GRANTS UPDATES
As part of the Agency’s new Recovery to Practice project, SAMHSA recently approved awards to five national behavioral health care provider associations. The goal of the awards is to hasten awareness, acceptance, and adoption of recovery-based practices in the delivery of mental health services.
The Recovery to Practice project supports the Agency’s strategic initiative to enhance the Nation’s behavioral health workforce. “Through this new initiative, we are retooling the behavioral health workforce by applying the principles of recovery to direct care practice,” said SAMHSA Administrator Pamela S. Hyde, J.D.
These five awards represent a major new outreach by SAMHSA to engage key behavioral health professional groups directly in the Agency’s ongoing efforts to improve behavioral health care services nationwide.
Funding for the next 5 years goes to the following organizations to develop recovery-oriented educational materials and train thousands of psychiatrists, psychologists, psychiatric nurses, social workers, and peer specialists:
- American Psychiatric Association
- American Psychological Association
- American Psychiatric Nurses Association
- Council on Social Work Education
- National Association of Peer Specialists.
The Recovery to Practice effort includes materials development and professional training.
The project builds on SAMHSA’s National Consensus Statement on Mental Health Recovery. The statement includes 10 fundamental components of mental health recovery, as well as the Agency’s ongoing work in the area of shared decision-making.
A team of leading behavioral health organizations and curriculum development experts are assisting with this effort. They include the Annapolis Coalition; Mental Health America; the National Alliance on Mental Illness; National Development and Research Institutes, Inc.; and the New York Association of Psychiatric Rehabilitation Services.
Homeless Individuals and Families Grants—4 new grants, each for up to $400,000 per year for up to 5 years, to local organizations working to prevent or reduce chronic homelessness in their communities. Totaling just under $8 million, these grants are in addition to $81.5 million in grants awarded under this program in September 2009.
This grant program is a key part in SAMHSA’s strategic initiative on homelessness. It is designed to provide essential mental health and substance use treatment services linked to permanent supportive housing targeted to chronically homeless individuals and families.
These resources serve to reduce the barriers that homeless persons with mental and substance use disorders and their families experience in accessing effective programs that sustain recovery and stable housing.
This program has a targeted focus to serve chronically homeless individuals and families by enhancing existing permanent supportive housing programs and other resources. The programs will provide intensive individualized support services designed to reduce psychiatric symptoms and substance use and empower people to regain stability.
The following is a list of the grant awardees and their first-year grant amounts:
- Community Area Resource Enterprise/Gallup, NM – $400,000
- Catholic Charities of Santa Clara County/San Jose, CA – $399,991
- Greenhope Housing Development Fund Corp./New York, NY – $398,985
- Women Accepting Responsibility, Inc./Baltimore, MD – $400,000
For more on grants, visit SAMHSA’s grants page.