A Major Healthcare Insurance Foundation Targets Disparities in Substance Use and Mental Health

The Elevance Health Foundation — formerly known as the Anthem Foundation, but still the philanthropic arm of the healthcare insurance giant that has been similarly renamed Elevance Health — recently announced a $13 million commitment to several community mental health programs. What’s perhaps most important to note about these new grants is that they demonstrate an acceleration of the funder’s COVID-era strategic rethink to focus on improving health and access to care for communities that have long experienced more than their fair share of health problems.

“Over the past couple of years, the effects of COVID-19 and the recent social unrest really called to attention the racial inequalities and health disparities that have plagued our communities for way too long,” said Maggie Bowden, a program manager at Elevance Health Foundation. This difficult period in American health has been a good time for the foundation to consider its strategic direction for the future, she said. “We redefined our approach and really tightened in our focus to invest in partnerships and programs that address health inequities for the socially vulnerable.”

That strategic refocus resulted in the foundation’s three-year, $90 million philanthropic giving strategy, which focuses on four pillars. Substance use is one of those pillars, along with improving maternal and child health, encouraging the use of healthy food as medicine, and providing disaster relief. (For more information, see Connie Matthiessen’s article from back in March about the then-Anthem Foundation’s funding for maternal health.)

Elevance Health Foundation’s latest $13 million, which includes grant commitments to 15 organizations, will support programs to promote equity in mental health, with a particular focus on helping people with substance use issues. Grantees will pursue goals like prevention and early intervention around risk factors that lead to substance use disorders, improved access and quality of treatment of those disorders, and community support to promote lifelong recovery. The grants are part of the foundation’s broader plans to invest $30 million over three years to address substance use and its health impacts.

One of the grantees, for example, is Shatterproof, a national addiction services organization. Funding from Elevance Health Foundation will help the organization address stigma and discrimination, which are among the primary barriers to receiving treatment for addictions. But as Bowden pointed out, different communities have different needs and require different approaches. As a result, the grants are also going to local nonprofits. One such nonprofit is Youth First, which operates in the state of Indiana, providing substance abuse care and other services to help kids and families.

According to Elevance Health Foundation, some 9.5 million adults in the U.S. currently report suffering from both a substance use disorder and a mental illness. Substance use disorders — including the use of alcohol, heroin and synthetic opioids, and methamphetamine — affect over 20 million Americans aged 12 and over.

But mental health and substance abuse are among the thorniest of health problems to treat, involving as they do so many complex factors — including matters of biology and physical health, psychological and family factors, trauma, and historical and socioeconomic conditions and stressors. And these issues must be addressed across a wide range of different specialties and care providers — crisis response, medical care, social workers, psychologists and so on. It’s what mental health professionals and policymakers call the “continuum of care.”

Elevance Health Foundation is seeking to address this continuum. “As we approached the funding footprint around substance use disorder, we did take into consideration the mental health component, but primarily, we are thinking about how to look at funding from prevention and early intervention, to treatments — whether that’s crisis response or immediate post-crisis — as well as long-term interventions,” Bowden said. “So we are thinking about how our programs can span that continuum of care around substance use disorder treatment and mental health.”

Of course, lessons learned about developing a continuum of care for people and communities don’t just apply to substance use disorders and mental care. They are the same kinds of challenges that impact many issues of health and wellness, and speak to disparities between communities. “We really also recognize that health is just so much more than healthcare,” Bowden said.

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