About the Grantees

The National Center currently serves two grantee groups funded by the U.S. Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, and Justice: (1) Safe Schools/Healthy Students (SS/HS), and (2) Project LAUNCH (Linking Actions for Unmet Needs in Children’s Health. Visit the Grantee Locator to find current and past grantees by state.

Safe Schools/Health Students (SS/HS) Initiative

The Safe Schools/Healthy Students (SS/HS) Initiative is a four-year grant program that helps school districts, in partnership with mental health providers and juvenile justice agencies, implement projects that address the following five elements:

Safe school environments and violence prevention activities
Alcohol, tobacco, and other drug prevention activities
Student behavioral, social, and emotional supports
Mental health services
Early childhood social and emotional learning programs

Through grants made to local education authorities, the SS/HS Initiative provides schools and communities across the United States with the benefit of enhanced services; this is done in an effort to strengthen healthy child development and thus reduce violent behavior and substance use. To achieve these goals, school districts develop comprehensive strategic plans in partnership with law enforcement officials, local mental health authorities, and juvenile justice officials.

Project LAUNCH

Project LAUNCH (Linking Actions for Unmet Needs in Children’s Health) grants enable states, territories, tribes, and communities to create a shared vision for coordinating behavioral and physical health services for young children. The grants aim to build early childhood system capacity and integration and support programming to promote the physical, emotional, social, and behavioral health of children birth to eight years old and their families.

Past Programs

Targeted Capacity Expansion (TCE) Program

The Targeted Capacity Expansion program was designed to increase the capability of cities, counties, and tribal governments to meet the emerging and urgent mental health needs of their communities. The program helped recipient areas to build the service system infrastructure necessary to address regional mental health needs through service linkage, community outreach, and the expansion of local services in the form of prevention and/or treatment interventions with a strong evidence base. Grants were provided for prevention and early intervention, which support mental health and early intervention services. The National Center supported 23 TCE grantees between 2002 and 2006.

Youth Violence Prevention (YVP)