UDM receives $300,000 grant from Michigan Health Endowment Fund to work toward healthier community

Two major grants from the Michigan Health Endowment Fund totaling more than $300,000 are helping University of Detroit Mercy (UDM) work in unique ways with the community to improve wellness.

One grant involves how nonprofit community organizations use AI today and in the future, and the other establishes a neighborhood wellness council for residents of Northwest Detroit to guide health priorities in their communities.

The AI-focused grant began with a realization from UDM’s Phillip Olla, who directs the University’s Center for Augmenting Intelligence (CAI): In the very near future, users will be charged to access the AI systems they use daily.

“In many cases AI may be free now, but in the future the companies that have been developing it will have to recoup their cost,” Olla said.

This will create a digital divide, he said, where the free AI models will be limited, slow and outdated and the models that power scientific discovery, clinical support, financial analysis, legal review, product design and strategic decision-making will be locked behind subscriptions.

“It will become a utility that people and businesses will have to pay for like they do their water, electricity or Wi-Fi,” he said.

Among those who will feel the pain will be nonprofits, especially those that address healthcare issues for the most vulnerable populations.

To address that issue in advance, Olla, through the CAI, created the Detroit AI Health Equity Collaborative, which recently received a $150,000 Capacity Building Grant from the Michigan Health Endowment Fund.

The goal of the collaborative is to support a community-driven effort to ensure AI improves health outcomes for Detroit residents, particularly children, older adults and families facing health disparities.

The collaborative includes Brilliant Detroit, Michigan Roundtable for Just Communities, Global Alliance Solutions Foundation, The Heart Next Door, Merit and StudyAid, all Michigan-based support organizations working toward community wellness.

Over the next two years, the organizations will bring together nonprofits, healthcare providers, digital equity leaders and community organizations to:

• Build a shared AI governance model grounded in ethics, transparency and community voice.
• Design a Detroit AI Utility Model — a system that provides affordable, shared access to multiple AI tools through one platform.
• Develop a health equity dashboard and evaluation framework to measure real-world impact.
• Create a long-term sustainability plan to protect organizations from rising AI costs and vendor lock-in, where a customer becomes dependent on a single vendor for services and cannot switch to a competitor without costs or disruption.

The scope of this initiative, according to Olla, is to move ahead of the issue of rising costs by joining forces with these partners and create a community-owned AI utility model. The goals are to pool demand across organizations to lower costs, establish shared governance to avoid vendor lock-in, vet tools for safety, ethics and effectiveness and ensure long-term, sustainable access to AI resources.

“This grant allows us to bring organizations together to build something bigger than any one group could do alone — a shared, ethical, AI infrastructure that puts community needs first,” Olla said. “We’re not just adopting technology; we’re shaping how it serves our communities for the long term.”

Detroit Mercy’s CAI is a multidisciplinary innovation and research hub dedicated to advancing human-centered, ethical artificial intelligence to improve urban health outcomes and reduce health disparities. It brings together faculty, students and community partners to co-create AI solutions focused on education, applied research and community-driven innovation that strengthen decision-making and promote equity in Detroit and similar urban communities.

The Titan Equity Nourish Network (TENN) and UDM’s McAuley School of Nursing have been working with their Michigan Health Endowment Fund since December. The group received a $180,000 grant to fund The People’s Path to Wellness, which will establish a neighborhood wellness council to guide health priorities, design culturally relevant wellness programs and build long-term community health leadership.

“This has been the dream for a couple of years now,” said Chelsea Manning, TENN’s program manager. “This University has so many great resources with the community work done by the Dental School, the McAuley School of Nursing, the Psychology clinics, the School of Law and so many more. The idea of this group is for us to be more targeted in what we do so that we can make more impactful change.”

TENN is a student-led community-rooted food and wellness initiative whose initiatives include creating community gardens and delivering produce to residents with the overall goal to create a more food-sovereign Detroit.

The Martin Park and Fitzgerald neighborhoods, which are adjacent to the University’s McNichols Campus, are historically Black Detroit neighborhoods facing significant health and social disparities. These include food insecurity and childhood poverty, elevated rates of chronic illnesses like diabetes and hypertension, and aging populations with limited access to care, transportation and culturally relevant health resources.

Residents in the neighborhoods, especially older adults, caregivers and women, expressed an urgent need for preventive and proactive wellness support, higher confidence regarding community and personal health and health solutions designed by and for the community.

A nine-person community council has been operating for a few months and other work in the first year of the grant is focused on developing and training leaders to be confident in addressing health issues. The second year will focus on community-wide listening, priority setting and launching wellness programs and developing sustainability of the council.

“What’s important is that this is community led,” Manning said. “We want to use our skills to help the community members build their own skills to help their neighbors find the resources they need for healthier lives.”

Learn more about the Center for Augmenting Intelligence and TENN.