Being for Others awards $500,000 for Dubois County wellness projects

Greater Jasper Consolidated Schools and Team OC (Our Community) will anchor Dubois County’s role in Being for Others Health and Wellness Foundation’s new $500,000 collaboration grant round, with money aimed at projects that can change daily life in Jasper and the wider southern Indiana service area.

For Jasper, the headline project is Screens in Balance: Dubois County Digital Wellness, a partnership that signals the foundation is willing to fund work at the intersection of technology, health and family life. In Orange County, Team OC is tied to the Bridge to Stability Housing Collaborative, showing the program is not limited by county lines when a problem, such as housing instability, affects the same regional network of families and service providers.

Being for Others says the collaboration grants are three-year awards, with as much as $250,000 available for each collaboration. The foundation’s larger Community Collaboration Program is designed to invest up to $2 million from 2026 through 2030, fund at least six collaborations and have at least three implementation plans underway by 2029 under its 6-3-9 Strategic Plan.

The stakes are clear in the foundation’s own regional survey work. Its Community Snapshot Survey drew 146 responses from 190 participants at eight informational sessions across the service region. Residents and service providers ranked mental health and substance use support as the top concern, followed by housing and economic stability, transportation and connectivity, and early childhood and family support. Limited funding was named the biggest barrier in nearly every county surveyed, which helps explain why the new grants are built around collaboration instead of isolated projects.

Being for Others, established in 2024 through a $20 million endowment tied to the Memorial Hospital and Health Care Center and Deaconess Health System affiliation, says it serves Dubois, Martin, Crawford, Daviess, Spencer, Perry, Pike and Orange counties. That regional structure matters for Dubois County because the money is not just covering programs, but also the planning and staff time many local organizations cannot afford on their own.

The public can measure whether the effort works by watching for the foundation’s own benchmarks: six collaborations funded, three implementation plans moving by 2029 and a full $2 million invested by 2030. Just as important, local families should be able to see whether the grants produce real-world results, from school-based digital wellness tools to stronger housing supports and better coordinated care.