The challenge
At the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, our mission is to improve health and health care for all Americans. But improving health among the most vulnerable requires acknowledging that factors such as poverty, violence, inadequate housing and education contribute to poor health. If your family is not well off, if your schools do not allow you to be well educated, or if your community lacks resources, chances are you will not be well either. You will simply live a shorter and sicker life than those more fortunate.
In his own philanthropy, Robert Wood Johnson understood the critical connections between health and social circumstances. So it is only natural, that the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has looked beyond the medical system for proven ways to improve the health of all Americans. This orientation was at the core of our founder's original vision and personal investments, and continues as a fundamental focus of our work and our mission today.
The Vulnerable Populations Portfolio is a diverse collection of innovative programs that addresses health issues within their broader social context through sensible, sustainable solutions that have the potential for scale.
The Vulnerable Populations Portfolio funds nontraditional solutions that improve health by meeting people where they are. Working on the ground level, within the context of challenged neighborhoods, struggling school systems, low-income households, failing institutions, and other related social conditions, the Vulnerable Populations grantees find common-sense routes to improved health. Portfolio grantees work with "what is" and create new models of success: they restore what's best and renovate broken systems, they renew vitality of local environments and organizations, redirect available resources and energies for better results, re-engineer existing institutional solutions, and re-imagine ways to create sustained improvement in quality of life and health for all, especially those most challenged by additional social factors.
Our work seeks to ignite change within the areas we operate. By approaching health differently, we hope to push the boundaries that can constrict our ability to see the solutions that may be right in front of us. The measure of our success is not limited to the success of our grantees. Instead, it is extended by our drive to fund ideas that can live beyond these grants. By changing the way we look at things, by helping each idea achieve its potential and by nurturing the expansion of models and their influence, we hope to expand the very definition of what it means to improve someone's health.
Learn more about our strategy and the issues we are seeking to address in this area: