The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) is working toward a future where health is a right for all, not a privilege. Their strategy focuses on three core goals: promoting economic inclusion for family wellbeing, ensuring equitable and accountable health systems, and fostering healthy, equitable community conditions. Achieving these “Generational Goals” means transforming the systems that currently uphold inequities, particularly those rooted in structural racism. RWJF aims to reimagine these systems by empowering practitioners, researchers, and community leaders to envision a more just and inclusive future for public health.
To support this vision, RWJF’s Ideas for an Equitable Future team backs forward-thinking innovators from diverse fields who explore how social, cultural, scientific, and technological shifts might influence the future of health equity. These grantees analyze emerging trends to identify both opportunities and obstacles in dismantling structural racism. Their work explores how changes in these forces could help rebuild systems in ways that serve all communities better and promote wellbeing on a broad scale.
RWJF’s current call for proposals, Exploring Equitable Futures, seeks to fund experimental projects that challenge conventional thinking and seed transformative ideas for health equity. Special focus is given to reimagining the Health Science Knowledge System, ensuring it includes diverse forms of wisdom and evidence, especially from communities historically excluded from traditional research. Projects may investigate how developments like AI or shifting trust in institutions could affect future knowledge production and how new structures might better support equitable decision-making in health.