Mercy Medical Center looking for grant recipients

Focusing on helping fight childhood obesity and homeless health problems, Mercy Medical Center has grants available worth $82,000.

Each year, Mercy awards grants to nonprofit organizations. This year the grants are available to groups focusing on childhood obesity, health issues for the homeless and teen pregnancy.

"This is part of our community benefit program in giving back to the community," said Janice Wilkerson, mission integration director for Mercy.

The grant money available this year is the most Mercy has ever made available, Wilkerson said, and up to $50,000 of it can be granted to one agency. In the past, the cap was $25,000, she said.

Mercy's parent company, Catholic Healthcare West, has given a total of more than $34 million in grants since 1990, when the grant program was started, Wilkerson said.

One of the beneficiaries of the grants in the past was Healthy House, a nonprofit whose mission is to improve the health and well-being of all cultures in the community. Candice Adam-Medefind, executive director of the organization, said the grant was used to help educate the Hmong community about diabetes.

"We are using the money to adapt diabetic education to the Hmong and Southeast Asian community," Adam-Medefind said. "If the culture doesn't know the history of having the disease, and suddenly they have it, they may not have the knowledge of it."

Adam-Medefind said having the grant money available from Mercy helps a lot of local organizations.

"It's been a wonderful way for us to fill in gaps, like classes and transportation," Adam-Medefind said. "We want Merced to eventually become a best-practices model on how to alleviate medical disparities among various cultures, and this money has helped so much in that regard."

Reporter Carol Reiter can be reached at (209) 385-2486 or creiter@mercedsun-star.com.