Michigan Health Fund's First Healthy Kids Round: $9.7 Million, 26 Grants, and What the Winners Reveal About the 2027 Cycle

Twenty-six projects split $9,709,778 in the first grant round the Michigan Health Endowment Fund has ever run under its Healthy Kids banner. Two of the awards went to Wayne State University. Three went to state agencies. The smallest award was a $75,000 grant to the City of Dearborn for a breastfeeding "Baby Café." The largest, $750,000, went to the Michigan Primary Care Association to build food and nutrition services into federally qualified health centers.

The Health Fund's board approved the round at its public meeting in Brighton on November 5, 2026. It was part of a $23.9 million package that also covered Healthy Aging awards and $4.9 million in capacity-building and special-project grants. For Michigan nonprofits, the November slate is the first real evidence of how the state's largest health foundation will spend under its new 2026-2031 strategic framework. It also shows what a competitive Healthy Kids application has to look like when the next round opens.

A New Program With an Old Funder's Habits

The Health Fund is not a typical private foundation. It was created in 2013 as part of the conversion of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan into a nonprofit mutual insurer. It now invests more than $35 million a year in Michigan communities with a staff of about two dozen. Its grantmaking has historically run through themed initiatives: Healthy Aging, Behavioral Health, Community Health Impact, Capacity Building, and others. Each has its own request for proposals, concept-paper stage, and annual announcement date.

Healthy Kids replaces the old children's-health tracks with a single annual round. Grants go up to $750,000. The 2026 request for proposals named four priorities:

• Access to Care and Support
• Maternal and Infant Health
• Nutrition and Physical Activity
• Integrated Models for Children's Health

The program page says it funds work from "before birth through young adulthood." It favors projects that "inform policy, influence systems, or offer replicable models." The emphasis on policy and replicable models matters more than any single priority area. The Health Fund is not looking to underwrite a clinic's existing services. Its FAQ excludes "existing operations and staffing for ongoing programs," capital projects, clinical research, and lobbying outright.

Third-party listings for the 2026 cycle put concept papers due around March 30, 2026 and full applications around June 4, 2026, with the November 5 announcement date matching the program page. If the Health Fund repeats that calendar, the 2027 Healthy Kids RFP will open in late winter, and a November award decision means a planning year that starts almost twelve months before money arrives. The foundation has not yet posted 2027 dates, so treat that calendar as a planning assumption, not a deadline.

What the 26 Winners Have in Common

Read the award list closely and three patterns stand out.

Schools are the delivery channel of choice. Alcona Health Center received $500,000 to open an integrated school-based health and wellness center at Clara Bolen Elementary in Iosco County. The center will offer screenings, immunizations, behavioral health care, insurance navigation, and a youth advisory council. Lakeshore Food Club got $425,000 for a West Michigan school-based food club consortium. The School Nutrition Association of Michigan received $593,977 to spread scratch cooking across school kitchens. Wayne State's $289,600 EARLY project is a school-based clinic. Even the Michigan Department of Education's $144,820 award, "10 Cents a Meal for Non-School Program Sponsors," extends a school-food policy model to summer and after-school sponsors.

Integration beats standalone services. The largest awards went to projects that embed one kind of care inside another system. The Michigan Primary Care Association's $750,000 integrates nutrition into FQHCs. Wayne State's $749,075 HealthySteps project puts behavioral health specialists inside pediatric primary care. The Autism Alliance of Michigan's $745,426 PEARS project gives primary care practices an early autism recognition system, so diagnosis does not wait months for a specialist referral. All three are at or near the $750,000 ceiling, and all three are about rewiring a system rather than adding a program.

State agencies and statewide intermediaries compete alongside community groups. The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services ($440,796, perinatal depression prevention), the Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity ($249,064, Michigan Youth Mental Health Corps), and MDE all won. So did statewide networks: the Michigan Breastfeeding Network ($550,000), the Michigan Center for Rural Health ($503,616 for rural maternal and infant emergency readiness), Children's Advocacy Centers of Michigan ($500,000 for a statewide trauma response network), and the Michigan League for Public Policy ($200,000 for Kids Count 2027-2028). A small community nonprofit applying for Healthy Kids is competing in the same pool as Lansing.

That said, the slate is not only for large institutions. The Michigan Prison Doula Initiative won $100,000 to provide up to 12 weeks of postpartum doula support to as many as 25 women a year who give birth while incarcerated. The Ruth Ellis Center ($500,000) and Stand with Trans ($368,359) both won awards for LGBTQ+ youth services, a choice that stands out given how many national funders have quietly retreated from the area since 2025. Gleaners Community Food Bank ($219,127) and Lemontree Foods ($474,380) won on food-access navigation.

"We are thrilled to support an incredible group of organizations and projects through our first ever grant round," Healthy Kids Director Caitlin McEvilly-Rosenbach said. She noted that the first RFP "attracted wide interest from across Michigan." The Health Fund did not publish an applicant count. With 26 awards and statewide interest, the acceptance rate is almost certainly in the low double digits or below.

The Other $14 Million: Capacity, Aging, and Special Projects

The Healthy Kids headline obscures the rest of the November slate, which matters for organizations that don't do children's health.

The Capacity Building program approved 20 grants totaling about $3.67 million. Fourteen were organizational grants, ranging from $38,500 for succession planning at Children's Advocacy Centers of Michigan to $300,000 each for the Autism Alliance's MiNavigator program and Habitat for Humanity of Oakland County's technology systems for senior home repair. Six were collaborative grants, most at or just under $300,000. Two examples: the Four County Community Foundation's Thumb Food Security Collaborative and Access Health's West Michigan social-determinants infrastructure.

The capacity awards fund the kind of work federal grants almost never will: project management software (Community Action House, $109,551), document control and data infrastructure (Oakland Livingston Human Service Agency, $117,500), governance strengthening (Hegira Health, $104,285), and evaluation systems (Thumb Community Health Partnership, $215,000). "Michigan communities rely on nonprofits to meet a wide range of their health needs," said Veronica Marchese, senior program officer for Capacity Building. For organizations whose federal awards were cut or frozen in 2025-2026, this is one of the few places in the state to fund the back-office rebuilding.

Five special projects received nearly $1.3 million. The largest was $697,895 to Michigan State University to expand a kinship caregiver navigation program from eight counties to statewide, serving about 1,100 caregivers over two years. Another $299,544 went to the Community Mental Health Association of Michigan to develop an alternative clinical social work licensure exam. That is a workforce-pipeline bet aimed at one of the state's tightest behavioral health bottlenecks.

Subtracting the Healthy Kids and capacity totals from the $23.9 million board approval leaves roughly $9.3 million, most of it Healthy Aging. As of this writing, the Healthy Aging program page still listed 2024 and 2025 awards, so the 2026 cohort was not yet public.

How to Position for the 2027 Healthy Kids Round

The first cohort gives applicants a clear template. Organizations considering the next round should work through four questions now.

Is your project a system change or a service expansion? Every award near the ceiling changed how an existing system works: primary care, FQHCs, school nutrition. If your proposal is "more of what we already do," the FAQ's exclusion of ongoing operations will sink it. Frame the work around a replicable model and name the policy or practice it is meant to change.

Who is your institutional partner? School-based projects won repeatedly, and each needed a district or school as a working partner. Integrated-care projects needed a clinical home. Line up memoranda of understanding before the concept-paper stage, not after an invitation.

Can you take the full 30% indirect? Starting with the 2026 cycles, the Health Fund allows all applicants to request indirect costs of up to 30% of the total grant budget. That is far more generous than most health foundations, and it changes the math on a $750,000 request. Budget it deliberately rather than defaulting to 10% out of habit.

Are you eligible, and is your house in order? Eligible applicants include nonprofits, federally recognized Tribes, local governments, and the State of Michigan. Applicants must have IRS tax-exempt status, at least one paid FTE, and a current audit or independently reviewed financials (a 990 is accepted). Out-of-state organizations can apply if all project activities happen in Michigan. Fiscal sponsorship is allowed. Multiple applications are permitted, but the FAQ warns that one organization receiving more than one grant per cycle is unlikely. Wayne State's two awards are the exception, not the rule.

Organizations that are not ready for a $500,000 systems project should look at Capacity Building first. Its awards are smaller and its review is less crowded. A capacity grant that builds evaluation or data infrastructure in 2027 is also the strongest possible foundation for a Healthy Kids application in 2028.

For a closer look at how other large regional funders are structuring multi-year commitments, see our analysis of the Houston Endowment community college investment and the Kresge Culture of Justice cohort. Michigan applicants can also browse Health Fund programs and comparable funders in Granted's foundation directory.

Source documents: the Health Fund's Healthy Kids announcement, capacity building and special projects announcement, Healthy Kids program page, and grantmaking FAQ.

If the 2027 RFP lands on the same late-winter calendar, the concept paper is due in about four months, and Granted can help you turn a system-change idea into a fundable narrative before then.