The Non-Clinical Side of SSG Fox Grant Funding
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.
On Sept. 29, 2026, VA announced $111.9 million in awards to 191 community organizations under the Staff Sergeant Parker Gordon Fox Suicide Prevention Grant Program, with funds available at the start of fiscal 2027. The published record establishes who received money and the counties each organization will serve. It does not record what any grantee will run. That gets answered organization by organization, and most of the answer is non-clinical.
VA named the reach problem in its own announcement
“Community organizations are critical to reaching Veterans who may not otherwise connect with VA care,” VA Secretary Doug Collins said in the Sept. 29 announcement.
The figure underneath that sentence comes from VA's own reporting. The “2025 National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report” found that 61% of veterans who died by suicide in 2023 were not receiving VA health care in the last year of their life. In the report's accounting, that is 10.7 of the 17.5 veteran suicides per day that year.
Whatever a health system builds, it reaches the people who walk in.
VA also published what the program's grantees did with the prior year's money. In 2025, Fox grantees served about 17,000 veterans, service members and family members, a 31% increase over 2024, and connected 2,647 veterans who had not previously used VHA services to VA care and resources.
Reach is what this program buys. The harder question is what a grantee runs once the money lands.
Eight service categories inside an SSG Fox grant
VA's program page lists the services a grantee may provide. Read as a list, it answers the question a program director actually has.
Service category, as VA lists it | Clinical credential named by VA |
Outreach to identify eligible Veterans at risk of suicide | Not named |
Baseline mental health screening | Not named |
Education on suicide risk and prevention for families and communities | Not named |
Clinical services for emergency treatment | Yes, for emergency treatment |
Case management services | Not named |
Peer support services | Not named |
Assistance in obtaining VA or other federal, state or local benefits | Not named |
Nontraditional, innovative, or other services as defined in the Notice of Funding Opportunity and approved by VA | Defined in the notice of funding opportunity |
VA states the balance plainly on the same page. Grantees “facilitate participants’ engagement with (and reduce barriers to) clinical mental health care,” and “most services are non-clinical and may incorporate peer, family, faith-based, and innovative components.”
One category on that list names clinical services, and it names them for emergency treatment. The program also prioritizes reaching veterans not yet connected with VA in under-resourced areas, which is the same population a clinic cannot reach by waiting.
A $688,608 award in Missoula
VA's published fiscal 2027 awards list records a new award of $688,608 to Ole Beck Post No. 209 of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, under award ID MT-SSG-4082-27, serving Missoula, Ravalli, Mineral, Sanders, Granite, Powell and Lake counties in Montana.
Newstalk KGVO reported Oct. 19 that the post plans a veteran gym and resource center built around fitness, resilience, purpose, family and community, with fitness and strength training, yoga and mindfulness, nutrition and lifestyle coaching, outdoor adventures and veteran resources. KGVO attributed those program details to the post's own website.
Set the two records beside each other and the program comes into focus. VA's list establishes the money, the cycle and the counties. The activity comes from the grantee. A gym sits outside clinical care, and a federal suicide prevention award paid for it.
The first quarter after an award lands
An award is a budget and a delivery obligation arriving on the same day. Four things have to be settled before a program serves anyone: a place to deliver it, staff who can run it, a schedule participants keep and a record of who completed what.
The room comes first. A program that fits space the organization already has starts in weeks. A program that needs space the organization has to find, rent or renovate starts in quarters. Staffing runs the same way. Delivery by people already on payroll, after training, is a different plan from delivery that requires a license the organization does not hold. The schedule question is about the participant rather than the budget, because a commitment that runs for months loses the veteran who avoids appointments by the third week. And completion has to be countable without building a charting workflow that outlives the grant period.
Programming that answers all four with resources already in the building survives the grant. Programming that answers one of them with a hire, a buildout or a clinical credential starts late and stops when the funding does.
Non-clinical, in practice
“Non-clinical” gets used loosely. For an organization that is not a health care provider and does not want to become one, it has to mean something specific.
Start with the room. The program runs in space the organization already has, with no exam room, no medical records system and no licensed provider on site. Staff who run it do not diagnose, assess or treat anything. A program that asks a youth coordinator to exercise clinical judgment is a clinical program under a different label.
Two things matter beyond the delivery mechanics. Non-clinical programming sits beside clinical care, so everyone running it needs to know what to do when a participant discloses distress, and that answer belongs in writing before the first session. Then there is the question of who finishes. Reach gets measured at completion, and for a population that avoids care, completion is the first honest metric available.
Community delivery, from our side of it
Neurova Labs builds Neurova Academy, a facilitator-led general wellness and cognitive training program delivered in virtual reality. 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 30 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 the program up with staff it already employs.
In a general community population, 84% of enrolled participants completed the full 30-day assessment and 96% said they would recommend the program. Those are observational pilot findings from single-arm community cohorts, and a controlled validation study is underway. The completion figure is the one we would point a grant manager toward first, because it was produced by an organization's own coordinators rather than by clinicians.
Organizations that want a physiological measure alongside self-report can add the iXpressGenes CoreSignals Panel, which reads 22 markers of RNA gene expression from whole blood and is designed to track inflammatory and immune signals associated with stress and recovery. It is not used to diagnose any condition. The panel runs through iXpressGenes, a CLIA-certified, CAP-accredited laboratory, and what we measure in a blood draw states its limits in full.
Five questions worth asking any vendor
Grant money moves fast and vendors move faster. If you are holding an award and weighing programming, these five questions separate the serious from the rest.
What does your program claim to do, in writing? A vendor claiming to treat, cure or prevent a diagnosed condition without FDA clearance is a liability you are taking on with grant funds.
Who has to be in the room? If the answer involves a licensed clinician, your non-clinical budget line has a problem.
What is your completion rate, and in what population? Enrollment is easy to report. Completion is the number that survives an audit.
How does the data collection work? Ask what is stored, where, and if a participant can go through the program without handing over identifying information.
What happens when someone discloses distress mid-program? A vendor without a clear answer has not run this at scale.
We would answer all five in a first conversation, and we would expect you to ask them of everyone. Our full position on the evidence in this category is on our claims page.
Where VA is the authority
Eligibility, allowable costs, reporting and subcontracting belong with VA, which administers the program, publishes the notice of funding opportunity and the application guide, and takes questions at VASSGFoxGrants@va.gov. We are not a source on any of it, and no vendor is. Anything in this piece about the program comes from VA's own published materials, and VA's materials govern where they disagree with a summary of them.
Our own boundary on this
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. Neurova Labs is a for-profit company and is not an eligible applicant for this program. We hold no outcome data in a grantee population. No organization named on this page has any relationship to Neurova Labs. The clinical and crisis work in this space belongs to the people trained to do it.
What we offer a grantee is programming that gets used, in a building veterans already trust, run by staff already on payroll. That is a contribution to reach, and reach is the gap VA named in its own announcement.
If you are standing up a program this quarter
Neurova Labs is veteran founded and veteran led. More than 500 programs have been delivered to date, in community organizations, clinics, first responder agencies and military units.
If your organization received an SSG Fox grant and is deciding what to put behind it, we are glad to walk through implementation 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, government publications, and published research are for commentary only and do not imply endorsement of Neurova Labs by any federal entity or research institution.
Media contact: Nathaniel Free, chief communications officer, nathaniel.free@neurovalabs.com
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