Lilly Endowment Inc. Awards CICOA $5 Million Sustainability Grant

CICOA Aging & In-Home Solutions has received a grant of $5 million from Lilly Endowment Inc. through its latest round of financial sustainability grants.

This grant is one of eight grants totaling $34 million that are designed to help human services organizations that serve residents in central Indiana enhance their long-term impact by building stronger financial futures.

CICOA will put $500,000 to work immediately to address two specific needs: a system integration environmental scan of existing technologies and a development audit. Both will provide roadmaps in support of CICOA’s 20-year strategic plan goals. The additional $4.5 million will be set aside in an endowment to provide a sustainable source of income for future technology needs.

Since 1974, CICOA has been the state-designated Area Agency on Aging providing services to older adults, people with disabilities, and family caregivers in central Indiana. Although CICOA is not a healthcare provider, CICOA’s wraparound supports address the non-medical, social determinants of health challenges its clients face, often resulting in better health, improved quality of care, and lower costs of care.

As CICOA has grown in service reach, offering and scale, the need for better data integration has become more critical. CICOA’s core service lines—care management, options counseling, information and referral, senior nutrition, transportation, caregiver support, and home accessibility modifications—all use separate technologies to store and track client data, creating unnecessary siloes and duplicate data entries. What is lacking is the ability to see and manage all client touches in one place.

“This is big,” said CICOA President and CEO Tauhric Brown. “We are humbled and grateful to Lilly Endowment for this transformational gift that will help us build support for endowment and fund development capacity building and future technology enhancements in support of our mission.”

“The grant is designed to help CICOA Aging & In-Home Solutions build long-term financial strength and resiliency so that it can better weather unexpected and adverse funding changes,” said Ronni Kloth, Lilly Endowment’s vice president for community development. “The grant is not intended to fund ongoing operating support to meet the day-to-day needs of the people they serve. In fact, we hope the grant helps CICOA attract additional support for this important work.”

This is the sixth group of grants Lilly Endowment has made since 2015 to support the long-term sustainability plans of charitable organizations based in central Indiana. Through this effort, Lilly Endowment has made grants totaling $417 million to 70 organizations.