Saturday, March 15, 2025
3/15/2025
Building on its leadership of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline/Disaster Distress Helpline (Lifeline/DDH) since 2004, the Mental Health Assn. of NYC (d/b/a Vibrant) will extend its proven experience and partnerships to scale Lifeline/DDH's reach, capacity, innovation, and quality service for 988, to equitably and effectively serve all persons in mental health and suicidal crisis in the U.S. and its territories, including those affected by disasters. 988 has the potential to benefit 39M people annually (estimated people in crisis with means to contact 988). About 12M people currently call the Lifeline, local/regional crisis centers, and 911 for mental health/suicidal crises each year. To assure seamless service connection, Vibrant will: continue work with the nation's top telephony systems for connecting 911 calls -- maintain a call routing system that efficiently links callers to nearest certified centers to effectively coordinate local care, or national backup centers to ensure that all calls are answered; and implement a state-of-the art, unified communications platform to enable network-wide phone/chat/text interoperability, real-time monitoring and management of service connectivity and performance data. To assure that 90% of calls are answered within a caller's state, Vibrant will continue working with the National Assn. of State Mental Health Program Directors to leverage well-established relationships with every state and county public mental health authority, as well as prominent accreditation organizations to recruit and sufficiently resource Lifeline centers for 988. Vibrant will continue to extend its reach to high-risk, marginalized, and under-served populations by: assuring that Veterans and service members are efficiently connected with the Veterans Crisis Line; maintaining a Spanish-speaking subnetwork and LanguageLine Solutions to assist non-English-speaking callers; and working with long-standing partners to implement trainings and access to special services for supporting LBGTQ, Native American, rural, and BIPOC populations to expand service awareness outreach and engagement, Vibrant will: continue partnerships with media influencers including Facebook and Google to build on its successful public messaging strategies; and coordinate communications through its four Lifeline and DDH national advisory committees to establish field consensus for industry standards and address barriers to project goals. To assure quality Lifeline/DDH services, Vibrant will enable network-wide, online and face-to-face trainings on evidence-based, risk/safety assessments, imminent risk standards, and related best practices, with ongoing network quality improvement monitoring and evaluation, supported by the Research Foundation for Mental Hygiene.
HHS’ Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS) website provides access to detailed descriptions of grants, loans, aggregated direct payments and other types of financial assistance awarded by the HHS Operating Divisions (OPDIVs) and the Office of the Secretary Staff Divisions (STAFFDIVs).