Southern Az mental health services unsettled after Trump admin revokes, reinstates grants

Mental health and addiction service providers throughout Southern Arizona were relieved Friday to have confirmed they’ll be able to keep grants for mental health and addiction recovery programs after those monies were abruptly slashed Tuesday night by the Trump administration.

Some in the Tucson area said they’d initially planned to cut mental health education programs, or be forced to find an alternate source of funding, after National Public Radio broke the news Wednesday that the Trump administration cancelled up to $2 billion in grants through the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. NPR reported that night the grants had been restored.

‘It resonates with everybody’

Josephine “Jo” Korchmaros, an outreach professor and the executive director of the Southwest Institute for Research on Women at the University of Arizona, said she was relieved to discover Thursday morning that nearly $3.5 million across six SAMHSA grants for 2026 hadn’t been cancelled.

The research institute had previously been notified through the National Institutes of Health’s eRA Commons website of the cuts. It was unexpected, she said, and would have had a “devastating” impact on the surrounding community for decades. 

“A lot of these issues we see cross generations,” she said.

SIROW uses the funds to partner with local and national organizations on both preventative and reactive mental health and substance abuse programs. Two of which, Korchmaros said, focus on homelessness, which is interconnected. 

“There’s a lot of overlap on these projects,” she said.

David Delawder, the executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness nonprofit’s Southern Arizona affiliate, said Thursday he’d received no word directly from SAMHSA on the grants being revoked or continued, and didn’t know which of the grants the local NAMI group had been awarded would have been cut.

The reversal, he said, was the result of backlash by NAMI and other mental health advocacy groups throughout the United States.

“It’s really good news, from our perspective,” he said of the most recent NPR story. “The collective voice of everybody pushing back is what stopped it.”

NAMI Southern Arizona had been preparing for months, Delawder said, for cuts after the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill. Those cuts are still expected, he added, which is why the local NAMI group has used the time to further its community engagement and find different ways to fund its programs, separate from federal grants.

He’s since discovered how important mental health, and the availability of resources surrounding it, is to people in Southern Arizona.

“It resonates with everybody,” he said. “I’ve yet to meet anyone who’s family hasn’t been affected by mental health.”

Tempe-based nonprofit Solari Crisis and Human Services, which operates the Pima County Mental Health Crisis Line, had been “slightly affected,” by the initial cuts. 

Solari spokesperson Thomas Bond said Thursday afternoon they’d received word that day that their SAMHSA grant was still active and an educational program it had previously planned to drop could continue. The county’s crisis line was never in danger, he said. 

‘We will find a way’

Solari leaders decided Wednesday morning, according to Bond, to cut its Mental Health First Aid program, often used by civic and religious groups and school districts, which aims to teach trainees how to recognize the signs of common mental health and addiction challenges, lend support and connect people with the appropriate services. 

Gauri Gladish, said CEO of the Tucson-based Arizona Youth Partnership, said Wednesday evening a similar mental health training had been cut after two SAMHSA grants they received were terminated.

Gladish had also been aware that SAMHSA would be restructured and cuts would take place.

An Wednesday morning attempt to reach Arizona Youth Partnership again after the grants were reportedly reinstated was not immediately successful.

Though Arizona Youth Partnership has a separate source of funding for a few training sessions in the White Mountains area, Gladish said, they’d lost all funding to host the regular, already-scheduled training sessions for adult and youth mental health throughout the state. In 2025, she said, the nonprofit had been able to train more than 700 people.

“We’re giving individuals the support and skills to recognize the signs of a mental health crisis,” she said of the training services. “It’s truly a training for everyone.”

She said Arizona Youth Partnership was accepting donations and community support to keep its mental health training available, with or without grant funding.

“Even though we’ve hit a snag right now, this will remain a priority and we will find a way.”

She considered it a “silver lining,” that Arizona Youth Partnership was able to retain all staff members. The loss of SAMHSA grants also affected a program to combat youth alcohol consumption, but aspects of that program could be continued by other addiction service programs provided by Arizona Youth Partnership.

“Our staff are our most valuable asset,” she said. “They’re the ones with their boots on the ground.”

Korchmaros said the initial notification of grant cuts was effective immediately, which spurred SIROW to notify its staff that their positions could be eliminated. Because word of the reinstatements came so quickly, no employees at SIROW had been terminated. 

Because so many different aspects go into how SIROW is funded, she said, it’s too difficult to predict whether funding could be cut again. 

“There is some anxiety that goes along with this experience,” she said. “There are going to be significant changes to the work, and even whether someone even has a job anymore.”

When SIROW seeks funding, she said, leaders determine what Southern Arizona’s existing and emerging issues are, what the gaps are between those and its current programming and then search for available grants.

Though SIROW is a research institute, rather than a nonprofit, Korchmaros said, it also has a diverse portfolio of funding sources, and could reassign staff to remaining programs if positions were open.