Funding Opportunity

Standard Grant Announcement: STS

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I. FUNDING OPPORTUNITY DESCRIPTION

1. INTRODUCTION

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) announces its intent to solicit applications for Service-to-Science grants. This program announcement must be considered in conjunction with a full Notice of Funding Availability (NOFA), which specifies the grant program’s purpose, target population, and other requirements of the program. These grants will document and evaluate innovative practices that address critical substance abuse and mental health service gaps but have not yet been formally evaluated. Applicants who seek to stabilize, document, and evaluate promising practices for mental health and/or substance abuse treatment, prevention, and support services should apply for awards under this announcement.

SAMHSA also funds grants under three other standard grant announcements:

• Services Grants provide funding to implement substance abuse and mental health services.

• Infrastructure Grants support identification and implementation of systems changes but are not designed to fund services.

• Best Practices Planning and Implementation Grants help communities and providers identify practices to effectively meet local needs, develop strategic plans for implementing/adapting those practices and pilot-test practices prior to full-scale implementation.

This announcement describes the general program design and provides application instructions for all SAMHSA Service-to-Science Grants. The availability of funds for specific Service-to-Science Grants will be announced in supplementary Notices of Funding Availability (NOFAs) in the Federal Register and at www.grants.gov - the Federal grant announcement web page.

SAMHSA’s Service-to-Science Grants are authorized under Section 509, 516 and/or 520A of the Public Health Service Act, unless otherwise specified in a NOFA in the Federal Register and on www.grants.gov.

Typically, funding for Service-to-Science Grants will be targeted to specific populations and/or issue areas, which will be specified in the NOFAs. The NOFAs will also:

• Specify total funding available for the first year of the grants and the expected size and number of awards;
• Provide the application deadline;
• Note any specific program requirements for each funding opportunity; and
• Include any limitations or exceptions to the general provisions in this announcement (e.g., eligibility, award size, allowable activities).

It is, therefore, critical that you consult the NOFA as well as this announcement in developing your grant application.

2. EXPECTATIONS

While there is a well-established evidence base for many behavioral health practices, critical service gaps exist for which there is no formal evidence base. Stakeholders have developed many innovative practices to fill these gaps, but they may lack the expertise and/or resources to formally document and evaluate their practices. Consequently, it is not clear whether these innovative practices are effective, and they are not disseminated widely. SAMHSA seeks to encourage continued development of evidence-based practices to fill service gaps by documenting and evaluating promising stakeholder-initiated practices. This program will help organizations that have identified promising new practices to evaluate and package those innovations for review and inclusion in the National Registry of Effective Programs and Practices (NREPP) as well as for further research.

2.1 Program Design

SAMHSA will fund Service-to-Science grants in two phases. You may apply for Phase I and II combined or for Phase II alone. Applications for Phase I alone will not be accepted. The program design requirements for Phase I and Phase II are described below. Applicants must, however, consult the NOFA for any program design requirements (e.g., required activities) specific to the funding opportunity.

Phase I provides support for up to 2 years to stabilize and document an existing practice that fills an identified gap. During Phase I, you may:

• further develop or refine the promising practice;
• develop training and practice manuals;
• train persons who are implementing the practice;
• more systematically implement the practice;
• develop measurement instruments; and
• ensure that the intended target population (see Glossary) is being reached by the practice.

The desired endpoint of Phase I is readiness to conduct a high-quality, systematic evaluation.

Phase II provides support for 1-3 years to evaluate the success of the practice. The purpose of Phase II is to conduct a high-quality, systematic evaluation to document short-term outcomes and demonstrate that the practice is worthy of an experimental study. On the basis of the evaluation, you may need to further refine the practice and further refine the practice manual. The evaluation may use a pre-post approach, an open trial model, other quasi or non-experimental model, or an experimental model.

The desired endpoint for Phase II is readiness to submit the practice for inclusion in SAMHSA’s NREPP and/or to submit applications to various research institutions for additional research.

SAMHSA’s Service-to-Science grants will provide support to stabilize practices so that they may be documented and evaluated. However, these grants are not intended to support development of entirely new practices. The practices must be in place and operational for at least one year prior to application, and you must have at least anecdotal evidence that the practice is effective.

You may apply for a combination of Phases I and II in a single grant application if you have identified a priority gap for which a fully developed and documented practice currently does not exist.

• During Phase I, you will further develop and document the practice.
• During Phase II, you will evaluate the practice.

At the conclusion of Phase I, SAMHSA staff will review your progress to determine whether Phase II is warranted. This decision will be based on review of the documentation required by the end of Phase I, as described under the Performance Expectations section below. You must provide compelling evidence that the practice has been sufficiently developed and documented to be evaluated and has produced positive results.

For practices that are already fully developed, implemented, stabilized, and documented but that have not yet been formally evaluated, you may apply for Phase II only. Applications for Phase I alone will not be accepted.

Depending on your readiness, you may receive a combination of Phases I and II for a period of up to, but not more than, 5 years. You may apply for a shorter grant period than the maximum, and SAMHSA may award a grant for a shorter time period than you request.

2.2 Establishing Need

Service-to-Science grants are intended to develop solutions to widespread needs. This grant program is not intended to address a local community’s need for funds to solve a local problem. Therefore, you must demonstrate that the broader substance abuse and/or mental health field—not just your local community—has a need for the practice. You must also show that no well-documented solution to the problem exists, and that your local community can support an evaluation that will increase the knowledge base of the field.

2.3 Allowable Activities

Phase I: Practice Development and Documentation

In Phase I, you will further develop and document the practice. The types of activities that may be needed and that are allowable include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Strategic planning
• Convening stakeholder meetings
• Training of practitioners
• Efforts to overcome policy and funding barriers to practice stability
• Development of an action plan for systematizing and stabilizing the practice
• Development of a practice support system
• Developing needed partnerships for ongoing implementation
• Logic model development
• Documentation of core elements of the practice
• Practice manual development
• Measurement instrument development/selection
• Participant recruitment
• Development of quality assurance and accountability mechanisms
• Implementation and refinement of the practice
• Implementation process evaluation
• Management information system development
• Collection of pilot outcome data

Phase II: Practice Evaluation

During Phase II, SAMHSA will (if necessary) continue to fund implementation of the practice being evaluated. Other types of allowable activities include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Convening relevant stakeholder meetings
• Alignment of management information systems with data collection needs
• Training evaluators
• Measurement instrument development/selection
• Data collection
• Database management
• Data and cost analysis
• Dissemination of results
• Refinement of logic model and practice manual based on evaluation results

2.4 Performance Expectations

All grantees will be expected to meet the following performance requirements by the end of their grant projects.

Phase I

By the end of Phase I, documentation for the practice must include:

• A logic model depicting the principles and concepts underlying the practice.

• A manual describing the practice in detail that would allow others to replicate the practice.

• Documentation of how critical stakeholders were included in the development of the practice.

• A detailed description of the population that the practice is designed to serve, and demographic characteristics of the people served by the practice over the past year.

• Documentation that the number of people being served by the practice has been stabilized.

• Documentation of the number and percentage of staff trained in the practice, and a mechanism for ongoing training for any new staff.

• A process evaluation demonstrating that the practice is in full operation and that a routine service delivery process is in place.

• Pilot outcome results. (Note: Collection of these data need not include an extensive set of outcomes systematically collected on all participants, but quantitative project data should provide some indication that key outcomes are being achieved.)

Phase II

By the end of Phase II, the evaluation of the practice must have demonstrated that:

• Key outcome measures have been clearly identified and defined.

• Participant data collection systems are in place that include:

• Demographic characteristics
• Practice outcomes
• Service utilization
• Service delivery costs
• Satisfaction with services

• Demographic characteristics of participants, as well as the types of services that participants have received, are consistent with expectations based on the logic model for the practice.

• Service delivery patterns are stable.

• A fidelity scale has been developed for assessing the integrity of the practice, and the practice has been implemented with fidelity according to the scale.

• Systematically collected short-term outcome measures indicate meaningful results.

• Consumers, family members, and other critical stakeholders are satisfied with the practice.

In addition, at the end of Phase II, grantees must:

• Demonstrate how consumers, family members, and other critical stakeholders participated in the evaluation of the practice.

• Demonstrate how the practice will be sustained over the 5 years following the end of the grant period.

• As appropriate, submit the practice to the SAMHSA National Registry of Effective Programs and Practices (NREPP).

• Demonstrate the willingness of those who initiated the practice to participate in rigorous research over the next 5 years (e.g., through submission of grant applications to the National Institutes of Health, private foundations, or other research funding sources; through formal agreements between practice initiators and researchers; etc.)

2.5 Data and Performance Measurement

The Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 (P.L.103-62, or “GPRA”) requires all Federal agencies to set program performance targets and report annually on the degree to which the previous year’s targets were met.

Agencies are expected to evaluate their programs regularly and to use results of these evaluations to explain their successes and failures and justify requests for funding.

To meet the GPRA requirements, SAMHSA must collect performance data (i.e., “GPRA data”) from grantees. Grantees are required to report these GPRA data to SAMHSA on a timely basis.

Specifically, grantees will be required to provide data on a set of required measures, as specified in the NOFA. The data collection tools to be used for reporting the required data will be provided in the application kits distributed by SAMHSA’s clearinghouses and posted on SAMHSA’s website along with each NOFA. In your application, you must demonstrate your ability to collect and report on these measures, and you may be required to provide some baseline data.

The terms and conditions of the grant award also will specify the data to be submitted and the schedule for submission. Grantees will be required to adhere to these terms and conditions of award.

Applicants should be aware that SAMHSA is working to develop a set of required core performance measures for each of SAMHSA’s standard grants (i.e., Services Grants, Infrastructure Grants, Best Practices Planning and Implementation Grants, and Service-to-Science Grants). As this effort proceeds, some of the data collection and reporting requirements included in SAMHSA’s NOFAs may change. All grantees will be expected to comply with any changes in data collection requirements that occur during the grantee’s project period.

2.6 Grantee Meetings

You must plan to send a minimum of two people (including the Project Director) to at least one joint grantee meeting in each year of the grant, and you must include funding for this travel in your budget. At these meetings, grantees will present the results of their projects and Federal staff will provide technical assistance. Each meeting will be 3 days. These meetings will usually be held in the Washington, D.C., area and attendance is mandatory.