New funding for behavioral health services in rural King County

Rural populations face significant health disparities compared to their urban counterparts. Rural community members are more likely to die from heart disease, cancer, unintentional injury, chronic lower respiratory disease, and stroke than community members in urban areas. Risk factors contributing to these health disparities include social isolation, stigma, lower socioeconomic status, higher rates of health risk behaviors, limited access to healthcare services, and limited job opportunities.

Currently, several sections of King County have no publicly funded behavioral health clinic option. In these areas, rural King County residents lack access to services due to transportation barriers that include long distances to behavioral health clinic sites in suburban cities and limited public transportation services in rural areas.

A new funding opportunity is available from the MIDD Behavioral Health Sales Tax Fund to increase access to behavioral health services in rural and unincorporated areas of King County, by meeting community members “where they are” – both physically and in their recovery journey.

Funding for Behavioral Health Services in Rural King County

Funded programs should be designed to respect and support the rural community each grant is aimed to serve, with intended outcomes that are representative of community priorities. This MIDD initiative and the resulting grants are meant to support local community-based organizations, small organizations, and grassroots coalitions to address community-identified needs that relate to behavioral health prevention, intervention, treatment, recovery, or service access embedded in rural unincorporated King County.

Successful applicants will address: 

• Evidence-based practice. Evidence-based practice holds promise for promoting health equity when effective practices can be focused within populations at greatest risk.
• Demonstrated success in outreach strategies to Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities and providing inclusive services to the diverse populations in the community.
• An incorporation of policy and systems change efforts; and/or an improvement of an existing integrated program/service that has shown promising results or is based on promising practices;
• An integration of a behavioral health program/service into a new setting (e.g., clinic, school, community center, etc.);
• Demonstrated success in providing in-language services to the diverse language needs in the community.

Application details

Available funding: Approximately $680,000 is available in grant funding for 2021-2022.
Questions: Contact Andria Howerton at dchs-c&p@kingcounty.gov
Applications due: December 11, 2020 at 2:30 pm

Pre-Application Conference:

October 23, 2020 | 10:00 – 11:00 am
Join by Zoom
Join by phone: 1-253-215-8782
Meeting ID: 977-2219-7067
Passcode: 2021

For more information and to apply visit: https://zoomgrants.com/gprop.asp?donorid=2209&limited=3150