Elevance Health Foundation Is Putting Up to $1M Behind Maternal and Infant Health — a July 31 Deadline, Ten Priority States, and a Bar Set at Measurable Outcomes, Not Good Intentions.

The United States remains an outlier among wealthy nations on a statistic no one wants to own: it is one of the few where maternal mortality has been rising, and the burden falls with brutal unevenness across race, income, and geography. That gap is precisely the target of the Elevance Health Foundation's Maternal/Infant Health grant, one of the largest corporate-philanthropy commitments to the problem currently open. The RFP closes July 31, 2026, offers up to roughly $1 million per award, and — critically — is built around a funder philosophy that separates it from most health philanthropy: it pays for measurable outcomes, not activities. If your organization can't name the maternal or infant health number it will move, this is not your grant. If it can, few funders will match the check size.

This is the deep dive on how the Foundation structures the opportunity, the two tracks it funds, the ten states where local work is prioritized, and how to position a proposal that reads as an intervention with a metric rather than a program with a mission.

The Money and the Two Tracks

The headline figure is approximately $1 million in available funding, with up to 15% indirect costs and a grant term of one to three years depending on the scope and need of the work. The Foundation is explicit that funding levels are open — it sizes awards to the demonstrated community need and the robustness of the intervention, not to a fixed formula. That's a signal: a tightly designed $400K project with a credible outcome model can beat a sprawling $1M ask with vague deliverables.

Eligibility runs to registered 501(c)(3) charitable organizations, and the Foundation splits its interest into two distinct tracks:

• National programs that promote scalable and sustainable systemic change — interventions designed to spread beyond a single site.
• Local programs implementing relevant interventions in ten named states: California, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Ohio, Texas, and Virginia.

That state list is not arbitrary — it maps to Elevance's operating footprint and to geographies with significant maternal-health disparities. If you operate in one of those ten states, the local track is your lane and you should say so plainly. If you don't, your path is the national track, which raises the bar: you must credibly argue your model is scalable, not just locally effective.

What "The Pregnancy Journey" Actually Means Here

The Foundation frames its scope as the full pregnancy journey — from pre-conception support through prenatal care, delivery, and postnatal care for both mothers and babies. This is broader than many maternal-health funders, who fixate on the delivery window. Elevance is explicitly interested in the bookends most programs neglect: pre-conception health (chronic-disease management, nutrition, mental health before pregnancy) and the postpartum period, where a large share of U.S. maternal deaths actually occur.

Within that arc, the Foundation names four priorities it will weight:

1. Improving maternal and infant health outcomes (the measurable core).
2. Targeting disparities — race, ethnicity, income, geography.
3. Addressing social needs — the housing, food, transportation, and behavioral-health barriers that drive clinical outcomes.
4. Removing barriers to care across the journey.

The through-line is that Elevance, as a health-benefits company, thinks in terms of social determinants and systems, not one-off clinical services. A proposal that treats maternal health as purely a doctor's-office problem misreads the funder. One that connects a clinical outcome to the social barrier driving it — and shows how the intervention removes that barrier — speaks the Foundation's language.

The Bar: "Specific, Measurable Outcomes"

The single most important phrase in this RFP is that programs must drive specific, measurable maternal/infant health outcomes. This is where most applications quietly fail. A proposal that promises to "raise awareness," "provide support," or "improve access" without a number attached will not clear a funder that is, structurally, in the business of measuring health results.

Strong applicants name the metric and the baseline. Examples of the shape the Foundation is looking for:

• "Reduce the rate of severe maternal morbidity among Black birthing patients in our service area by X% over the grant term."
• "Increase postpartum-visit completion from Y% to Z% among Medicaid-enrolled mothers."
• "Cut low-birth-weight incidence in the target ZIP codes by X percentage points."

The pattern is always: a defined population, a defined outcome, a baseline, and a target. If you can't populate that sentence, spend your remaining pre-deadline time getting the data to do so — it is more valuable than another page of narrative.

How to Position a Competitive Proposal

Pick your track and commit to it. Local applicants in the ten states should anchor hard to their community's specific disparity data. National applicants must lead with scalability — pilot evidence, a replication model, a plan to spread.

Lead with the outcome, tie in the social determinant. Open with the number you'll move and the population you'll move it for, then explain the barrier (transportation to prenatal visits, untreated maternal depression, food insecurity) your intervention removes. This mirrors exactly how the Foundation prioritizes.

Show measurement capacity, not just intent. A funder that demands measurable outcomes will scrutinize whether you can actually measure them. Name your data source, your evaluation method, your reporting cadence. Organizations with existing outcome data have a real edge; those without should partner with one that does.

Right-size the ask. Because the Foundation scales awards to need and rigor rather than a ceiling, resist the reflex to request the maximum. A defensible budget tied line-by-line to the intervention reads as competence.

Respect the full journey. If your work touches the underserved bookends — pre-conception or postpartum — foreground it. That's where the Foundation's stated interest is strongest and where the field is thinnest.

Why This One Is Worth the Effort

Corporate health foundations that will write seven-figure checks for maternal-health work are rare, and rarer still are ones with a scope this broad and a state footprint this specific. The trade for that check size is rigor: Elevance is asking applicants to think like a health system that will be judged on outcomes, because that is what Elevance is. For a nonprofit that already operates with a measurement discipline — clear metrics, baseline data, an evaluation plan — this RFP is a strong fit and a large opportunity. For one that operates on mission and activity counts, the July 31 deadline is a forcing function to build the outcome infrastructure that every major health funder now expects.

Even organizations that can't assemble a competitive proposal by July 31 should use this cycle to build the metric-and-baseline foundation that unlocks not just Elevance but the entire tier of outcomes-driven health philanthropy. To find the full set of maternal-health and health-equity funders matched to your mission, geography, and measurement capacity, Granted surfaces the aligned opportunities — and filters out the hundreds that aren't a fit.

Granted helps nonprofits and mission-driven organizations find, qualify for, and win the funding they're eligible for. Start with a free search at grantedai.com.