HBCU Health Equity Data Consortium at A&T Secures $1.86M in Awards

EAST GREENSBORO, N.C. (April 22, 2026) – The Historically Black College and University (HBCU) Health Equity Data Consortium, housed at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, has secured three significant awards totaling $1.86 million to improve public health, support data modernization workforce development, and mitigate health disparities.

N.C. A&T will use a $850,000 Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust award over the course of two years to support the establishment and operation of the HBCU Health Equity Data Consortium infrastructure as a coordinated, multi-institution effort to address public health outcomes and disparities in underserved communities.

The consortium, led by executive director Jason Mose, Ph.D., is a partnership formed to address health inequities across all 100 counties by leveraging the collective expertise, infrastructure and community relationships of its member institutions.

A&T serves as the hub and fiscal agency of the consortium whose other member institutions are Elizabeth City State University, Fayetteville State University, Johnson C. Smith University, Shaw University and Winston-Salem State University. Ancillary member institutions are Appalachian State University, the University of North Carolina at Pembroke and Western Carolina University.

“This award from the Trust reflects a selective philanthropic investment in statewide health equity infrastructure,” said PaDonda Webb, DNP, A&T’s assistant vice chancellor of Health and Wellness. “The size of the award, multi-year structure, and continuation tied to progress reporting indicate a high bar for readiness, governance capacity, credible partnerships and accountability for results.”

Mose, who also serves as A&T’s Alvin V. Blount Jr. Student Health Center research operations director, led efforts to pursue the consortium’s latest awards, which include $810,000 from the North Carolina Division of Public Health via Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Public Health Infrastructure Grant funding.

Through Nov. 30, the consortium will use this money to support statewide data modernization workforce development for North Carolina’s public health system.

“Consortium members will benefit through strengthened statewide partnerships with the state Department of Public Health and local health departments, reusable training curricula and evaluation models, and an evidence base supporting workforce-aligned education, research and future grant competitiveness,” said Webb. “This supports the targeting of interventions, improved evaluation and more equitable allocation of resources across North Carolina.”

The consortium will use a $200,000 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation award to resume activities and complete the dissemination of findings and policy implications from its COVID-19 Impact Survey through Jan. 31, 2028. The survey was developed to rapidly generate localized evidence regarding the pandemic’s effects on health, social and economic well-being across North Carolina, with the aim of informing interventions to mitigate disparities.

“A fundamental equity strategy is community engagement. The consortium will use this funding to facilitate these efforts and offer neutral, data-driven input in accessible formats for near-term policymaking,” said Webb.

The foundation’s Rapid Response mechanism, through which the award was received, is national, highly competitive and designed to protect and complete critical health equity research and dissemination when prior federal support has been interrupted.

“Dr. Mose’s leadership in obtaining these awards reflects our shared commitment to advancing health equity through data, innovation and collaboration, and his contributions are invaluable to our mission,” said Webb. “We are deeply grateful to the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the North Carolina Division of Public Health for their continued support in helping make the consortium’s important work possible.”

The consortium’s mission is an end-to-end data enterprise – ethical collection, rigorous analysis and responsible dissemination – explicitly aligned to health equity. It prioritizes equitable surveillance and community engagement, including co-designed, culturally appropriate data collection approaches and the integration of social determinants of health to better capture the lived realities that drive disparities.