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About the Connect project
The Connect project helps our grantees build relationships with their members of Congress and other policymakers.
The Foundation's Connect project helps RWJF grantees build or enhance relationships with their members of Congress and other policymakers—relationships that will serve to further grantees' work and position them as resources to members of Congress on the most pressing health and health care issues in America today. Our grantees are talented, passionately committed people whose extraordinary work leads to sound solutions that improve the quality of life for people living in a member's state or district. The Connect project highlights this important work with members of Congress.
Through Connect, grantees have an opportunity to discuss the challenges they face and share the lessons they've learned with their representatives in government. Connect also provides the tools and resources to turn those opportunities into lasting, beneficial relationships. Building relationships with policymakers can be a strategic goal for anyone working to bring about social change. There are tangible benefits for both grantees and policymakers. Grantees can educate members of Congress and other officials about the health and health care challenges facing people in their state or district and show how local institutions and constituents tackle those problems and find solutions. They can engage policymakers as respected voices of support in the community, gain increased media attention for their work and goals, and ask for help in navigating specific, nonlegislative barriers and challenges. These interactions will often spur fruitful relationships with other community leaders as well.
Connect brings members of Congress in contact with a constituency too rarely heard from—those who are working on the front lines to address important health and health care issues such as improving health care quality, reversing the epidemic of childhood obesity, building the health care workforce, ensuring that all Americans have access to affordable health care coverage, improving the public health infrastructure, and reducing harm from tobacco, alcohol and other drugs.
Connect is one of only a few efforts under way in the philanthropic world to educate policymakers about the important work grantees are doing in communities throughout the nation. To date, hundreds of RWJF grantees have learned how to reach out to their members of Congress and engage them as champions of their work.
No lobbying takes place as part of Connect activities. Like all private foundations, RWJF is generally prohibited from lobbying or otherwise attempting to influence legislation, and the use of its funds are similarly restricted. RWJF prohibits the use of grant funds for either lobbying or political campaign activities. Other organizations interested in implementing a Connect-style program should be familiar with lobbying and political campaign restrictions.
For more information about Connect, please contact Maureen Cozine or Jody Struve in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Communications Office.
Connect
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
Route 1 and College Road East
P.O. Box 2316
Princeton, NJ 08543-2316
Phone: (888) 878-0019
E-mail: connect@rwjf.org