Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Local Funding Partnerships — formerly Local Initiative Funding Partners — is a 20-year-old national program that provides matching grants for innovative community-based projects aimed at improving the health and health care of underserved and vulnerable populations.

From 1988 through 2007, the Foundation (RWJF) awarded 299 program grants to local organizations across the country to implement a wide range of health services and interventions in collaboration with more than 1,200 community foundations, corporate grantmakers and other local funding partners.

Key Results to Date

• Through Local Funding Partnerships, RWJF has provided more than $106 million to stimulate health-improvement projects in communities spread across 48 of the 50 states. (For a list of the projects, see the program Web site. The list is searchable by state, grantee name, project type or demographics of the served population.)
• All but a handful of the grantees accomplished their project objectives during the RWJF grant period. Since the program's beginning, only 12 projects have had to close before the end of the grant period because of an inability to meet grant objectives, according to program staff.
• Most projects continued operating after their RWJF funding ended. Some 86 percent of all projects funded from the program's inception through 2001 lasted at least one year after their RWJF grant ended, and 75 percent were continuing to operate when surveyed in summer 2002, according to a study by Mathematica Policy Research.

Program Management
The Health Research and Educational Trust of the New Jersey Hospital Association in Princeton, N.J., manages the program for RWJF. Pauline Seitz, a former RWJF program officer who helped create the program, directs the program staff.

Funding
Since 1987 RWJF's Board of Trustees has authorized $146.7 million in program funding.