SSG Fox Grant Program Results, in VA's Own Figures

If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Veterans and service members can press 1.

VA publishes performance figures for its own community grant program, and the three that matter most sit in a paragraph of a press release that almost no coverage reprints. In calendar year 2025, organizations holding awards under the Staff Sergeant Parker Gordon Fox Suicide Prevention Grant Program served about 17,000 veterans, service members and family members, a 31% increase over 2024. VA also reports that Fox grantees connected 2,647 veterans who had not previously used Veterans Health Administration services to VA care and resources, nearly 1,000 more than the year before, and that 344 at-risk veterans were connected to emergency mental health care through these grants in 2025.

Those figures appear in VA's Sept. 29, 2026 announcement of $111.9 million to 191 community organizations, with funds becoming available at the start of fiscal year 2027. Regional VA releases have repeated them through October. Local outlets covering an award in their own state almost always run the dollar figure and the organization count and cut the paragraph the numbers live in, which is why a program director holding one of these awards can read a dozen stories about the program and never meet its published record.

VA's published figures, with the period each one covers

Figure	Period	Comparison VA gives	What VA attributes it to
About 17,000 veterans, service members and family members served	Calendar year 2025	31% increase over 2024	Services delivered through Fox grantees
2,647 veterans with no previous VHA use connected to VA care and resources	Stated in VA's 2025 background, year not named in the release	Nearly 1,000 more than 2024	Connections made by Fox grantees
344 at-risk veterans connected to emergency mental health care	2025	None given	Connections made through these grants
61% of veterans who died by suicide were not receiving VA health care in the last year of their life	2023 data year	None given	VA's 2025 National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report

One note on the last row, because two numbers are in circulation this month. VA's current releases cite 61% for 2023, which comes from the 2025 annual report. The 2026 annual report, published Sept. 30, 2026, carries 62% for 2024. Both are VA figures for different data years, and anyone citing either should name the year and the report. The current figure and its two-year lookback are explained on our own page.

2,647 connections, and the limit on that number

The 2,647 figure is the most useful thing VA publishes about this program, and it is also the easiest to overstate.

It counts connections. A veteran who had no record of using VHA services was connected to VA care and resources by an organization holding a Fox award. That is a count of program activity, and VA does not break it down by what the grantee was doing when the connection happened. Outreach at a county fair produces a connection in that count, and so does a peer mentor making a phone call. Nothing in the release says which share came from which.

So the figure supports a specific statement and no larger one. Community organizations are reaching people who were not in VA care and getting some of them connected to it, at a volume VA measures and reports. The figure says nothing about what happened to anyone afterward, and it establishes no cause for any outcome. VA's own framing keeps it in the reach and access column, and that is where it belongs.

Our own reason for pointing at it is plain. Every argument about reach in this field, ours included, has rested on the size of the gap: the share of veterans who died by suicide and were not in VA care, the distance between a Guard member's drill weekends and a military treatment facility. Those numbers describe a problem. This one describes measured activity against it, published by the agency, credited to community organizations.

Program components grantees describe

Read grantee announcements through the fall and the same components recur. Outreach and early intervention. Veteran-to-veteran peer support. Case management and resource navigation. Family education. Connections to housing, employment, care and benefits. Delivery in community settings.

Grantees name the category themselves. United Way of Central Alabama announced on Oct. 12, 2026 that Priority Veteran, its veteran services subsidiary, received a $750,000 Fox award, and the announcement describes the program as funding “non-clinical and innovative approaches to suicide prevention” for eligible veterans, service members and their families. That is the category named by an organization holding an award, which is a more useful reference point for a program director than any vendor's account of the same word.

Most of this money buys case management and navigation, which is work that needs trained staff and a referral network rather than a program to run. That is worth saying out loud, because a vendor reading the component list will see only the line its product fits.

Questions about eligibility, allowable costs, subawards, monitoring and reporting belong with VA, which administers the program and publishes the notice of funding opportunity alongside the application guide. We are not a source on any of that, and no vendor is.

Four conditions that put an activity on a program plan

For the share of an award that does fund a scheduled activity, four things decide whether it survives contact with a program plan. These come out of watching organizations stand programs up, and they apply whatever the activity is.

Condition	The question behind it
A fixed duration	Does the commitment have a defined start and end a participant can see from the first day?
A named person responsible	Can someone already on payroll run it after training, or does delivery need a license the organization does not hold?
A space requirement already met	Does it fit a room the organization has, with no buildout, no lease and no medical records system?
A record of completion	Can completion be counted without building a charting workflow that outlives the grant period?

An activity that answers all four with resources already in the building can start in the first quarter of the performance period. A hire, a renovation or a clinical credential in any one row pushes the start date out and ties the activity's life to the funding cycle.

The completion row is the one grant managers underrate. Enrollment is easy to report and easy to inflate. For a population that avoids appointments, the number of people who finished is the first honest measure a program has, and it is the number that survives an audit.

Neurova Academy in a community building

Neurova Labs builds Neurova Academy, a general wellness and cognitive training program delivered in virtual reality by a certified facilitator. It is designed to support focus, stress regulation and mental endurance. A cycle runs five consecutive days, with day one for orientation and onboarding and four session days after it. Sessions run about thirty minutes, one a day, and a participant works standing in roughly a square meter of space. The program runs offline and collects no personally identifiable information in normal use. Facilitator certification is delivered remotely, so an organization can stand it up with staff it already employs, and the certification stays with the staff member who earns it.

A facilitator runs the session and stays with the participant through it. A facilitator does not diagnose, assess, advise or counsel. That boundary is what makes a non-clinical role honest, and it belongs in writing before the first session along with the answer to what staff do when a participant discloses distress.

Organizations that want a physiological measure alongside self-report can read what the laboratory panel does and does not do on our measurement page.

The claims Neurova Labs does not make

Neurova Academy is a general wellness and cognitive training program. It is not a suicide prevention intervention, and we make no claim that it reduces suicide risk. We make no claim on any part of the figures above. We did not produce any of the 2,647 connections, we hold no outcome data in a grantee population, and nothing we sell improves anyone's access to health care. Neurova Labs is a for-profit company and is not an eligible applicant for this grant program. The clinical and crisis work in this field belongs to the people trained to do it. The fuller version of that position is on our claims page.

VA's award record, and where to take questions

VA publishes the FY2027 awards list and the program guide on its own site, and that list is the authoritative record of who holds an award and which counties each one serves. State totals reported in local coverage are useful, and VA's own list is the record to cite.

If your organization holds a Fox award and is deciding what to put behind it, we are glad to walk through what implementation looks like in your building, including what it costs, what your staff would need and what we would measure together.

Reach us at nathaniel.free@neurovalabs.com.

If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Veterans and service members can press 1.

Neurova Academy is a general wellness and cognitive training program. It is not a medical device and is not offered to diagnose, treat, cure, or mitigate any disease or condition, including concussion, traumatic brain injury, or CTE. Outcomes described reflect observational pilot findings and individual experience, and are not a prediction of results for anyone else. Individual results vary. Laboratory testing provided by iXpressGenes, a CLIA-certified, CAP-accredited laboratory. References to news reporting and government publications are for commentary only and do not imply endorsement of Neurova Labs by any federal entity, local government, or research institution.