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There are 5.4 million individuals who self-identify as American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) in the US, and there are 567 federally registered tribes. While characterized by many strengths and resiliencies, as a whole, AI/AN populations experience significant disparities compared to the general population across a range of health conditions and outcomes, including infant mortality, alcohol-related mortality, substance abuse, unintentional injury, homicide, suicide, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, obesity, chronic kidney disease, asthma, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, selected cancers, and other chronic diseases. Premature death rates, while decreasing in other US racial/ethnic minority populations over the past 15 years, are increasing among AI/AN populations. However, the examination of data on AI/AN populations in aggregate may obscure the significant heterogeneity within the AI/AN population due to tribal affiliation, geographic region, and other factors. For example, gastric cancers affect AI/AN populations in different parts of the country at different rates ranging from 6.1/100,00 in the Eastern US to 24.5/100,000 in Alaska. At the same time, national survey and epidemiological studies often do not report data on AI/AN populations because the numbers are too small or AI/AN individuals are folded into the highly heterogeneous "Other" category, thus not available to interpret any health outcomes specific for AI/AN populations. For these reasons, there is a critical need to build a more comprehensive evidence base regarding the health of AI/AN populations.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), Center for Mental Health Services (CMHS) is accepting applications for fiscal year (FY) 2018 Statewide Consumer Network Program grants (Short Title: SCN). The purpose of this program is to improve efforts to address the needs of adults with serious mental illness (SMI) by developing and/or expanding peer support services, peer leadership, and peer engagement strategies statewide. The population of focus is adults with SMI, including those who are underserved and under-represented (e.g., consumers from ethnic, racial, and cultural minority groups); veterans; individuals who are chronically homeless; individuals with co-occurring disorders (COD) ; sexual orientation and gender identity minorities; and individuals who have been involved in the criminal justice system. It is expected that this program will increase access to and quality of mental health services for adults with SMI; increase the sustainability of consumer-operated organizations; and enhance state capacity and infrastructure to support the recovery of adults with SMI and their families. The SCN grant program builds upon prior work of SAMHSA to establish recovery-oriented, consumer-driven services for adults with SMI.

The purpose of this FOA is to support Administrative Supplements to active NIMH grants to foster research across the NIMH Strategic Objectives that target the reduction and elimination of mental health disparities by race and ethnicity, geography, and socioeconomic status in the United States. This initiative aims to generate research within the scientific scope of the parent grant that identifies mechanisms underlying disparities or differences in mental health status and/or enhances optimal delivery of mental health interventions among diverse groups.

The foundation prioritizes studies focused on reducing inequality on the basis of race, ethnicity, economic standing, language minority status, or immigrant origin. It also supports studies from a range of disciplines, fields, and methodologies, and encourages investigations into various systems, including justice, housing, child welfare, mental health, and education. Competitive proposals often incorporate data from multiple sources and often involve multidisciplinary teams. In addition to financial support, grantees receive significant time and capacity-building resources from the foundation. Projects led by African American, Latinx, Native American, and Asian Pacific American researchers are encouraged.

The intent of the Qualitative Research Award is to support qualitative research studies that will help researchers and clinicians better understand the experiences of individuals with SCI and thereby identify the most effective path(s) for adjusting to disability and/or improving overall quality of life, health, and functional status after SCI. This mechanism is specifically focused on military and Veteran populations in the years after SCI, examining the issues, barriers, and promoters of success for Service members during the transition from initial injury and acute care through rehabilitation and community reintegration; therefore, collaboration with military and VA researchers and clinicians is encouraged. Factors that may affect the rehabilitation and reintegration of spinal cord-injured Service members include, but are not limited to, age, gender, ethnicity, family members/caregivers, psychological health, severity of injury, type of medical care (e.g., civilian, VA, or military facility), and co-morbid conditions. A key feature of the QRA is the inclusion of military and/or Veteran populations in the years after SCI. Applicants should clearly describe how their study design, including recruitment strategies and access to appropriate populations, as applicable, will enable them to meet this intent.

Social connections can help us thrive. But too many people feel disconnected from society and from life, and that contributes to a host of physical, mental and emotional health problems. School children, teens, new mothers, immigrants, LGBT people, people living in remote areas, even millennials with thousands of Facebook friends, often feel excluded or like they don't belong. We want to learn about solutions that have worked in other countries to address social isolation across all ages and life stages, so that we can strengthen social connection in the United States. RWJF is looking for applicants who represent organizations from a wide range of fields and disciplines-both within and outside the health sector. We encourage proposals from both U.S.-based applicants to adapt an overseas idea, and from international applicants with ideas that could work in the United States. We encourage submissions from teams that include both U.S. and international members. We seek to attract diversity of thought, professional background, race, ethnicity, and cultural perspective in our applicant pool. Building a Culture of Health means integrating health into all aspects of society, so we encourage multisector partnerships and collaboration.

This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) encourages applicants to develop innovative research applications on prescription drug abuse, including research to examine the factors contributing to prescription drug abuse; to characterize the adverse medical, mental health and social consequences associated with prescription drug abuse; and to develop effective prevention and service delivery approaches and behavioral and pharmacological treatments. Applications to address these issues are encouraged across a broad range of methodological approaches including basic science, clinical, epidemiological, and health services research to define the extent of the problem of prescription drug abuse, to characterize this problem in terms of classes of drugs abused and combinations of drug types, etiology of abuse, and populations most affected (including analyses by age group, race/ethnicity, gender, and psychiatric symptomatology). Studies on individual- and patient-level factors, prescriber factors, and/or health system factors are encouraged, as are studies on all classes of prescription drugs with high abuse liability, including analgesics, stimulants, sedative/hypnotics and anxiolytics. Researchers are further encouraged to study the relationship between the prescription medication, the indication for which the medication was prescribed (e.g., pain, sleep disorder, anxiety disorder, obesity), and the environmental and individual factors contributing to abuse.

The 2017 Building Trust and Mutual Respect to Improve Health Care call for proposals (CFP) will fund empirical research studies to help us better understand how to build trust and mutual respect to meet vulnerable patients' health care needs. For this CFP, we would define vulnerable populations in a number of different ways, including the economically disadvantaged, diverse racial and ethnic populations, the uninsured, older adults, homeless individuals, and people with complex health and social needs (including people with acute behavioral health needs or multiple chronic conditions). Proposals most closely aligned with the scope of this CFP will go beyond documenting the problem to generate findings that will be generalizable and have broad application across health systems and the field. Eligibility and Selection Criteria · Researchers, as well as practitioners in the public and private sector working with researchers, are eligible to submit proposals through their organizations. Projects may be generated from disciplines including health services research; economics; sociology; program evaluation; political science; public policy; psychology; public health; public administration; law; business administration; or other related fields. · The Foundation may give preference to applicants that are either public entities or nonprofit organizations that are tax-exempt under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code and are not private foundations or Type III supporting organizations. · The Foundation may require additional documentation. Applicant organizations must be based in the United States or its territories.

Through its Fellowship Programs, the Ford Foundation seeks to increase the diversity of the nation's college and university faculties by increasing their ethnic and racial diversity, maximize the educational benefits of diversity, and increase the number of professors who can and will use diversity as a resource for enriching the education of all students.

Substantial progress has been made in the development and testing of efficacious theory-based developmentally focused prevention interventions designed to address modifiable proximal risk and protective factors with the goal of having an impact on distal mental health outcomes, including suicide behaviors and the occurrence of serious mental illness. Pediatric-serving primary care (including obstetrics/gynecological for pregnancy and post-partum, pediatric care, family practice, adolescent medicine) is a health care setting that holds potential for the implementation of mental health prevention interventions because it offers broad access and is non-stigmatizing. In addition, there is the potential for prevention interventions found to be efficacious in the primary care setting to be endorsed by the United States Prevention Services Task Force (USPSTF) and covered under insurance. Because pediatric primary care offers broad access and is non-stigmatizing, it may be an appropriate setting for reaching populations who experience mental health disparities, including racial/ethnic minority groups, sexual and gender minorities, individuals living in rural areas, socioeconomically disadvantaged persons, or any other subgroup with documented disparities in prevalence of mental illnesses, mental illness trajectories, access to prevention services, and quality and outcomes of mental health care. Accordingly, this Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) encourages studies that involve diverse populations, including groups that might experience health disparities, and as appropriate, it encourages examination of whether prevention services in primary care can potentially reduce or eliminate disparities.

Substantial progress has been made in the development and testing of efficacious theory-based developmentally focused prevention interventions designed to address modifiable proximal risk and protective factors with the goal of having an impact on distal mental health outcomes, including suicide behaviors and the occurrence of serious mental illness. Pediatric-serving primary care (including obstetrics/gynecological for pregnancy and post-partum, pediatric care, family practice, adolescent medicine) is a health care setting that holds potential for the implementation of mental health prevention interventions because it offers broad access and is non-stigmatizing. In addition, there is the potential for prevention interventions found to be efficacious in the primary care setting to be endorsed by the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) and covered under insurance. Because pediatric primary care offers broad access and is non-stigmatizing, it may be an appropriate setting for reaching populations who experience mental health disparities, including racial/ethnic minority groups, sexual and gender minorities, individuals living in rural areas, socioeconomically disadvantaged persons, or any other subgroup with documented disparities in prevalence of mental illnesses, mental illness trajectories, access to prevention services, and quality and outcomes of mental health care. Accordingly, this Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) encourages studies that involve diverse populations, including groups that might experience health disparities, and as appropriate, it encourages examination of whether prevention services in primary care can potentially reduce or eliminate disparities.

Purpose NIMH seeks applications for innovative research projects to test strategies to increase the reach, efficiency, effectiveness, and quality of digital mental health interventions which may impact mental health outcomes, including suicide behaviors and serious mental illness. This FOA is intended to support the development of digital health test beds that leverage well-established digital mental health platforms/infrastructure to rapidly refine and optimize existing evidence based digital health interventions and conduct clinical trials testing digital mental health interventions that are statistically powered to provide a definitive answer regarding the intervention's effectiveness. Background The healthcare landscape in the United States is constantly changing, creating new challenges to the delivery of high-quality treatments and services to children, youth, adults, and older adults with unmet or under-met mental health needs. Epidemiological findings suggest that approximately one half of the United States population meets lifetime criteria for a mental disorder, and approximately one quarter of the population meets criteria in any given year. However, only one half of people with any mental health disorder and only two thirds of people with a serious mental health disorder received mental health services in the previous year. Of those that find their way into mental health care, many fall out of care and/or do not receive guideline concordant treatment, including suicide risk assessment and evidence-based preventive interventions. Disparities in population status (e.g., members of racial, ethnic, sexual, and gender minority communities), a fragmented healthcare system, provider shortages, healthcare affordability, and other factors moderate these findings.

Our focus on reducing inequality grew out of our view that research can do more than help us understand the problem of inequality-it can generate effective responses. We believe that it is time to build stronger bodies of knowledge on how to reduce inequality in the United States and to move beyond the mounting research evidence about the scope, causes, and consequences of inequality. Toward this end, we seek studies that aim to build, test, or increase understanding of programs, policies, or practices to reduce inequality in the academic, social, behavioral, or economic outcomes of young people. We prioritize studies about reducing inequality on the basis of race, ethnicity, economic standing, language minority status, or immigrant origins.

Through the council's COVID-19 Rapid-Response Grants program, innovative research projects that deploy remote research methods to shed light on both the short- and potential long-term effects of COVID-19 across a range of issues will be supported, including "social distancing" and virtual social interaction; governance and democracy; public trust and (dis)information; social inequality and the pandemic's disproportionate effects by race and ethnicity; the lessons of past disasters, and responses to them, for the present; the role of religious ideas, practices, and institutions in responding to the pandemic; the workplace and labor markets; technology, surveillance, and ethics; and the uses of, and the limits to, modeling in responses to the pandemic's effects and in scenario planning.