LGBT Cultural Competency in Funding

by Scout

Program Director

Reporting from meeting with Kathleen Sebelius in DC

Today I joined other LGBT health advocates in a meeting with HHS Secty Sebelius in DC, to help give her input on what is important to include in her LGBT health action plan for the coming year. Coming on the heels of last weeks announcement that there were no LGBT awardees from the long awaited Community Transformation Grants, knowing how they wrote those RFAs in a way that made it quite an uphill battle for any applicant (even states) to include LGBT people at all in their action plans, knowing how the same thing happened for the big $650M in Communities Putting Prevention to Work awards in the prior two years, knowing how many of you have been trying to get LGBT people included in your states’ tobacco work for years… well I’m just profoundly impacted by the funding that has passed us by. $750M of new funding came out in the past three years, for tobacco exercise and nutrition. And except for the rare state who went above and beyond to decide these funds must also include LGBT people… it just passed us by.

Do you know that as 4% of the population, it’s reasonable that $30M of that new funding would be aimed at LGBT people. Instead, we’re counting direct awards that may get to $500k if we’re lucky. And inclusive state programs on maybe… two hands.

This shouldn’t be quite this hard. Not when policy documents are rolling out right and left prioritizing our health disparities.

So after adapting our old writings and putting them into a new policy brief, LGBT Cultural Competence in Funding with the help of many reviewers with the Network, I was able to present and discuss this with Secretary Sebelius. 

In this document we have outlined three simple strategies that can demonstrate a funding stream is welcoming to LGBT applicants as well as priority HHS funding streams to address. To view this document, visit our website: http://lgbttobacco.org/files/LGBTCulturalCompetencyinFundingWhitePaper.pdf