The Numbers Are In: VA’s Community Suicide Prevention Grants Are Working
By Shawn Cosner | June 5, 2026 | Veteran News
New results from the VA’s Staff Sergeant Fox Suicide Prevention Grant Program show the community-based model is doing exactly what it was built to do.
In 2025, Fox grant recipients served more than 17,000 veterans, service members, and family members, a 31 percent increase over the year before. Nearly 9,000 of those veterans were identified as having elevated risk for suicide. Among them, 91.8 percent reported a decrease in risk factors after receiving services, and grantees made 854 life-saving emergency connections for veterans at high risk.
The longer arc is just as strong. Since September 2022, grantees nationwide have generated more than 24,000 referrals connecting veterans to support, and among veterans who had never enrolled in VA health care, 42 percent became newly enrolled after engaging with a grant-funded program.
Why does that matter here? Because the model behind those numbers, meeting veterans in their own communities through people they already trust, rather than waiting for them to find a clinic, is built for places exactly like North Central West Virginia: rural, proud, underserved, and carrying one of the heaviest veteran suicide burdens in the nation.
The program that produces these results has never operated in our region. The Eight Fifty Committee is working to change that.
