The Community Wellbeing program empowers Santa Monica and west-side residents to take direct, small-scale action intended to advance new policies and spark conversations (https://www.wellbeingmicrogrants.org/). Designed in 2018 with the nationally-recognized Cities of Service, Wellbeing Microgrants quickly developed a proven track record.
This funding enables us to award new cohorts, systematize program evaluation, and develop new training and capacity-building.
We use findings from our innovative Wellbeing Index to prompt microgrant applicants. We ask them to consider local strengths and challenges across issues of economic opportunity, place and planet, health, learning, and community. Awardees develop and lead the solutions based on their unique skills, expertise, and networks. We provide assistance throughout, connecting microgrant leaders to a cross-section of local entities – government, non-profit, business, and community leaders – who act as allies and microgrant force-multipliers.
Head over to the website to read our blogs about the impact the projects have made.
To get connected with the program, please email info@civicwellbeing.org or:
Program Coordinator: lizeth@civicwellbeing.org
Applications are currently open! Apply from February 10, 2025 through March 14, 2025. Follow this link to subscribe to our newsletter.
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The Wellbeing Index
The Wellbeing Index was created in 2014 from Bloomberg Philanthropies $1m government innovation prize.
The Index provides a baseline for understanding what contributes to wellbeing and how the city and community can work to improve it. By understanding more about what makes us thrive, we can work together on making meaningful changes in our community.
The index combines data we have, determines what new types of data we need to gather, and integrates in new ways all of the available information. It brings together a variety of data from City measures, an extensive resident survey and social media in six distinct yet connected categories of what research shows drive wellbeing. Scroll through the Wellbeing Microgrants Apply page to take a look at the wellbeing themes adopted into the Wellbeing Microgrant program.