Grants for mental and behavioral health

What grants fund mental health and behavioral health programs?

SAMHSA is the dedicated federal funder, with grant programs across mental health services, substance use treatment, and prevention. States administer their own behavioral health funds plus federal block grant money, and now opioid settlement funds, which many states and counties regrant locally. On the private side, health foundations, including the regional legacy foundations created from hospital conversions, treat behavioral health as core, and community foundations increasingly name it a priority.

Last reviewed September 9, 2026.

Public money is layered; know which layer is yours

Behavioral health funding stacks: federal SAMHSA programs, block grant dollars states redistribute, state general funds, county behavioral health budgets, and settlement funds moving through their own local processes. The same service can be fundable at three layers under three different names, and the applications go to different offices.

The practical rule: SAMHSA's published programs are the visible top of the stack. The state and county layers below it are where smaller providers most often actually get funded, and Quillify carries state opportunities in the same search as federal ones.

The sources worth working

SAMHSA programs: Published, cyclical, and specific about populations and evidence-based practices. Eligibility language decides these; ask the eligibility question before committing a team to one.
Settlement funds: Opioid settlement money is being granted by states and counties on locally set processes, many of them young and lightly competed. If your work touches substance use, prevention, or recovery, find your county's process by name.
Health legacy foundations: Regional foundations endowed by hospital and health plan conversions consistently rank behavioral health among their priorities, and they fund only in their own footprint, which keeps competition local.
Community foundations: Behavioral health has moved up community foundation priority lists in most regions. For a local provider these are fast, reachable funders whose staff already know the service gaps you fill.

Work backwards from providers like you

Name behavioral health providers doing similar work and Quillify surfaces the foundations behind them from the IRS filings, then shows which of those funders have no history with you yet. In a vertical where funder priorities shift by region, what peers actually got funded is the ground truth worth starting from.