the Fund maintains strong commitments.
The Fund tends to support well-established organizations and institutes working in the areas of healthcare research and policy development and health services.
Grantmaking is national in scope.
Fellowships are generally awarded in amounts set by the program.
Recent grantees include Harvard University, Boston University, the Alliance for Health Policy and the Center for Health Care Strategies.
For additional information about past grantmaking, see the fund’s searchable grants database.
Commonwealth accepts unsolicited letters of inquiry at any time through an online portal. It occasionally posts RFPs for topics of timely or high interest. Grantseekers are advised to carefully read the organization’s LOI application instructions before submitting letters. General inquiries may be addressed to the fund’s staff via email.
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