Funded Fellowships to Grow a Rural Behavioral Health Workforce
A Rural University Model Pairing Student Fellowships with Community Prevention Projects
Western Colorado University uses opioid settlement dollars to place Master of Behavioral Science students with community partners across the Gunnison Valley and to fund student fellowships that support substance use prevention, overdose prevention education, and the growth of a rural behavioral health workforce.
The Challenge They Were Addressing
The Gunnison Valley sits in Colorado's Western Slope, a frontier community with one road in and one road out and mountain passes separating it from the nearest towns an hour or more away. Like much of rural Western Colorado, it faces behavioral health provider shortages, limited resources, and the loss of residents who must leave the valley to access behavioral health and recovery services. Until recently, the county had no local recovery housing at all, and medication-assisted treatment (MAT) was only offered weekly by out-of-town providers. During the past 5 years, the Gunnison Valley community has collaboratively worked together to establish: two recovery houses, one for men and one for women; more consistent, locally administered MAT services; peer support recovery services; and community-supported sober events. Still, recovery options remain thin, and challenges to accessing recovery services and sobriety support persist valley-wide.
The valley's economy compounds the strain. It is a resort region where second-home wealth sits alongside a service workforce that cannot afford to live where they work, producing sharp economic inequality and housing insecurity that residents cite as their top stressor. Substance use is common, tied to long hospitality hours, tourism, and a local culture where drinking is normalized. The county coroner recently reported that chronic alcohol use is among the leading causes of death. Travel barriers, small-town privacy concerns, and stigma toward talk therapy keep people from care.
Against that backdrop, the region needed a deeper behavioral health workforce. It needed people trained for nonclinical behavioral health roles, peer support specialists, community health workers, therapeutic mentors, and prevention and program planning staff, who could deliver support in ways that fit rural culture and reduce stigma. Western Colorado University's Master of Behavioral Science program, one of only a few graduate programs in the country focused on rural community health, was already training students for those exact roles. The missing piece was funding that would enable local students to enroll and for their practicum work to connect directly to substance use prevention in their own communities.
What They Built
The two-year, $216,600 award funds student fellowships that cover tuition, help with the valley's high housing costs, and pay for research supplies and faculty mentors. About 95 percent of the money goes directly to students, turning the grant into a recruitment tool that allows residents who could not otherwise afford graduate school to enroll, stay, and serve their rural community afterward.
Every graduate fellow completes a practicum project, akin to a thesis, in partnership with a rural community organization. Rather than arriving with a research agenda, students approach a partner and ask what the organization actually needs, then design a project around that need under the guidance of faculty advisors who have expertise in program planning and evaluation, research methods, and coalition building. The work is grounded in community-based participatory research: students work collaboratively with an organization and the people it serves, and every project ends with written recommendations that the partner can use to improve how they serve the community. Most projects are qualitative or mixed-methods, with residents' own stories at the center of the research and quantitative data used as context.
The first funded cohort produced work that demonstrates the model's range. A student placed with the Gunnison County Substance Abuse Prevention Project conducted interviews and focus groups with parents and middle schoolers about middle school readiness: what did parents and students wish they had known before entering middle school? This research highlighted that both parents and students want substance use education, lessons on bullying, belonging, and healthy relationships to start early, in fourth and fifth grade.
Placements flex with student interest and community need. Students have partnered with Western Colorado University, where staff had noticed many students needed substance use and recovery support, and with Gunnison County Health and Human Services and The Grove on prenatal, postnatal, and maternal health, another dimension of substance use prevention for parents who may feel isolated or carry a history of use. One current student is pairing cheek-swab cortisol testing with adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) screening to examine whether rural college students experience higher stress than their urban peers. The program would like a future fellow at Gunnison County Probation and Courts to support diversion and restorative justice work, though no student has been placed there yet.
Key Program Components
Who You Need at the Table
What made a willing partner essential vs. optional?
The partners a fellow cannot operate without are the university program that funds and mentors the work, the settlement funder that pays for it, and a community organization willing to host a student and allow a project to address a real need. What makes a partner essential is readiness to treat the student as a collaborator rather than a visiting researcher. The strongest placements begin with the organization naming its own need; for example, current practicum partners would like to host fellowship students to conduct a needs assessment on isolation and suicide prevention and to explore recovery gaps among food pantry clients, so that student research yields something the partner can use.
Other partners widen the model's reach without being required on day one. Juvenile Services, the hospital, maternal health organizations, and the food pantry each open a different avenue for prevention work, and the monthly community health coalition, drawing 30 to 50 people from across the valley's health fields, keeps the whole system alert to what is changing. Contextual partners such as GRASP, GCSAPP, and WCU Student Health round out the local network the program draws on.
Budget Breakdown
What is the minimum viable budget to replicate this?
The core budget is the fellowship itself. Funding that reaches students directly enables rural residents to enroll, and the program's director identifies it as the single most important recruitment tool. A leaner version can run on a smaller cohort, so long as it maintains two things: enough money to make fellowships a real draw and paid faculty time to mentor each project closely. A program running near the annual figure here, roughly $108,300, can support 6 to 8 fellows a year; a smaller grant would mean fewer fellows, since the practicum model is high-touch and cannot grow past the faculty available to mentor them. Where possible, budget for community partner supervision as well, so the organizations that train students are compensated for the time they give.
What Worked and Why
Specific decisions or design features that drove success
Putting roughly 95 percent of the award directly into student fellowships turned the grant into a recruitment engine. Many fellows could not attend graduate school without funding, and directing money toward tuition, housing assistance, and research supplies enables the program to recruit people who already live in these rural areas and to keep them working in behavioral health nearby after they graduate.
Anchoring every fellowship in community-based participatory research is what makes partners willing to host. Students begin by asking an organization what it needs rather than imposing a research agenda, and each project delivers recommendations the partner can act on. That framing avoids the extractive pattern communities often expect from academic research and makes the work mutual, which matters even when the program cannot pay partners for their time.
Letting student interest guide projects, within the frame of community need, produced a wide and useful range of work. Keeping the cohort small, 6 to 8 students a year, matches admissions to the number of faculty available to mentor. The practicum projects are time-intensive and closely supervised, and the program admits only as many students as two to four faculty can guide well, which protects the quality that makes the model worth replicating.
Reporting stays close to the work. The program files quarterly reports and meets face-to-face with the funder to review deliverables together. Two students have also presented their funded research directly to the board, showing funders the human impact behind the numbers.
Early outcomes and data
First funded cohort graduated.
6 to 8 fellows are admitted per year, each completing a field-based practicum with a community partner.
About 95% of the $216,600 award is allocated to student fellowships that cover tuition, housing, and research supplies.
Current projects include: a cortisol and ACEs screening study comparing stress among rural and urban college students, and an evaluation of surf therapy for substance use prevention and behaviors.
Two students presented funded research directly to the funder's board.
Quarterly reports and face-to-face check-ins are maintained; projects are largely qualitative and mixed methods.
Lessons Learned
Make funding the recruitment tool. Directing about 95 percent of the award toward fellowships enables residents to enroll. Many students could not attend graduate school otherwise, and the money is the program's main draw.
Plan to compensate community partner supervisors. The program has run without paying partners, relying on the value of the research students bring. The director would build supervisor compensation into a future round so the organization's training students are paid for it.
Match cohort size to mentoring capacity. Admit only as many students as the faculty can guide closely. The practicum projects are time-intensive, and quality depends on hands-on faculty mentorship.
Let students' interests lead, matched to community need. Saying “yes” to student-driven projects produced a wide range of useful work.
Tell the story, not just the count. Most projects are qualitative or mixed methods by design. Numbers provide context, but the stories in residents' own voices show the impact and honor the community's role in the research.