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Funding Priorities

The SCAN Foundation awards grants to organizations that are working to support the creation of a more coordinated, person centered model of health care and support services for seniors. Our funding is rooted in these principles:

  • Establishing a unique role that no other foundation is playing.
  • Leveraging our resources by collaborating with other foundations.
  • Concentrating on a limited number of strategic priorities, and commissioning much of the work we support.
  • Maintaining a long-term perspective.
  • Ensuring we are able to respond quickly to unanticipated opportunities to advance our mission.

Our three main funding priorities are Public Engagement, Policy Solutions, and Promising Programs.

Rationale for our Funding Priorities

A genuine opportunity exists to reform long-term care: the emergence of two potentially powerful groups who are personally experiencing the many inadequacies of the nation’s long-term care system. The first is the growing number of baby boomers who are now caring for their aging parents and relatives, or struggling to arrange for their own care. The second group is seniors themselves. The Foundation believes that these two groups can be mobilized into a powerful force in support of long-term care reform.

The first step is to elevate the issue of long-term care so that it becomes a high priority for policymakers through our work in Public Engagement. To do this, and to help foster the political will necessary for meaningful reform to occur, the Foundation will explore why long-term care reform is not considered a pressing political issue and how best to frame and talk about long-term care reform so that it attracts the attention that it merits. Policy makers also need concrete policy options on which to act.  Identifying sound and realistic Policy Solutions is a major part of our work.

Lastly, The SCAN Foundation advances promising models for the delivery of a continuous continuum of care for seniors through our support of programs that show promise.  This keeps the Foundation grounded in the realities of long-term care delivery and the door open to proven ways of delivering services.