We support communities in developing safe, affordable housing, improving access to nutritious, locally produced foods, and planning resilient local solutions to address other needs essential to community health and well-being.
Housing, food systems, and other basic needs—commonly called the “social determinants of health”—are among the most powerful influences on people’s and their communities’ health. Through our work with partners across the state and a review of community health assessments and county-level data, we know that access to safe, affordable housing and nutritious, locally produced foods are among the top health-related needs in many Montana communities.
Communities understand their needs best. For this reason, through this initiative, we develop close partnerships with communities to learn about their specific needs and support them in identifying promising strategies, partnerships, and financing to address them.

Healthy Montana Communities Initiative One-Pager

Spotlight
In its first year, the initiative provided three program-related Investments to support the preservation and creation of 265 units of affordable rental housing, and supported housing needs assessments in three communities. It also provided four grants to support strengthening local food systems in communities across the state.

Our Support
We provide grants, technical assistance, and low-interest loans to support communities in planning and developing economically viable projects.
- We provide smaller grants and technical assistance to support community-led planning addressing identified housing, food, or other clearly defined, high-priority needs related to the social factors that impact health.
- For well-planned projects that address significant health-related housing or food system needs, we provide larger grants and low-interest loans to support capital costs, business startups, or other creative, community-driven approaches. For large projects, we will generally not be the majority funder. Instead, we will provide strategic investments that facilitate securing full financing.
Because we can only meet a small fraction of our state’s needs, we emphasize planning and strategic investments that help communities bring together new partners to design and finance the development of new projects. For example, we support partnerships between community developers, health care and public health agencies, and others to create permanent, self-sustaining solutions to housing, food, and related needs. We prioritize work with rural communities in recognition that they have traditionally been underserved in these areas and face unique barriers to addressing these needs.
In selecting projects to support, we consider the community’s need, readiness for the project, feasibility of the proposed programming, and the resources that can be leveraged. Funding is by invitation only—we do not accept unsolicited proposals.