How To Find Your Grant: Women Back to School Health Care Funding

As an adult woman who wants to change careers and join the health care industry, it can be difficult to fund the needed education. Fortunately, there are foundations and organizations that grant women back to school health care funding, in the form of grants, to make those dreams a reality.

What Grants Are Out There For Adult Woman Students?

If you are an adult woman returning to school, specifically to pursue a career in health care, you are relatively lucky. These two areas (women, health care professionals) are both considerably well-funded. As an overlap of the two, you are likely eligible for more grants than many other people who start new careers. This puts you at an advantage from the beginning.

Grants are sometimes funded through an institution itself, and will therefore be applied only to the winning student (or students) who are going to that specific college or university. Foundation grants can come from large government agencies, nonprofit foundations, or philanthropic arms of large corporations.

Who Can Get Women’s Health Care Grants, and Why?

To understand why grants for women entering the field of health care is so often supported by grants, you must first understand what grant giving is about. Grant-giving organizations do not think of a grant as a donation, but rather as an investment. They are investing in something that they see as helping meet a need that exists on a local, statewide, national, or even global level.

Therefore, you may find that some such grants are very specific. For example, many grants are specifically for women who are entering a field of work that is traditionally dominated by men (science, engineering, and business are good examples).

Others may see a need for health care workers in impoverished communities and provide grant funding for people who commit to working in those areas after their schooling is complete.

Still others believe in financial equality for men and women, and will therefore set aside grant funding for professional development training specifically for women returning to work after leaving the workforce to raise children.

How To Find Adult Student Grants For Women In Health Care

To find grants, you essentially have three different options:

• Contact the school or program you wish to enter and ask if they have worked with any grant-giving organizations (or internal scholarships) in the past.
• Search for grant openings from major foundations that you know give grants to a variety of causes. For example, all grant availability from the federal government is announced on the website grants.gov.
• Follow news updates from organizations specific to your case. They’ll be a good filter of opportunities that you’re most likely to be eligible for. A good example would be AAUW.org (which used to be called the American Association of University Women, but now just goes by AAUW).

It’s not every single day that a new organization will grant women back to school health care funding, so start early and keep your eyes open so you don’t miss any opportunities.