As we move forward with the Behavioral Health Integration Initiative (BH2I), it’s a great time for you and your team to pause and reflect on what you’ve built, what you’ve learned, and how you can continue to enhance integrated care in your community. Along with your sustainability planning, you might want to consider how your experiences with BH2I could position you for new funding opportunities, especially if there’s a potential BH2I Cohort 3 coming up.
Getting ready for future funding doesn’t mean you should divert your attention from your current responsibilities or count on additional funding as a sure thing. Instead, this is your chance to deliberately document your progress, clarify the lessons you’ve learned, and express how integrated care has advanced during the grant period. These reflections will not only help you prepare for funding but also clarify your program’s achievements, engage your leadership and community, and support long-term planning.
Using BH2I as a Foundation for Future Readiness
The work you’ve done through BH2I, like establishing integrated workflows, strengthening partnerships, and embedding behavioral health into clinical settings, has required a significant investment of your team’s time and effort. Programs that clearly outline their journey tend to be better positioned to explain why continued investment can enhance or fortify integration. When you think about future funding applications, there are some key questions that are bound to come up:
- What have you achieved with your initial funding?
- What challenges did you face during implementation, and how did you overcome them?
- What evidence do you have that your program has progressed over time?
- How would additional funding build upon—and not duplicate—what you’ve already done?
The best answers to these questions are already in your BH2I journey. Thus, preparing for a possible Cohort 3 is about organizing and sharing that journey in a clear and honest way.
Documenting Both Successes and Challenges
A strong funding narrative includes both successes and the challenges you’ve faced. Integrated care implementation is anything but straightforward, and funders know that progress isn’t always a straight line. In fact, how your programs have tackled challenges can reveal a lot about your capacity, resilience, and readiness—possibly even more than success stories alone. Thus, it might be worthwhile for you to reflect on:
- Early implementation barriers and how you refined your workflows
- Staffing or capacity challenges and how your team adapted
- Adjustments made to screening, referral, or warm handoff processes
- Lessons learned that informed later stages of implementation
Clarifying Impact and Program Growth
As your program develops, it will become easier for you to differentiate between activities and their actual impact. Funders are often keen to understand how your initial efforts have translated into measurable or observable improvements over time. This could involve:
- More consistent screening or referrals
- Improved coordination among behavioral health, medical, and cultural teams
- Greater follow-through for clients
- Clearer roles and workflows
- Enhanced data collection or better use of evaluation findings
Capturing this evolution is crucial, as it shows that your program still isn’t in an exploratory phase but is ready to refine, deepen, or expand its integration efforts.
Identifying What the Next Phase Would Strengthen
When it comes to future funding, its focus is on how you can accelerate your progress rather than starting over. So, if you’re prepping for a possible Cohort 3, it’s helpful to think about what you’d prioritize if more support became available. Some ideas might include fine-tuning workflows implemented early on; boosting evaluation capacity or data utilization; expanding services to more populations or settings; or further integrating with cultural or community partners. Demonstrating thoughtful planning and management can be a key factor in securing follow-up grants.
Alignment With Sustainability Planning
While sustainability planning and future funding readiness may differ, they are closely connected. Sustainability planning identifies the crucial aspects of integrated care that need to be maintained, while funding readiness focuses on enhancing them. By documenting efforts like engaging leadership, exploring billing options, and enhancing workflows, you can strengthen future funding applications. This approach demonstrates that your program isn’t solely dependent on grants and is committed to long-term success.
Preparing Regardless of Future Opportunities
It’s important to remember that prepping for a potential Cohort 3 doesn’t require you to be certain that such an opportunity will arise. The process of capturing your lessons learned, organizing outcomes, and reflecting on your program’s growth is valuable, no matter what future funding announcements may come. These efforts will enhance your internal clarity, improve communication with partners and leadership, and support ongoing quality improvement.
As always, Sister Sky’s Training and Technical Assistance and Evaluation team is here to support you in documenting your progress, reflecting on lessons learned, and aligning your sustainability and readiness efforts. We’re all in this together, helping you clearly share your journey, showcase your program’s maturity, and stay ready for future opportunities, whether that means continued BH2I funding or tapping into other investment sources.
References
Foundant Technologies. (2025, April 12). Tips for telling (and selling!) your story in grant applications [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAd3GoQGyQw
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) & SAMHSA Center for Financing Reform and Innovation (CFRI). (2024). Use data to monitor progress and tell your agency story. In BestPractices4Data [Report]. https://library.samhsa.gov/sites/default/files/cfri-use-data-brief-pep24-07-002.pdf