Announcing the Phase II Winners of the 2025 Reconstruct Challenge
We’re thrilled to announce the five Phase II winners of the 2025 Reconstruct Challenge, who are working to build solutions in Food Justice, Maternal and Child Health, and Healthcare Access.
After a successful Phase I, these five remarkable projects will receive $100,000, totaling $500,000, to continue transforming lives and advancing health equity in their communities:
“We’re thrilled to award these five innovators with the next round of funding and support, enabling them to expand their reach, refine their processes, and generate the data needed to secure more traditional long-term funding sources,” said Bryce Butler, Access Ventures’ Managing Director. "Their work in Phase 1 resulted in 90% of participants reporting improved health outcomes, proving that these solutions have real-world results.”
Phase 1 of this Reconstruct Challenge was supported by funds made available by the Kentucky Department for Public Health’s Office of Health Equity from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for STLT Public Health Infrastructure and Workforce, under RFA-OT21-2103. We awarded fifteen innovators a total of $1.5 million through the phase one effort.
During Phase 2, these five awardees will further explore interventions that showed tangible impact and feasibility in Phase 1 that have the potential scale beyond the Challenge and attract interest from more traditional funders. Funding for phase 2 winners comes from Access Ventures and donor, Brook T. Smith.
The Reconstruct Challenge is a reverse pitch program–powered by Access Ventures, a Louisville-based impact multiplier–that unearths innovations from around the country to address a community’s most pressing social issues. The program recognizes that the innovators with the greatest insights often face barriers to capital, market access, and connections that make them harder to find and slower to scale. Reconstruct finds these solutions and runs paid pilots, grounded in community voice, academic research, and industry mentoring, to mitigate the risk for both innovators and partners. To date, Reconstruct has funded over 20 innovators and deployed over $4m in risk capital.