Policy Goal 1: Inventory current state funding
Have state leaders assessed current levels of sustained funding across sectors, including whether funding streams are sufficient to meet communities’ needs and flexible enough to benefit a variety of local contexts?
RATIONALE: State leaders’ window into state funding is typically shaped by where they sit in intersecting systems. This is true at the system level (i.e., behavioral health, criminal justice, housing) and within independent agencies with unique priorities (e.g., corrections, law enforcement, criminal justice, state administering agencies). As these actors work across sectors to address complex problems at the intersection of public health and public safety, they require a deeper understanding of the complex funding landscape supporting existing efforts. In any given state, there are multiple entities providing different funding streams that all aim to reach the same person. For example, reducing criminal justice contact for one person might require funding for law enforcement-assisted diversion, rental assistance, housing development, community behavioral health, and reentry supports—each of which are funded through a different agency.
Therefore, state policymakers can benefit from a bird’s-eye view of the state’s multiple funding streams; to what extent the state is directly funding work at the intersection of criminal justice, behavioral health, and housing; and what challenges and gaps communities face in navigating the state funding landscape. A cross-system funding assessment can help identify persistent funding gaps, as well as burdensome and inconsistent reporting requirements, and can ultimately inform future funding strategies where more or different investment is needed.
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Ways to do it
- Conduct or commission an assessment of the state’s current funding landscape in regard to addressing a given challenge or meeting the needs of a specific population.
- Convene funders from different systems to understand funding streams that support a shared population, identify funding gaps, and discuss strategies to strategically align future investments.
- Seek local feedback through quality assurance processes, surveys, and focus groups to understand the funding landscape from the local perspective. Consider that “local” may mean different things to different systems; some state funders may target neighborhoods, cities, counties, regions, judicial districts, or continuums of care.
- Create a mechanism for coordinating budget requests for programs serving a specific population to ensure ongoing synergy across systems.
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Things to consider
- To better coordinate funding services for a shared population, state policymakers must engage in the slow work of building trust and aligning priorities among cross-system partners. While they often serve a shared population, criminal justice, behavioral health, and housing partners and the systems in which they sit often have different priorities and challenges in meeting the population’s needs. Bridging these cultural gaps requires commitment to relationship building and sustained collaboration to develop a shared understanding of various systems’ constraints and goals.
- Think broadly about which funding to include in an assessment, including sources such as health and housing and private and philanthropic funding in addition to state and federal dollars. For example, states fund local crisis systems through a variety of funding sources, including the following:
- State government grants and contracts
- Private sector contributions
- Medicaid, a program jointly administered at federal and state levels
- Federal sources, including Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration block grants, the Health Resources and Services Administration’s funding for community health centers, Department of Veterans Affairs, and U.S. Department of Justice sources such as the Bureau of Justice Assistance’s Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant Program and the Justice and Mental Health Collaboration Program. Communities are also working to advance these efforts through time-limited federal sources such as the American Rescue Plan Act.
- Statewide funding assessments benefit from an equity lens to gauge to what degree state investments are serving historically marginalized populations and under-resourced communities. States may consider investigating the limitations of current grants and contracting processes, including barriers to access for communities and organizations that have never attempted to secure state funding before.
- States can help address persistent local gaps by providing consistent and flexible funding so that communities can determine paths to outcomes that make sense for them. Consistent funding alleviates the heavy administrative burden of time-limited, competitive grant programs, freeing up more time to focus on program design and implementation. Flexible funding ensures that responses are locally driven and meet the unique needs of the communities (i.e., urban, suburban, rural and frontier, tribal) across the state.
- States have worked to assess and align funding by convening one-time coordination and planning events with cross-systems partners and building funding coordination into the responsibilities of new or existing cross-systems collaborative bodies. Learn more about how formal collaborative structures can advance these efforts.
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