Program Areas

Vulnerable Populations

The Challenge

At the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, our mission is to improve health and health care for all Americans. But improving health among the most vulnerable requires acknowledging that factors such as poverty, violence, inadequate housing, and education contribute to poor health. If your family is not well off, if your schools do not allow you to be well educated, or if your community lacks resources, chances are you will not be well. You will simply live a shorter and sicker life than those more fortunate.

In his own philanthropy, Robert Wood Johnson understood the critical connections between health and social circumstances. So it is only natural that the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has looked beyond the medical system for effective ways to improve the health of all Americans. This orientation was at the core of our founder's original vision and personal investments, and continues as a fundamental focus of our work and mission today.

Our Approach

In the Vulnerable Populations Portfolio, we create new opportunities for better health by investing in health where it starts—in our homes, schools and jobs. The social innovations we support often work in the domains of education, housing, or corrections, but always address the health needs of people who are vulnerable. The factors that lead to poor health—such as how and where we live, learn, work, and play—are often referred to as the social determinants of health, and are documented by a significant body of research.

The Vulnerable Populations Portfolio is a diverse collection of innovative programs that addresses longstanding health issues within their broader social context through sensible, sustainable solutions that have the potential for widespread replication and national impact.

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Men in park

We fund nontraditional solutions that improve health by meeting people where they are. Working on the ground level, within the context of challenged neighborhoods, struggling school systems, low-income households, and other related social conditions, the Vulnerable Populations grantees find common-sense routes to improved health. Portfolio grantees work with "what is" and create new models of success: they restore what's best and renovate broken systems, renew the vitality of local environments and organizations, redirect available resources and energies for better results, re-engineer existing institutional solutions, and re-imagine ways to create sustained improvement in quality of life and health for all, especially those most challenged by additional social factors.

Man in uniform hauling an oven

Our work seeks to ignite change within the areas we operate. By approaching health differently, we hope to push the boundaries that can constrict our ability to see the solutions that may be right in front of us. The measure of our success is not limited to the success of our grantees. Instead, it is extended by our drive to fund ideas that can live beyond these grants. By changing the way we look at things, by helping each idea achieve its potential and by nurturing the expansion of models and their influence, we hope to expand the very definition of what it means to improve someone's health.

Girl raising hand in classroom

We are looking for ideas that have the potential to represent fundamental breakthroughs in the circumstances that affect vulnerable people. These models take on the big messy challenges that are too often seen as unsolvable—things like the heartbreak and fear of street violence or the gap between a patient's medical and social needs. And while they always mark their successes in the form of better health, they almost always come from outside of the health care system.