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Family Caregiver Alliance has been awarded a grant from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for a national project to ad-vance state programs for family caregivers.
As the population ages, this is an increasingly important policy area: states currently are major financers and regulators of long-term care services.
The $231,739 grant provides for a national invitational conference for policy-makers; a weekly electronic news bulletin; and a series of commissioned briefing papers on vital issues in long-term care. Lynn Friss Feinberg, FCA's Director of Research and Information Programs, will oversee the project.
The new funding will continue the momentum of FCA's survey of fifteen states' caregiver support programs and landmark 1999 policy conference, which brought together key policy makers from across the country. "The response to that meeting was so positive, and the resulting actions by various states to increase their caregiver support programs so impressive, that we felt it was critical to continue our efforts to explore trends and share information on best practices," commented FCA Executive Director Kathleen Kelly. "We are thrilled that The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation shares our hopes for developing cost-efficient, effective caregiver programs in every state."
The conference will take place in San Francisco October 26 - 27, 2001. A national advisory committee of experts in long-term care policy has been convened to identify key issues and themes for the invitational conference.
Family caregiving has been highly visible in the news lately as Congress passed reauthorization of the Older Americans Act. The act contains new funding for a National Family Caregiver Support Program, partially modeled on California's state-wide system of Caregiver Resource Centers. (See page 8 for more information).
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, based in Princeton, NJ, is the nation's largest philanthropy devoted exclusively to health and health care. It concentrates its grantmaking in three goal areas: to assure that all Americans have access to basic health care at reasonable cost; to improve care and support for people with chronic health conditions; and to reduce the personal, social and economic harm caused by substance abuse.
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