Colorado Health Institute

The single most important thing a grant seeker needs to know about Colorado Health Institute (CHI) is that it is not a grantmaking foundation, despite appearing in funder databases under a Health NTEE code. CHI's own IRS filings show $0 in grants paid to other organizations across every fiscal year from 2019 through 2023, and its published materials confirm it operates as a nonpartisan health policy research, data, and consulting nonprofit — not a donor. CHI was itself founded in 2002 through three equal seed grants from Caring for Colorado Foundation, The Colorado Trust, and Rose Community Foundation, and it continues to be funded today by those same philanthropic partners plus others such as NextFifty Initiative, alongside fee-for-service contracts with state agencies and health systems. For organizations searching for a grant, CHI simply does not have a program to apply to — there is no LOI form, RFP calendar, or grants portal anywhere on coloradohealthinstitute.org. The productive relationship to pursue instead is a research, data, or evaluation partnership: CHI regularly serves as a subcontracted analytic or evaluation partner on other organizations' grant-funded projects (its 2025 Annual Report cites the eight-organization Community-Clinical Linkages Network and the statewide Belonging Colorado evaluation as examples), and it collaborates with state agencies, health systems, and community nonprofits that need data expertise, survey work, or policy analysis. First-time contacts should route through Karam Ahmad, CHI's Managing Director of Partnerships and Development — the only named external-facing contact for collaboration in CHI's public materials — with a concrete, scoped ask (a specific dataset, a specific evaluation, a specific policy question) rather than a general funding request. Organizations that actually need grant capital for health-equity work in Colorado should redirect their search to CHI's own funder base (Caring for Colorado, The Colorado Trust, Rose Community Foundation, NextFifty Initiative) or to the separate, much larger Colorado Health Foundation, which despite the near-identical name is an unrelated ~$100M/year grantmaker with an actual open application process.

Because CHI disburses no third-party grants (grants_paid = $0 in every filed year, FY2019-FY2023), there is no median grant size or funding range to report — any grant-seeker treating CHI as a check-writing foundation is working from a misread of the data. What the financials do show is a mid-size, contract- and grant-revenue-dependent research nonprofit whose scale has been fairly stable but whose funding mix is volatile year to year. Total assets held between $8.2M (FY2021) and $10.6M (FY2022), settling at $9.94M in the most recent filed year (FY2023). Total revenue swung widely — from $11.67M in FY2019 down to $5.56M in FY2021, then recovering to $7.26M (FY2022) and $7.20M (FY2023) — a pattern typical of an organization dependent on renewing project contracts and multi-year grants rather than a steady endowment payout. Contributions received (grants and gifts CHI itself receives) ranged from $2.09M (FY2022) to $8.86M (FY2019), with the FY2019 spike likely reflecting a major capital or multi-year grant infusion from one of its founding funders. Officer compensation ran from $339,946 (FY2020) to $634,174 (FY2022), reflecting a CEO transition captured in the underlying 990 data — Sara Schmitt is listed as President & CEO at $226,235-$256,081 in earlier filings, with Michele Lueck listed as President & CEO at $215,001-$345,072 in more recent ones, plus a Managing Director of Finance & Administration role (Quan V. Nghe, Trenton Garber) in the $104K-$193K range. Net investment income has been modest and volatile ($1,473 to $249,881), consistent with a working-capital reserve rather than an endowed corpus. In short: CHI's 'total_giving' figures in public data represent its own program and operating expenditures (research, surveys, technical assistance, convenings) — not grants disbursed to outside nonprofits. Any grant seeker should mentally re-file CHI as a $7-8M/year operating research organization, not a philanthropic funder.

CHI's IRS-filed asset size (~$9.9M) places it among a cluster of small Health-category entities in this dataset, but the comparison is instructive mainly for what it reveals about data quality in this segment — most of these "peers" are equally unlikely to be productive unsolicited-application targets.

Four of the five matched peers have no public website in the dataset at all, and the fifth (Pfizer Patient Assistance Foundation) runs a structured patient-assistance program rather than a competitive nonprofit grants process — meaning none of the six organizations in this table, including CHI, represents a viable cold-application target for a typical nonprofit grant seeker. The practical takeaway is that this asset tier ($9-11M, Health NTEE code) is dominated by small operating funds, corporate patient-assistance vehicles, and mission-driven nonprofits like CHI rather than by traditional discretionary grantmakers — grant seekers should look one tier up (e.g., Colorado Health Foundation, Caring for Colorado Foundation, Rose Community Foundation) for organizations that actually fund external nonprofits at scale.

CHI's most recent public activity centers on its flagship Colorado Health Access Survey (CHAS), released November 19, 2025, which found the state's uninsured rate holding at 5.9% — roughly in line with pre-pandemic levels — alongside signs of improving mental health indicators. In October 2025, CHI's Board of Trustees added two health-system leaders, Dustin Moyer (CEO, Mountain Family Health Centers) and Kevin Patterson (CEO, Connect for Health Colorado), broadening the board's operational health-delivery expertise. CHI has also been expanding into newer research territory: an April 2026 climate-and-health survey found more than 80% of Coloradans believe climate change affects human health, and the organization's 2025 Annual Report highlights continuing work on federal policy-impact analysis amid anticipated Medicaid and marketplace benefit cuts, public health data modernization support for local health agencies, and the Milbank Fellows leadership curriculum for state officials. On the partnerships side, CHI received project funding from NextFifty Initiative for a 'Measuring and Addressing Community Capacity for Aging' initiative (dollar amount undisclosed), and in May 2026 it transitioned its Colorado Lotus Project to the Colorado Asian Culture and Education Network — an example of CHI incubating community initiatives and later spinning them off to independent nonprofit homes. Karam Ahmad, CHI's Managing Director of Partnerships and Development, was named to the Arab America Foundation's 40 Under 40 Class of 2026 in June, reinforcing his visibility as the organization's primary external-facing contact. No leadership transition at the CEO level has been announced recently; Michele Lueck remains President & CEO per the most recent filings, succeeding Sara Schmitt in that role in an earlier fiscal year.

There is no formal grant application to tailor advice around, so the actionable guidance here is about how to engage CHI productively rather than how to win a grant from it. First, verify you have the right organization — Colorado Health Institute (coloradohealthinstitute.org) is frequently confused with the separate and much larger Colorado Health Foundation (coloradohealth.org), which does run a real competitive grants program; conflating the two wastes an outreach cycle. Second, treat CHI as a potential research, evaluation, or data partner rather than a funding source: its 2025 Annual Report shows CHI functioning as the analytic engine behind other organizations' grant-funded work (the Community-Clinical Linkages Network, the Belonging Colorado evaluation, ACC Phase III stakeholder engagement), so the strongest pitch is a specific data, survey, or evaluation need tied to one of CHI's three active portfolio areas — Care in Our Communities, Cost/Affordability and Payment Reform, and Community Engagement. Third, route the first contact to Karam Ahmad, Managing Director of Partnerships and Development, since he is the only named collaboration contact in CHI's public materials; a cold email to a general info address is far less likely to get traction than referencing his name and title directly. Fourth, come prepared with a scoped ask and, ideally, a funding source already identified or in progress — CHI is a mission-driven nonprofit operating on contract and grant revenue (roughly $7.2M in FY2023), not a foundation with discretionary dollars to award, so proposals framed as "please fund us" will be redirected. A common mistake outside organizations make is assuming CHI's Colorado Health Access Survey (CHAS) data or Hot Issues in Health convening series are grant-funded outputs available for free redistribution as project support — they are CHI's own research products, useful to cite as evidence of alignment in a proposal to CHI's funders, but not a funding stream in themselves. Finally, if the real goal is securing grant dollars for Colorado health-equity work, redirect energy toward CHI's own funder base — Caring for Colorado Foundation, The Colorado Trust, Rose Community Foundation, and NextFifty Initiative — where CHI itself has a track record of successful applications.