Gateway Reporter

Proudly Improving Community Health by Supporting Local Nonprofits, Like ChildSavers

Every three years, our ministry conducts a Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA) where we receive direct feedback from the communities we serve. Once we tabulate the results, we develop a plan of action to address the areas of key need that have been identified.

As a nonprofit organization, we contribute a percentage of our proceeds back into the communities we proudly serve. Each year, as a part of these efforts, we make community benefit investment grants to local nonprofits. These awards impact key areas of community need, including access to health care, behavioral health, affordable housing and community placemaking, educational achievement and economic equity.

Over the last 10 years, more than $33 million in community benefit investment grants have been distributed to nonprofit organizations across the Richmond region.

In 2022 alone, these awards totaled $3.8 million to 50 nonprofits. Awards are given to organizations advancing innovative work in a few key areas: access to care, behavioral health services, affordable housing, livability, economic equity and educational achievement across the continuum.

“This program represents the able capacity of our non profit partners to address current social determinants of health across the community,” Becky Clay Christensen, executive director of community health for our Richmond market, says. “It is only through high-impact projects that promote collaboration and measured success that we can together make a difference.”

For many years now, behavioral health has come forward through our CHNA process as a clear need.

One of the many ways we work as an organization to address these social determinants of health is through partnering with organizations who are experts in these areas, like ChildSavers.

ChildSavers is an organization that, for nearly 100 years, has been doing important community work around childhood trauma with trauma-informed mental and behavioral health services. This is just one of the many wonderful nonprofits in the area that we are proud to support through our community benefit investment grants.

“Support from Bon Secours has allowed ChildSavers to expand our school-based clinical services to children with great potential who have experienced severe trauma,” Robert Bolling, CEO of ChildSavers, shares. “Having clinical staff work in partnership with school staff in the school space makes treatment more efficient and allows us to serve more children.”

Original source can be found here