The Duke Endowment Grants Health Care Division and Child & Family Well-Being Division

Sponsor: The Duke Endowment
Internal Deadline: 10/09/2026
Institutional Submission Limit: varies
Sponsor Deadline: 12/15/2026
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 Well-Being Division. 

Health Care  

Improving health and reducing health disparities will require communities and 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. The Duke Endowment seeks to improve health status and reduce health disparities in the Carolinas by ensuring all people can access timely and appropriate health care, lead a healthy lifestyle, and have their basic social needs met. Most grants will focus on one of two strategies:

   •    Build Community Coalitions: The Duke Endowment builds coalitions that bring together health systems, public health agencies, and community-based organizations to advance programs and policies that promote healthy lifestyles. 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.  
   •    Advance Innovation: The Duke Endowment partners with health systems and community-based organizations to identify, develop, and evaluate innovative programs that have the potential for long-term 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, The Duke Endowment also has identified five 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.


• School-based mental health, supporting communities in the development of comprehensive and integrated systems of care for school-aged children, especially in the school setting. They prioritize innovative models of care that seek to understand root causes and provide mental health and well-being services that emphasize prevention and resiliency. They also support investments that change systems, including policy and regulation reforms supporting models that increase access, screening, early identification, and intervention services focusing on vulnerable populations. 


• 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. 


• Access to care: 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. They support projects that deploy virtual care technology to reach under-resourced populations and seek to partner with grantees to discover which virtual care models have the highest potential for broader scaling and sustainability.


• Population health: As the US advances value-based payment methodology, the Health Care program is building capacity at the state, regional, and local level to link government, health, and social services so that Carolinians have the opportunity to increase healthy behaviors and address their social needs. They support 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. Finally, they support community-based organizations to address social needs such as food insecurity, social isolation, medical-legal partnerships, lifestyle medicine, and health literacy.

 Child & Family Well-Being 

Child & Family Well-Being 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 Well-Being’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. 

Eligibility, Budget, Other Important Considerations

 

• 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 and will not fund tuition. While stipends and participant incentives are permissible, they are unlikely to be funded (i.e. an award would likely be reduced commensurately). Projects are typically three years in length.


• The Duke Endowment strongly prefers proposals that leverage partnerships, as well as other funding resources.


• An individual PI may submit only one concept per cycle. It is permissible to serve as co-PI on more than one submitted concept.


• Once submitted through the USC limited submission process, a concept may not be resubmitted in a later cycle without prior consultation with the Corporate and Foundation Relations team. Once The Duke Endowment has reviewed a concept, it is not eligible for resubmission in a future cycle; however, a PI may submit a new concept. Please contact the Corporate and Foundation Relations team with any questions about resubmission eligibility.

Timeline for the Winter 2026 competition:

-       USC internal applications due by 5 p.m. on Friday, October 9, 2026 

-       Notification of review decisions and selection at the end of October (pending feedback from The Duke Endowment)

-       Application deadline to The Duke Endowment by 5 p.m. December 15, 2026

-       Funding decisions by July 1, 2027

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 5 p.m. on the INTERNAL DEADLINE above:

• The Duke Endowment-USC internal proposal template: 

  duke_proposal-template.docx

• a 2-3 page CV/biosketch for the PI