SPONSORED RESEARCH: New $10.9 Million NIMH P50 ALACRITY Center Grant at the Center for Behavioral Intervention Technologies
August 21, 2026
What are the aims of the project?
The newly-funded P50 award from the National Institutes of Mental Health establishes the COMPASS ALACRITY Center at the Center for Behavioral Intervention Technologies (CBITs) (Contact PI: Northwestern University Department of Medical Social Sciences Associate Professor Jessica Schleider, PhD, MPI: Northwestern University Preventive Medicine Professor, David Mohr, PhD). The Center grant will support integrative, large-scale, community-partnered science through a collaborative team spanning institutions across the country. The “Community-based Online Mental Health Promotion and Support Service” (COMPASS) Center builds on a nine-year partnership with Mental Health America (MHA), a leading national nonprofit organization that promotes mental health, well-being, and illness prevention and reaches millions of people seeking information and support online. The Center’s core aim is to forward the development, evaluation, and sustainable implementation of COMPASS: a flexible digital mental health service for adolescents and adults seeking help for depression, anxiety, and related concerns through MHA’s website. COMPASS will integrate online mental health self-screening, evidence-based single-session interventions (SSIs), and text message-based supports that can extend SSIs' initial benefits over time. The Center’s Signature Research Project (PI: Schleider; MPI: Mohr) aims to co-design COMPASS, rigorously evaluate its effectiveness, and support and rigorously test its sustainability when deployed by MHA. Through three Exploratory Projects—which will be led by Rachel Kornfield, PhD, Jonah Meyerhoff, PhD, and CBITs Director Andrea Graham, PhD,—the COMPASS ALACRITY Center will also study ways to strengthen and broaden the impact of these services, including through responsible use of generative AI, digital suicide prevention tools, and training to enhance peer-to-peer support.
A second major aim is to advance the methods needed to design and implement population-level digital mental health services effectively, equitably, and sustainably. This includes developing better ways to estimate population mental health impact, adapt interventions across ages, cultures, and languages, and create a practical implementation blueprint for other community-based organizations. The COMPASS ALACRITY Center will work closely with MHA and the communities it serves to ensure that COMPASS is useful, engaging, culturally responsive, and well-integrated into how people already seek support online. Sustainability will be a priority from the outset, with the goal of building the systems and organizational capacity needed for MHA to ultimately administer COMPASS independently.
What are your next steps?
Our immediate next steps focus on establishing the operational and scientific infrastructure needed to support this ambitious, highly collaborative Center grant. The team is preparing for an in-person kickoff meeting in October that will bring together investigators, community partners, and other collaborators from across the country. Simultaneously, the Center is laying the groundwork to begin co-designing COMPASS and its individual components with the people and communities it is intended to serve. The Center is also preparing to launch several cross-cutting methods initiatives designed to advance population digital mental health research, including work focused on measuring population-level impact, culturally and linguistically adapting digital interventions, and supporting sustainable implementation through community-based organizations.
What do you hope will come out of this funded research?
Our team hopes this work will create a sustainable pathway through which millions of people can access effective mental health support at the moment they seek help online. For many people, particularly those facing financial, geographic, cultural, or structural barriers to traditional care, community-based organizations are already an important first point of contact. The Center’s goal is to help these organizations offer digital services that are evidence-based, responsive to the communities they serve, and capable of producing meaningful benefits at a population level.
PI Schleider shared about the new award: “Our entire team is incredibly excited and honored for the opportunity to pursue this ambitious, impact-driven science. The COMPASS Center’s whole will be far greater than the sum of its parts, bringing together community-partnered methods, intervention and implementation science, and scalable technologies to build sustainable mental health services poised to reach millions of youth and adults. Together, we aim to build a suite of tools for researchers and community-based organizations across the United States, towards helping far more people access timely, effective support.”