Request for Proposals: Social, Emotional and Behavioral Health

August 7, 2007 - The Endowment invites proposals for projects that improve the social, emotional and behavioral health of children and youth in Wake and surrounding counties, especially hard-to-reach populations and adolescents. The Endowment particularly encourages proposals that increase access to mental health care, strengthen youth resiliency and promote healthy and positive behaviors by youth.

Please join us for a call-in information session on Thursday, August 9 from 10:00 to noon. Dial 1-866-365-4406 and enter access number 8353565#.

Proposals must be emailed by the end of the day Monday, September 10 to: kevin@rexendowment.org and mcallister@rexendowment.org.

Download the Request for Proposals [pdf] with submission instructions. Download the Budget Template [pdf]

Note that the application process outlined here is different than the Endowment has used in the past.

New Projects Promote Access to Healthcare

August 7, 2007 - This quarter, the Endowment awarded support to healthcare access projects from seven local agencies:

• The Autism Society of North Carolina will receive $285,004 over three years to help hospitals and doctors' offices better accommodate patients with autism and to help patient families access medical care more easily and more effectively.
• The Health Access Coalition of the North Carolina Justice Center will receive $90,000 over three years to expand children's insurance enrollment and access to care and to increase provider and advocate participation in the coalition.
• Wake Teen Medical Services will receive $118,932 over two years to improve agency infrastructure and strengthen their capacity to manage care for adolescents.
• Wake County Human Services will receive $168,388 over three years to further develop its Children's Health and Development Program, a comprehensive assessment and management program for children entering foster care.
• The Department of Pediatrics and the Pediatric General Surgery Division at North Carolina Children's Hospital will receive $905,996 over three years to provide a community-based pediatric multi-subspecialty clinic in Wake County.
• Wake County Medical Society will receive $671,528 over three years to increase the capacity of pediatric practices to care for children of Spanish- speaking families and increase outreach to these families.
• El Pueblo will receive $352,988 over three years to continue developing LIderes de Salud, which connects the growing population of low income, underinsured residents to health services with the assistance of trained lay health advisors.

Ripple Effect: Prevent Blindness NC

August 7, 2007 - When the Commission on Early Childhood Vision Care presented its recommendations for a vision screening law to the N.C. legislature July 1, it incorporated best practice guidelines from an Endowment-funded pilot project. Prevent Blindness North Carolina (PBNC) in collaboration with the N.C. Pediatric Society spent two years working with nurses and pediatricians to improve vision screening for preschool children in Wake County. The project ended just as the Eye Commission convened, and Dr. Peter Morris, a member of the commission—and a past winner of the Endowment's Hands of Health award—brought the project's data to the attention of the group.

"He put this valuable information in exactly the right hands at the right time," said Jennifer Talbot, PBNC's chief executive officer. "If we hadn't done the pilot, we'd all be guessing about the impact of a screening change. The pilot project was conducted at just the right time to make a statewide impact."

Many pediatric practices hold off on vision screening until a child is old enough for a chart test, Talbot said, but preschool screening can detect such problems as amblyopia (lazy eye), which can be corrected easily and at little cost. The PBNC project worked to help practitioners identify preschool children's vision problems in the least expensive manner possible, using systems already in place, and to do better screenings and more appropriate referrals without spending more time with each child.

The Eye Commission's recommendations could be implemented for North Carolina children entering school in Fall 2008, though funding hurdles remain. Meanwhile, Talbot said, "Prevent Blindness America and the National Academy of Pediatrics are working to find collaborators to get done across the country what the John Rex Endowment allowed to be done here. We're still exploring how to make this a national program. It's exciting when you get to do pioneering work like this in your own back yard."

To learn more about PBNC's work, contact Jennifer Talbot.