Community Behavioral Health Agency Partners
Community behavioral health agencies provide essential substance use and mental health treatment to people using public funding, such as Medicaid. Because behavioral health is integral to physical health (and vice versa), community behavioral health agencies play a critical role in creating healthy and thriving communities.
More than 100 community behavioral health agencies and tribal health centers in Washington serve as student training sites and potential future employers of conditional grant students in the Ballmer Behavioral Health Scholarship Program. This on-the-ground training helps to ensure that students gain the right set of skills and confidence to make a lasting impact in the communities they serve.
Click here to review the WDI’s select list of community behavioral health agencies.
Eligibility
To partner with the Washington State Behavioral Health Workforce Development Initiative, agencies should meet the following criteria:
- Located in a community setting within Washington state (versus inpatient hospital, school district, Veterans Administration Medical Center, or other institutional setting).
- Employ master’s level clinical mental health staff from at least one of the following disciplines: mental health counseling, social work, and/or marriage and family therapy.
- Provide behavioral health services reimbursed by Medicaid.
- Provide at least the following three behavioral health services*:
- Individual outpatient mental health treatment;
- Outpatient substance use disorder level I or level II treatment; and
- Rehabilitative case management.
- Do not receive additional, non-Medicaid government funding for reimbursement of behavioral health services; examples of organizations that receive these additional funding sources include hospital systems and federally qualified health centers.
*The WDI used the federal Comprehensive Community Behavioral Health Clinic (CCBHC) service criteria to guide the criteria for agency eligibility. The CCBHC service criteria reflect the current best practices for offering behavioral health services in a community setting. Recognizing that most agencies are unable to meet the high standard of CCBHC criteria, however, the WDI narrowed the criteria to reflect the core elements of integrated service delivery that many agencies could meet. Thus, the nine service criteria of the federal CCBHC certification became three: (1) outpatient mental health counseling, (2) outpatient SUD counseling, and (3) rehabilitative case management.