G-2101-16667

Florida Voices for Health is a coalition of community organizations, businesses, and individuals working to improve the health care system in Florida.

Florida Voices for Health is seeking funding through the Advancing Equity through Oral Health Fund under the Sub-Program Strengthen Community Voice and State Advocacy. With DentaQuest Partnership for Oral Health Advancement (DentaQuest Partnership) funding in 2020, Florida Voices for Health began to build the infrastructure for a grassroots coalition/campaign for state oral health advocacy, which identified an inadequate Medicaid Adult Dental Benefit as the current primary challenge for Florida’s most vulnerable in accessing oral healthcare. Specifically, the services covered by Medicaid are emergency services to alleviate pain, infection, or procedures to prepare someone for dentures.

A Medicaid Adult Dental Benefit expansion bill was filed by the coalition earlier in 2021. To promote the bill, Florida Voices for Health will continue to use their full-time story banker to catalog real experiences of Medicaid beneficiaries, identified via grassroots partners and sponsored Facebook ads. They will use these stories, along with quantitative oral health data compiled in 2020, to build an advocacy campaign for an expanded Medicaid Adult Dental Benefit to be shared on social media (for public support), with key legislators, and with local media outlets.

Florida Voices for Health will continue to build its grassroots coalition for oral health in Florida in 2021, and specifically for the Medicaid Adult Dental Benefit bill. They will also use a single-issue sign-on letter to garner support from larger, grasstops organizations that may not have the capacity to participate in the coalition.

Budget line items include staff time and digital communications expenses.

DentaQuest Partnership has funded Florida Voices for Health in varying amounts since 2018, ranging from $2,900-$110,000. In the past two years of grant funding, Florida Voices for Health has proven successful in building an organized infrastructure for Florida’s oral health coalition, and also serves as the lead for Florida’s OPEN chapter. Florida Voices for Health’s shows strong alignment with DentaQuest Partnership’s commitment to elevating community voice in order to create systemic change in the field of oral health.