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Debra Pérez discovered a conundrum when she arrived at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in 2004 to head its efforts to support research into health disparities between whites and members of minority groups in the United States.

Despite the Princeton, N.J., foundation's commitment to improving the health of all Americans, she says, applicants for its research grants were the philanthropic world's version of "the usual suspects."

"We were getting the same people applying, and there wasn't a very diverse group of applicants," she says.

Laura Leviton, the foundation's special adviser for evaluation, says that some staff members assumed there was a dearth of qualified minority applicants. "I don't think we were trying to be elitist or anything," she says. "I think we sincerely just didn't know."

That kind of thinking is common among grant makers, says Orson Aguilar, who in January will move from associate director to executive director of the Greenlining Institute, in Oakland, Calif., which focuses on public policy, research, and advocacy related to minorities.

"We're usually disappointed when research opportunities are not given to people of color and they're given to typical Ivy League researchers," he says. "There are still foundations who are in denial and think it doesn't matter who does the research."

Ms. Pérez says she had no doubt that suitable minority candidates existed. The challenge, she says, was getting them to apply, especially those at the beginning of their research careers.

In response to that challenge, Ms. Pérez started a research-grant program focused on junior and midcareer scholars from what the program calls "historically disadvantaged and underrepresented communities," including racial and ethnic minorities, first-generation college students, and people from low-income neighborhoods.

Called New Connections, the three-year-old program is doing more than providing money to a small group of researchers, she says.

It also hopes to shape the Johnson foundation's grant making; provide mentors, training, and coaching to grant recipients, as well as those who are turned down for support; and "create a network of 1,000 diverse scholars," Ms. Pérez says, who will benefit from the foundation's mentoring and training opportunities, and will share ideas with one another. She adds that the program is more than a third of the way toward reaching that goal of 1,000.

The foundation has spent $2.3-million on the program so far and awarded 40 one-year grants of about $50,000 to $55,000 each. Its board recently authorized an additional $8.8-million over four years to support 16 grants annually, each up to $75,000 over one or two years.

Usually, Ms. Pérez says, when the foundation solicits research proposals, applicants respond to a broad category and propose their own research questions. New Connections grant recipients, on the other hand, are asked to design their proposals in response to any from among a list of research questions posed by each of the foundation's grant-making programs. The questions that researchers are most interested in tackling, she says, will help the foundation figure out which areas are most ripe for further study, and may help shape future grant making.

Says Ms. Pérez: "We wanted to inform the bigger picture of the teams and inform their thinking and programming."

It makes sense for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to cultivate scholars who come from the very groups of people whose lives the foundation intends to improve, says Ms. Pérez and others at the grant-making organization.

"If you're going to come up with a strategy that's focused on a community of color, you'd like to have somebody who understands the frame of reference of people in that community," says Calvin Bland, the foundation's chief of staff and chairman of its diversity committee, which promotes diversity in the organization's programming and grant making.

Rhonda BeLue, an assistant professor of health policy and administration at Pennsylvania State University at University Park, for instance, used her 2006 New Connections grant to study the ways that setting and context affect the success of medical treatment that minorities receive. For example, she looked at whether a health-care facility's waiting room is comfortable or dingy, how well staffed the place is, and how long patients have to wait.

Ms. BeLue, who is black, recalls how, as a child, she visited a military hospital with her father, a Vietnam veteran. "I used to completely dread going there," she says, "because we had to be there all day."

That experience, she says — plus time she spent working at a Nashville health clinic serving mostly black and Hispanic patients with little or no insurance and at a nearby hospital that served a more affluent, largely white population — allows her to understand what patients go through at an understaffed clinic.

In addition, she says, "I think I understand what's reasonable for an intervention." For example, she says, a program that focuses on improving services by computerizing patient records won't work at a clinic that cannot even afford to hire enough nurses.

New Connections researchers say they benefit equally from the money the program provides, which permits them to reduce their course loads and focus on research, and the prestige of receiving a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant.

"As a junior faculty member at UMBC, and the only African-American faculty member in my department, it goes a long way," says Shawn Bediako, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, of the grant he received to study the effects of sickle-cell disease on employment and mental health among black men. Mr. Bediako's grant began this June and already he has prepared three manuscripts that he is submitting to journals, he says.

Tamara Leech, a 2007 New Connections grant recipient, this summer joined the sociology faculty of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Because New Connections asks scholars to use already existing data, rather than requiring them to collect new data, she says, she was able to test ideas that will help her to formulate larger research questions. Ms. Leech studied risky behavior, such as drug use, among teenagers in public housing, before and after an overhaul of public-housing programs and policies in 1998.

Without the grant, she says, "I might be answering these questions in two or three years."

Beyond carrying the cachet of the Johnson foundation name, New Connections offers recipients chances to get advice from established stars of health-care research and to mingle with like-minded peers from various disciplines, something not readily available on many academic campuses, grant recipients say.

"It felt like it was a home for scholarship," Ms. Leech says of the foundation. "I don't think any institution will have that concentration of people who are thinking about health issues."

In a departure from foundation-world etiquette, the Johnson foundation decided to invite unsuccessful grant applicants to events it sponsors to train researchers.

"If we really want to strengthen the network of researchers from these historically underrepresented groups, we can't just focus on the grantees themselves," says Ms. Pérez.

Although she and others at the foundation feared that scholars whose proposals had been rejected might not "play nice in the sandbox," she says, "the people who learn the most and get the most out of our symposium are the people who've been turned down." After attending several New Connections events, says Ms. Pérez, one researcher reapplied and was awarded a grant on her second try.

New Connections' effect on foundation grant making remains to be seen, says Ms. Pérez, but the potential is there. This coming fall, three New Connections grantees will present their work on domestic violence to the foundation's Vulnerable Populations Team, she says.

Ms. Pérez and others at the foundation also would like to see New Connections grant recipients serve on the grant maker's national advisory committees, which are made up of scholars who volunteer their time to select recipients for each of the foundation's grant programs, and as evaluators to help gauge the effectiveness of the grant maker's programs. "I'm always looking to enlarge the pool of people we can turn to for evaluations," Ms. Leviton says.

Because of the program's success so far, Ms. Pérez says, the Johnson foundation's grant making to minority scholars has moved beyond her original conception of a separate New Connections program.

The grant maker's Healthy Eating Research Program awarded two New Connections grants out of its own budget in 2007 and is currently selecting a new batch of grant recipients who come from minority backgrounds. The Active Living Research Program, which explores the impact of environments and policies on children's and families' ability and willingness to exercise, is selecting its first New Connections grants recipients, who will begin their research grants in January. And the Public Health Team is proposing to include New Connections grants in a new effort to study policies and laws that improve public health.

"It's raised the visibility of the existing pool of talent among diverse researchers," Ms. Pérez says of her program, "so now everybody, to be honest, wants a piece of New Connections."