Behavioral Health Equity Challenge: Outreach and Engagement Strategies for Underserved Racial and Ethnic Communities
SAMHSA is excited to announce the 10 winners of its Behavioral Health Equity Challenge!
Community-Based Organizations (CBOs) often serve on the front lines to address the needs of their community members and can take the form of public or private nonprofit organizations, peer-run organizations, or faith-based organizations. Entities including local or state governments, health systems, hospitals, or health plans) are encouraged to partner with a CBO to participate in the Challenge. This challenge allows participants to share their innovative strategies to help underserved racial and ethnic communities access behavioral health service (mental health promotion, substance misuse prevention, and treatments and supports that foster recovery). SAMHSA will use this challenge to directly engage with a larger and more diverse number of CBOs providing services and supports throughout the continuum of care for behavioral health.
SAMHSA aims to learn the following from the behavioral health community:
- What challenges have you faced in connecting people from underserved racial and ethnic communities to behavioral health services?
- What outreach and engagement strategies or innovative methods have you used to connect people from underserved racial and ethnic communities to behavioral health services?
- How do you know your outreach and engagement strategies are successful? How do you measure your success?
- How do you incorporate equity into your outreach and engagement strategies?
The Goal
The goal of this challenge is to identify and highlight Community-Based Organization (CBO) outreach and engagement strategies that increase access to behavioral health services for racial and ethnic underserved communities.
Award Information
The Challenge fund has $500,000 available for up to ten awards through this competition. Four awards will be dedicated to the winning strategies that address mental health; three awards will be dedicated to the winning strategies that address substance use prevention; three awards will be dedicated to the winning strategies that address substance use treatment, respectively. The challenge prize for each winner is expected to be $50,000 plus multiple opportunities for recognition.
All prize-winning submissions will be prominently featured on the SAMHSA website and via social media; additional opportunities to be profiled by SAMHSA may be developed in the future.
Eligible Participants
CBOs such as public or private nonprofit organizations, peer-run organizations and faith-based organizations are encouraged to participate. CBOs can be a sole applicant or serve as a primary applicant to include local and state health departments, health systems, hospitals, health plans, academic medical centers, for-profit organizations, or other entities as part of teams that participate as a group.
For any questions regarding the challenge, email challenge@samhsa.hhs.gov.