(The Center Square) — Six organizations throughout the commonwealth have been awarded approximately $22.4 million of fiscal year 2025 and 2026 funds to advance Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s plan for transforming Virginia’s behavioral health system, Right Help, Right Now.
The plan’s executive director, Hallie Pence, called the grants a “critical investment in the infrastructure needed to support Virginians in behavioral health crises.”
Implementation of the three-year plan began in 2023 and is supposed to equip the commonwealth’s behavioral health system to respond to the long-term magnified mental health needs that have become more apparent in Virginia and the nation at large, particularly since the pandemic. The initiative has received bipartisan support.
“The ability to expand our crisis services ensures that more people will have access to the right care in the right place, at the right time. This will make an immense difference for individuals, families, and communities across the state for years to come,” Pence said in a statement.
The grant recipients are mostly community service boards, publicly funded organizations that provide services to Virginians struggling with mental health, developmental or substance abuse disorders. Some funds will go toward existing facilities or programs already delivering Right Help, Right Now care. Others will go toward construction and capital expansion projects.
To meet care objectives, Right Help, Right Now aims to ensure that Virginians in crisis have “someone to call, someone to respond, and somewhere to go.” Residents already have the 988 hotline, and the state’s mobile crisis teams have greatly expanded through the plan.
The new investments “will create additional places for Virginians to go, ensuring emergency room alternatives exist in a crisis situation” and relieving law enforcement from managing patients who need behavioral health care, according to a press release from the governor’s office.
New River Valley Community Services Board has been awarded the largest grants this round. The board has already established crisis receiving center and crisis stabilization unit programs for adults; a $4.2 million grant will facilitate the creation of three new youth programs through co-locating a receiving center, stabilization unit and a crisis therapeutic home. An additional $2.4 million will support ongoing operations at all five sites. “The crisis therapeutic home is part of the [board’s] REACH services array,” which assists developmentally disabled individuals experiencing a crisis, according to a release.
Over $6 million will go to Western Tidewater Community Services Board for the expansion of and continuing REACH services; Region Ten Community Services Board in Charlottesville will receive $4.7 million; Loudoun County, as “one of the fastest growing counties in the nation,” will receive $4.1 million; Highlands Community Services Board, $1.75 million; and Richmond Behavioral Health Authority, over $1.5 million.
This tranche of funding is the third since December.
