Duke Endowment Grants Health Care Division and Child & Family Wellbeing Division

Sponsor: Duke Endowment
Internal Deadline: 10/06/2025
Institutional Submission Limit: varies
Sponsor Deadline: 12/15/2025
Program Website

The Offices of the Vice President for Research and Corporate and Foundation Relations are pleased to invite internal applications for the Duke Endowment, Health Care Division and Child & Family Wellbeing Division. 

Health Care  
Improving health and reducing health disparities will require communities and the health care systems to innovate. The Duke Endowment Health Care Division looks for opportunities to support the development and testing of new approaches that can outperform the current standard of care. These new approaches will require robust evaluation plans that build the evidence necessary to understand what works and accelerate the systemic reforms necessary to scale and sustain best practices.

The Duke Endowment has a keen interest in innovation and looks for new ways to optimize person-centered and community-based approaches to improve health. Most grants will follow one of two strategies:

   •    Improving Community Health: The Duke Endowment advances programs and policies that promote healthy lifestyles and address social determinants of health. They create opportunities for collaboration to meet community needs and ensure that local voices inform improvements. Additionally, they prioritize data collection and sharing so that partners are better equipped to identify opportunities and target interventions.  
   •    Enhancing Patient Care: The Duke Endowment works with health systems and their community-based partners to identify, test, and spread innovative practices that have the potential for scale and sustainability. They prioritize models that build capacity to provide essential health and social services to vulnerable populations, increasing access to culturally appropriate care. 

Within these two overarching strategies, Duke also has identified four key funding priorities:  

• Maternal and infant health, especially prioritizing prenatal and postpartum preventative care for vulnerable populations. Examples may include, but are not limited to, supporting innovative workforce models such as Doulas, Nurse Midwives, Community Health Workers, and Paraprofessionals; leveraging virtual care technology and predictive analytics; and ensuring access to appropriate behavioral health services.


• Youth mental health, supporting communities in the development of comprehensive and integrated systems of care for school-aged children, especially in the school setting.  


• Strengthening the health care workforce, especially 1) developing a pipeline to train a diverse workforce, including outreach programs, mentoring, and experiential opportunities, and 2) addressing burnout and promoting resiliency.  


• Population health/access to care by supporting the collaboration between health systems and community organizations to implement evidence-based/evidence-informed programs that improve local policy and community infrastructure, all to promote health. The Duke Endowment funds projects and programs that seek to reduce health disparities, improve clinical outcomes, and reduce inappropriate hospital utilization by increasing access to essential services for low-income uninsured adults and underserved populations.

 

Child & Family Wellbeing 
Child & Family Wellbeing funds implementation support for public and private child- and family-serving agencies to adopt and sustain evidence-based and evidence-informed programs shown to prevent or treat child maltreatment. Additionally, Child & Family Wellbeing’s commitment to innovation recognizes the lack of evidence-based or ?informed models for the range of issues children and families face and the diverse populations served. They also support grantees in developing and testing innovative, tailored, data-driven approaches. 

Faculty from all system campuses are eligible to apply to the Duke Endowment; the lead PI must be an employee of the University of South Carolina. While the Duke Endowment does not have a stated budget ceiling, successful past proposals typically have had budgets in the range of $100,000 - $250,000 in annual direct costs. (The Duke Endowment does not allow indirect costs.) Projects are typically 2-3 years in length. The Duke Endowment strongly prefers proposals that leverage partnerships, as well as other funding resources.

Timeline for the Winter 2025 Duke Endowment competition: 
  •  USC Internal applications due by 5pm October 6, 2025
  •  Notification of review decisions and selection no later than October 22, 2025
  •  Application deadline to The Duke Endowment by 5pm December 15, 2025
  •  Funding decisions by July 1, 2026 

 

Submission Process

Limited submissions for Foundations MUST be coordinated with the Office of the Vice President for Research and Corporate and Foundation Relations.

If interested in applying for this opportunity, please combine the following items into a single PDF and email to USCCFR@sc.edu by 5pm on the INTERNAL DEADLINE above:

• Duke endowment-USC internal proposal template here, following the word counts
• a 2-3 page CV/biosketch for the PI