We are pleased to announce two new grants approved this month by our Board of Trustees.

Diane E. Meier, MD Diane E. Meier, MD

First, under our Models of Care portfolio, we renewed our support for the Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC), a pioneering organization led by a pioneering woman, Diane Meier, MD, of Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City.

Palliative care is specialized medical care that focuses on relieving the symptoms, pain, and stress of serious illness, which is critically important for the older adult population. While often confused with being only about end-of-life and hospice care, palliative care provides the extra layer of support needed by people and their families dealing with serious illness at any point in their lives. Palliative care principles and practices can also help organizations achieve both better quality and financial viability.

Dr. Meier and CAPC have made tremendous strides over the past decade in expanding palliative care to almost 90 percent of large hospitals. Now, with a transformation business plan, CAPC is poised to take itself and palliative care to a new level.

The business plan, developed with funding from our partners at The Atlantic Philanthropies, sets some ambitious targets for CAPC. First, there is a goal to raise $12-$17 million in philanthropic capital in order to build up CAPC’s infrastructure. The John A. Hartford Foundation’s $2 million award augments a $6 million grant from the Baker Family Foundation, which puts the center well on its way to meeting its target.

This capital will enable CAPC to transition to a revenue-generating model with membership fees for hospitals, health systems, hospices, and community healthcare organizations.

Moving beyond the hospital is another major goal of this grant, and CAPC will be developing a package of products to implement palliative care services in community-based clinics, nursing homes, and home care. This will all be supported by CAPC’s continuing work to influence payment reform and change policy so that palliative care services become more available to those who need it.

giaSecondly, the Hartford Foundation has made a core support grant to Grantmakers in Aging (GIA), the membership group of funders who invest in aging issues and programs. Periodically, the Foundation will make grants outside its five main funding areas and this grant fits in our not-so-creatively named “Other” portfolio. Even so, this grant will be very supportive of Hartford’s overall mission by building interest and engagement among funders in the work that we do.

A founding member of GIA, the Hartford Foundation has developed many of its most important funding and thought partners among GIA’s 128 members. With core support from Hartford, matched in funding by four other foundations, GIA will be able to expand its outreach and educational activities that bring philanthropies into the aging field.

Grantmakers in Aging will continue its successful webinar series that introduces important aging topics to funders; produce aging and health issue briefs; support a funders forum for Age-Friendly Communities; and continue with one of the educational and inspirational highlights of the year for Hartford staff, the GIA annual conference.

Additionally, GIA is working right now with a coalition of national aging organizations to fundraise for an evidence-based communications campaign to tackle the misconceptions that many people have about older adults, which get embedded in public discourse and policy debates.

Older adults are too often framed as “greedy geezers,” taking away from the next generation. While this might make for dramatic TV or radio, this creates an unnecessary and completely counterproductive “Sophie’s Choice”—who are you going to save, little Billy or Grandpa?

We are committing funding toward this effort that we think will overcome these messages and build investments in aging programs and policies by funders and those in other sectors.

In the meanwhile, you can help promote positive images of older adults and communities that are good places to grow old by entering GIA’s new Friendly Places, Friendly Faces photo contest. Winners will split $6,500 in cash prizes, and more importantly, all the entries will model the kinds of messages we need about age-friendly communities and the contributions of older adults to our world.

These most recent grants—which strive to make palliative care available to more older adults in different settings and to engage more funders to join us in the aging field—continue to advance the work to which the Hartford Foundation is committed: to improve the health of older Americans. We look forward to reporting more on the progress of this work as it develops.