Robert Wood Johnson Foundation - Grantmaking Areas

Grantmaking Areas

These interest areas include:

Childhood Obesity: Reversing the childhood obesity epidemic by 2015 by improving access to affordable healthy foods and increasing opportunities for physical activity in schools and communities across the United States.

In April 2007, the foundation committed $500 million to reversing the childhood obesity epidemic. The President and CEO is personally committed to reversing this epidemic by 2015; she is quoted saying the following:

Combined with a lack of safe playgrounds and cutbacks in school physical education programs, the absence of healthy food alternatives is one of the factors leading to an alarming increase in childhood obesity rates across the United States. These rates have soared among all age groups of children, more than quadrupling among those between the ages of 6 to 11 in the past 40 years. Today, more than 33% of children in the United States—approximately 25 million kids—are reported to be overweight or obese. The crisis is particularly acute in minority and low-income populations, which have significantly higher rates of obesity.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has been working over the past several years to support programs that offer potential for wide-scale change in communities and schools. These include efforts to bring supermarkets back to under served communities and programs to improve nutrition, physical activity, and staff wellness in schools nationwide. The Foundation partnered with the Food Trust, a non-profit in Philadelphia, whose mission is to ensure that everyone has access to affordable, nutritious food. The Food Trust’s research on childhood obesity led the Philadelphia school system to ban soda vending machines from all of its schools, the strongest measure in the country.

Health Insurance Coverage: Ensuring that everyone in America has stable, affordable health care coverage through the development of policies and programs to expand health coverage and maximize enrollment in existing coverage programs.

Public Health: Strengthening the practice of public health and the implementation of policies to ensure the system can fulfill its vital role in protecting the safety and health of all Americans.

Quality/Equality: Helping communities set and achieve ambitious goals to improve the quality of health care in ways that matter to all patients and their families, and in particular to patients from specific racial and ethnic backgrounds who often experience lower-quality care.

Human Capital: Fostering a diverse group of promising scholars and professionals through leadership development, training and research to ensure that our nation has a sufficient, well-trained workforce to meet our needs.

Vulnerable Populations: Supporting promising new ideas that address health and health care problems that intersect with social factors—housing, poverty and inadequate education—and affect society's most vulnerable people, including low-income children and their families, frail older adults, adults with disabilities, the homeless, those with HIV/AIDS, and those with severe mental illness.

Pioneer Portfolio: Promoting fundamental breakthroughs in health and health care through innovative projects, including those from nontraditional sources and fields.

The Foundation’s Pioneer portfolio focuses developing and implementing new ideas in new and unexpected ways, or new methodologies that inform the future of health and health care. The portfolio seeks disruptive ideas from all fields and invests in innovators who are looking to make long term social change. One example of a pioneering endeavor that fits into the portfolio is using video games to promote health. Although video games are often linked to the physical inactivity, Pioneer team is examining how video games can be used to help kids increase their physical activity level. The team is also examining whether or not an “X Prize” can be used to foster new ways of thinking about health and health care.