The Missouri Foundation for Health in St. Louis has announced a commitment of up to $6 million in support of efforts to improve racial and health equity in the region.

Informed by a 2015 report issued by the Ferguson Commission — which was appointed by Missouri governor Jay Nixon to make recommendations aimed at advancing racial equality and healing in the aftermath of Michael Brown's death and the protests that followed — the foundation will focus its grantmaking initially in six areas: grassroots advocacy; gun violence; juvenile justice and behavioral health; food insecurity; toxic stress and trauma-informed care; and school-based care.

Initial recipients include the St. Louis Regional Health Commission's Alive and Well STL, which was awrded $1 million to conduct training and awareness programs aimed at reducing the impact of stress and trauma on individuals' well-being and health, and Shut It Down: School to Prison Pipeline Project, which will receive $450,000 to train public school personnel to recognize implicit racial bias and identify students' needs with the aim of creating a better learning environment. Led by Norm White, associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at Saint Louis University, Shut It Down was launched by Judges Jimmie Edwards and David Mason of the Twenty-Second Circuit Court to address the problem of disproportionate minority contact with family court.

"The issues identified in the Forward Through Ferguson report deserve our attention," said MFH president and CEO Robert Hughes. "The foundation has resources to share, and we are committed to building on positive momentum and partnering with others just as we did with SLU. It's important that we take a look at the underlying problems and conditions that may have gotten us to this point as a region and realize that now is the time to dig in and do the long, hard work of developing critical strategies and making progress."