What Nonprofits Need to Know about the Social Determinants of Health

I'm a grant writer. I write funding proposals for public health-centric organizations, and most days, that means translating community need into dollars and cents for people who've never set foot in the neighborhoods I'm writing about.

But before I was a grant writer, I was an MPH student.

I actually found grant writing almost by accident during my Master's in Public Health: a program needed funding, someone needed to write the case for it, and I raised my hand.

I accidentally fell in love with the craft: the strategy, the storytelling, the puzzle of matching a program's need to a funder's priorities. Grant writing and fundraising became my career.

But public health? That's still my first love. It's the lens I can't turn off. It's in the food pantry client list, the school vaccination clinic, the community garden proposal, the housing nonprofit's outcomes report. It touches everything I do.

So what is public health?

At its core, it's the work of protecting and improving the health of entire populations: not just treating illness one patient at a time, but addressing the conditions that make people sick (or keep them well) in the first place.

Medical care is estimated to account for only 10 to 20% of the modifiable contributors to healthy outcomes for a population. That means 80 to 90% of what determines someone's health has nothing to do with a doctor's office.

That's where the social determinants of health (SDOH) come in.

The World Health Organization defines the SDOH as the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age, and their access to power, money, and resources.

The CDC frames it almost identically, describing SDOH as the non-medical factors that shape health outcomes, from housing and education to discrimination and access to nutritious food.

WHO takes it a step further with the idea of a social gradient: health tends to track directly with socioeconomic position. The lower someone's income or social standing, the worse their health outcomes tend to be, at every level of the income ladder.

Now let’s connect this to grant writing.

Most grant writers and nonprofits are leaving money on the table, and they don't even know it.

When was the last time you looked at a public health funder for an arts education program?

When was the last time you checked public health funding streams for a neighborhood cat-spaying initiative?

Neither program screams public health. But both have major public health implications: arts education is tied to mental health outcomes and community cohesion; unmanaged pet populations are a documented public health and safety issue in under-resourced neighborhoods.

If you've only ever searched arts funders for your arts program, or animal welfare funders for your spay-and-neuter program, you might be missing an entire category of funders who care deeply about the outcome your program produces, even if they'd never call it by your program's name.

Understanding public health also helps you better serve the communities behind your grants.

Have you ever considered that your food pantry isn't just distributing food; it's a trusted touchpoint where people who avoid clinics and doctors’ offices might actually be reachable for a vaccine clinic or a health screening?

Have you ever thought about the mom of three who's hesitant to vaccinate her kids before the school year, not out of defiance, but because no one's ever explained why it matters in a way that felt like it was for her, not at her?

When you understand the public health threads running underneath the programs you write for, you can leverage these ideals into a more compelling needs statement or a more robust community description.

The 5 Social Determinants of Health

Healthy People 2030 (the federal government's decade-long framework for improving the nation's health) organizes the social determinants of health into five domains.

Economic Stability

Economic stability covers income, employment, expenses, debt, and the ability to afford the basics: food, housing, healthcare. HP2030 is blunt: poverty, unemployment, and housing/food insecurity all compound to make it harder for people to live healthy lives, and that instability follows people into every other domain on this list.

Grant-writing relevance: If you write for workforce development, job training, financial literacy, childcare subsidies, or emergency assistance programs, you should be looking for public health dollars.

Education Access and Quality

This domain covers early childhood education, high school graduation rates, language and literacy, and access to higher education or vocational training.

HP2030 ties educational attainment directly to long-term health: people with more education tend to live longer, healthier lives, in part because education opens doors to better jobs, more health literacy, and more stable environments.

Grant-writing relevance: Tutoring programs, early literacy initiatives, school readiness programs, GED and adult education: these all sit squarely in this bucket. If you write for an education-focused nonprofit and have never looked at a health-focused funder, this is your sign.

Health Care Access and Quality

This one's the most obvious, but it's not just "does someone have insurance." HP2030 includes access to primary care, preventive services, health literacy, and the quality of care people receive once they're in the door: including whether that care is culturally competent and trustworthy.

Grant-writing relevance: This is the bucket every grant writer thinks they already understand: clinics, mobile health units, insurance navigation programs. But it also includes health literacy programs, interpreter services, and patient navigation; services that often get filed under "social services" instead of health, and miss funders who'd fund them as exactly that.

Neighborhood and Built Environment

This domain covers housing quality, transportation, walkability, access to healthy food, environmental exposures (pollution, water quality), and neighborhood safety. It's the physical stage where everything else in a person's life plays out.

Grant-writing relevance: This is where your cat-spaying program lives: unmanaged pet populations are a documented neighborhood and public health concern. It's also where housing rehab programs, community gardens, safe-routes-to-school initiatives, and public transit access programs live. If your program touches the physical space someone lives in, you should be looking at public health foundations.

Social and Community Context

This domain covers relationships, community engagement, social cohesion, discrimination, and civic participation; essentially, whether people feel connected, supported, and safe within their community. HP2030 and WHO both point to isolation and lack of community support as direct drivers of worse health outcomes.

Grant-writing relevance: This is for your arts education program, senior companionship programs, community centers, mentorship initiatives, or civic engagement work. None of these "look like" public health, but they're directly tied to the social cohesion HP2030 identifies as a core determinant.

Bringing it Home

I started this post by telling you that public health is my first love; the lens I can't turn off, even when I'm knee-deep in a budget narrative for a program that has nothing to do with a clinic. By now, I hope you can see why.

Public health is the underlying architecture of every program you write for, whether it's a food pantry, an arts program, a housing initiative, or a neighborhood cat-spaying effort.

That 80-to-90% statistic from earlier is worth sitting with one more time: most of what determines someone's health has nothing to do with a hospital or a doctor's visit.

It has to do with their income, their education, their neighborhood, their community, and their access to care; the five social determinants of health.

So the next time you sit down to write a case for support, ask yourself which of these five domains your program actually touches. Odds are, it's more than one.

And once you can see that connection, you can name it. That reframe alone might be the difference between a program that stays underfunded and one that finally gets seen for the full impact it's already having.