Advanced Laboratories for Accelerating the Reach and Impact of Treatments for Youth and Adults with Mental Illness (ALACRITY) Research Centers (P50 Clinical Trial Optional) | PAR 20 293

Opportunity Information: Apply for PAR 20 293

The ALACRITY Research Centers funding opportunity (PAR-20-293) is an NIH center grant (P50; clinical trial optional) designed to speed up how quickly effective mental health treatments and service approaches move from research into routine care for both youth and adults. The program is built around the idea that major improvements in mental health outcomes will come from tightly coordinated, transdisciplinary teams working in real-world systems, not from isolated studies. NIH is looking for centers that can produce high-impact evidence that changes clinical practice and helps drive broader transformation of mental health care across the United States.

A central feature of ALACRITY is the expectation that applicants will assemble teams that cut across traditional boundaries. The FOA highlights collaboration among clinical researchers and mental health services researchers, behavioral and social scientists, health information and communications technologists, health systems engineers, and decision scientists, alongside the people most affected by care decisions and delivery. This includes service users, family members, clinicians, and payers. In other words, the centers are meant to function like advanced laboratories where stakeholders who shape care and those who study care co-design and test solutions that are practical, scalable, and grounded in the realities of clinical settings.

The research supported under ALACRITY is aimed at rapid development, testing, and refinement of novel and integrative approaches in three broad but connected areas. First, centers should focus on optimizing the effectiveness of therapeutic or preventive interventions for mental disorders in well-defined target populations. This emphasis on well-defined populations signals that projects should be clear about who the intervention is for and why that population is expected to benefit, rather than pursuing overly broad or generic approaches. Second, centers are expected to develop and test better ways to organize and deliver optimized mental health services within real-world treatment settings, meaning the work should directly engage typical service environments such as community clinics, health systems, schools, or other routine care contexts. Third, ALACRITY centers should build approaches for continuous improvement so that gains in quality and outcomes are not short-lived, but instead remain durable and adaptable across diverse care systems over time.

The FOA also emphasizes leveraging synergies across the broader mental health research and care ecosystem. That includes integrating insights from clinical research discoveries, taking advantage of transformative health care technologies, using advances in information science, and aligning with evolving federal and state mechanisms that shape how mental health care is organized and paid for. Practically, this encourages applicants to think beyond a single intervention or a single clinic and instead propose a center model that can connect evidence generation, technology, implementation, and system-level change into a coherent pipeline that produces actionable improvements.

In terms of eligibility, the opportunity is broadly open to many U.S.-based organizational types, reflecting the program's interest in real-world impact and cross-sector collaboration. Eligible applicants include state, county, city, and special district governments; independent school districts; public and private institutions of higher education; federally recognized tribal governments; tribal organizations other than federally recognized governments; public housing authorities/Indian housing authorities; nonprofit organizations with or without 501(c)(3) status (as long as they are not institutions of higher education in those specific nonprofit categories); for-profit organizations (other than small businesses) as well as small businesses; and other eligible entities. The FOA explicitly notes additional eligible applicant categories such as HBCUs, Hispanic-serving institutions, Tribally Controlled Colleges and Universities, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian Serving Institutions, and AANAPISISs, along with faith-based or community-based organizations, certain regional organizations, and U.S. territories or possessions. Foreign institutions and non-U.S. components of U.S. organizations are not eligible to apply, but foreign components (as NIH defines them in policy) may be allowed, which typically means certain project elements may involve foreign collaborations if they meet NIH requirements and are justified.

Administratively, this is a discretionary grant program under NIH, categorized under health (CFDA 93.242). The published award ceiling in the provided source data is $1,500,000, indicating the upper bound of expected funding per award under the announcement as listed there. The original closing date shown is May 17, 2023, and the FOA was created on September 10, 2020. Overall, the opportunity is best understood as support for center-based, team-science infrastructure and research that can rapidly iterate on interventions and service delivery strategies, generate strong practice-relevant evidence, and create sustainable quality improvement within the complex systems where mental health care is actually delivered.

• The National Institutes of Health in the health sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "Advanced Laboratories for Accelerating the Reach and Impact of Treatments for Youth and Adults with Mental Illness (ALACRITY) Research Centers (P50 Clinical Trial Optional)" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 93.242.
• This funding opportunity was created on 2020-09-10.
• Applicants must submit their applications by 2023-05-17. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• Each selected applicant is eligible to receive up to $1,500,000.00 in funding.
• Eligible applicants include: State governments, County governments, City or township governments, Special district governments, Independent school districts, Public and State controlled institutions of higher education, Native American tribal governments (Federally recognized), Public housing authorities/Indian housing authorities, Native American tribal organizations (other than Federally recognized tribal governments), Nonprofits having a 501 (c) (3) status with the IRS, other than institutions of higher education, Nonprofits that do not have a 501 (c) (3) status with the IRS, other than institutions of higher education, Private institutions of higher education, For-profit organizations other than small businesses, Small businesses, Others.

Apply for PAR 20 293

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