A grant can help a first responder agency launch a wellness program. It can fund training, bring in clinical expertise, support a peer team, purchase technology, or give an agency the capacity to address needs that have gone unmet for years.
What happens when the grant ends is a more difficult question.
Too often, wellness programs are built around temporary funding rather than long-term organizational commitment. An agency introduces a promising initiative, participation grows, and employees begin to trust the resources being offered. Then the funding period closes. Training is no longer refreshed, contracts lapse, program coordinators return to other duties, and the initiative gradually disappears.
The loss is not only financial. Each short-lived effort can make employees more skeptical of the next one.
First responder wellness programs are more likely to endure when they are treated as part of the organization’s core operations; not as an optional benefit, a temporary campaign, or a project managed by one highly motivated individual. Grant funding should create the conditions for sustainability. It cannot be the sustainability strategy itself.
Why first responder wellness programs struggle to last
Most agencies do not abandon wellness because leaders suddenly decide it is unimportant. Programs usually weaken for more practical reasons.
The person who led the effort retires, transfers, or becomes overwhelmed by other responsibilities. The initial training is completed, but no process is created for onboarding new employees or updating existing staff. Peer supporters are appointed without enough supervision, protected time, or clinical consultation. The program collects participation numbers but cannot demonstrate whether it is improving access, trust, health, retention, or readiness.
In smaller agencies, the challenge is often capacity. A department may recognize the need for culturally competent clinicians, peer support, family resources, fitness programming, or post-critical-incident services but lack the staff and funding to build each component independently.
Research examining first responder mental health programming in Ohio found considerable variation across jurisdictions, with smaller and rural departments facing particular barriers. Participants identified several conditions that helped programs advance: an internal champion, broader organizational and political support, access to clinicians familiar with first responder culture, and collaboration among departments that could share resources and effective practices.
These findings point to a central lesson. The longevity of a wellness initiative depends as much on how it is implemented as on what the program offers.
Build infrastructure, not a collection of activities
A police wellness program is sometimes described by its individual components: annual mental health training, a peer support team, fitness incentives, a chaplain program, an employee assistance program, or access to a psychologist.
Those resources can all be valuable. They do not automatically constitute a sustainable wellness system.
A system connects services to policy, leadership, supervision, benefits, communications, training, data collection, and day-to-day working conditions. It clarifies what happens when an officer asks for help, who is responsible for responding, how confidentiality is protected, and how employees are connected to appropriate care.
It also considers the occupational conditions affecting health. Shift schedules, staffing shortages, mandatory overtime, sleep disruption, critical-incident exposure, inconsistent supervision, and fear of career consequences cannot be addressed through individual resilience training alone.
The goal is not to choose between helping individual officers and improving the workplace around them. Effective officer wellness requires both.
That distinction also affects how grant funds should be used. A grant may pay for the first round of training, but the agency should use the funding period to establish policies, internal roles, referral pathways, partnerships, and recurring budget lines that remain after the award closes.
Give the program more than one owner
Many first responder wellness programs begin because one person refuses to let the issue be ignored. That person may be a chief, union leader, clinician, peer supporter, spouse, chaplain, or officer with lived experience.
Internal champions matter. The research consistently shows that they can help overcome resistance, secure resources, and translate a broad commitment to wellness into action. But a program built entirely around one champion is vulnerable.
Sustainable programs distribute ownership.
Executive leadership establishes that wellness is an organizational priority. Supervisors reinforce the program through their everyday decisions. Labor representatives help ensure that policies reflect employee concerns and maintain credibility with the workforce. Peer supporters provide trusted points of connection without being expected to function as clinicians. Qualified mental health professionals offer treatment, consultation, training, and guidance on clinical risk. Human resources, risk management, benefits administrators, and occupational health professionals help connect wellness to the systems that influence access and long-term funding.
Employees and families should also have a meaningful voice. They often understand barriers that are not visible to program designers, including inconvenient appointment processes, concerns about confidentiality, limited provider options, or the belief that asking for help may affect an assignment or promotion.
Cross-sector collaboration is therefore not simply an advisory exercise. It reduces the likelihood that a first responder wellness program will become isolated from the systems necessary to sustain it.
Design services around trust and actual use
A program can exist on paper and still be functionally inaccessible.
First responders may avoid mental health care because they are uncertain about confidentiality, do not believe a provider understands the work, worry about career consequences, or view the available resource as disconnected from the realities of their agency. A systematic review and meta-analysis found that stigma and concerns related to confidentiality, career impact, and provider competence remain important barriers to mental health care among first responders.
Agencies should therefore evaluate more than whether a resource is technically available.
· Can employees access it quickly?
· Do they know how to use it?
· Are services available outside standard business hours?
· Are providers experienced in treating law enforcement officers, firefighters, emergency medical personnel, dispatchers, and their families?
· Does the agency communicate clearly about what information is confidential and what circumstances create legal or safety-related exceptions?
Research involving police officers has similarly emphasized the importance of normalizing help-seeking and connecting officers with mental health professionals who understand police culture and occupational demands.
Trust cannot be established through a single announcement. It develops through repeated experience. Leaders must communicate consistently, respond appropriately when employees seek assistance, and address practices that contradict the agency’s stated commitment to wellness.
Use peer support as a bridge, not a substitute for care
Peer support is often one of the most trusted elements of a first responder wellness program. A well-trained peer can notice changes, offer an informed and credible listening ear, reduce isolation, and help a colleague connect with additional resources.
Programs become vulnerable when peers are asked to carry too much.
Peer supporters need clear role boundaries, initial and ongoing training, clinical consultation, procedures for elevated risk, and support for their own well-being. Agencies must also address applicable confidentiality protections and explain them accurately to employees. Research on first responder programming has identified gaps and inconsistencies in confidentiality protections as a barrier to the development of trusted peer programs.
A durable model places peer support within a broader continuum that includes culturally competent clinical care, crisis response, family support, substance-use resources, physical health services, and follow-up after critical incidents.
The peer is often the doorway. The agency remains responsible for building somewhere safe and effective for that doorway to lead.
Make wellness part of the workday
Participation falls when wellness is added on top of an already demanding job.
Employees may be encouraged to attend training, exercise, get adequate sleep, use counseling, or participate in peer activities, while staffing and scheduling practices make those behaviors difficult. Programs are more credible when the organization creates protected time and integrates wellness into existing operations.
The Safety and Health Improvement: Enhancing Law Enforcement Departments, or SHIELD, study offers a useful example. The intervention used a peer-led, team-based format tailored to law enforcement personnel and addressed multiple health behaviors, including nutrition, exercise, sleep, stress, tobacco use, and alcohol use. It was delivered during the work shift in 30-minute sessions over 12 weeks.
At six months, participants showed improvements in areas including diet, sleep, stress, and quality of life. Some dietary and substance-use changes remained evident at 24 months, although improvements in sleep and stress did not persist to the same extent. The authors suggested that these areas may require continued reinforcement or booster sessions.
That finding is important for agencies planning officer wellness initiatives. Initial education may produce progress, but some outcomes require ongoing support. Sustainability does not mean funding a program once and leaving it unchanged. It means building a structure that can reinforce, evaluate, and adapt the work over time.
Measure what matters before the grant ends
Grant reports often emphasize what is easiest to count: the number of employees trained, counseling sessions offered, wellness applications downloaded, or events held.
These figures demonstrate activity, but they do not necessarily demonstrate impact.
Agencies should begin with a clear understanding of the problem the program is intended to address. Depending on local needs, meaningful measures might include employee awareness of available services, trust in confidentiality, wait times for care, use of preventive services, peer-support referrals, sleep quality, injury rates, sick leave, retention, burnout, or confidence among supervisors responding to an employee in distress.
Data should be collected carefully and reported in ways that protect individual privacy. The purpose is not to monitor which employees are seeking help. It is to understand whether the system is accessible and working as intended.
Evaluation also strengthens the case for continued funding. A chief, union, governing body, or budget office is more likely to support a program when leaders can explain what changed, where gaps remain, and what the agency risks losing if the work ends.
Research into first responder mental health programs continues to identify the need for stronger evaluation, particularly for programs that have spread faster than the supporting evidence. Agencies do not need to wait for a large academic study to begin measuring progress, but partnerships with universities, health systems, public health departments, and research organizations can improve the quality of the evaluation.
Plan the transition from grant to operating budget
Sustainability planning should begin when the grant proposal is written, not in the final months of the award.
Leaders should know which costs are temporary and which will continue. Startup expenses may include program design, needs assessment, policy development, initial training, equipment, technology, or evaluation support. Recurring expenses may include clinical contracts, peer-team training, program coordination, data management, family services, and refresher education.
The agency can then determine which functions should move into its operating budget, which may be supported through health benefits or labor-management agreements, and which can be sustained through regional partnerships.
Not every department needs to build every service alone. Several agencies may share a culturally competent clinician, regional peer-support network, training curriculum, family education program, or evaluation partner. Fire, law enforcement, EMS, corrections, dispatch, health systems, and community providers may also be able to coordinate services while preserving occupation-specific support.
Regional collaboration is especially important for small and rural agencies that lack the resources to maintain a comprehensive program independently.
The real test comes after the launch
The success of a first responder wellness program should not be judged by the enthusiasm surrounding its announcement. It should be judged several years later.
Do employees still know where to turn? Are new supervisors trained? Are peer supporters receiving consultation and continuing education? Are qualified clinicians available? Has the program survived a leadership transition? Are employees and labor representatives involved in its improvement? Is the agency using data to make decisions? Does the operating budget reflect the claim that wellness matters?
A grant can provide momentum. It can bring people to the table, test a new approach, and help an agency build capabilities that would otherwise remain out of reach.
Lasting change begins when the agency uses that opportunity to make wellness part of how it operates.
First responder wellness is not a temporary project. It is an ongoing responsibility to protect the health, readiness, and long-term well-being of the people who protect their communities.
References
Crowe, A., Averett, P., Bonner, H., & Franks, C. (2022). “Let them know it’s okay to get help”: Addressing the mental health needs of police officers. Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research, 49(4), 613–622. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10488-022-01187-1
Fisher, M. P., & Lavender, C. D. (2023). Ensuring optimal mental health programs and policies for first responders: Opportunities and challenges in one U.S. state. Community Mental Health Journal, 59(7), 1341–1351. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10597-023-01121-1
Haugen, P. T., McCrillis, A. M., Smid, G. E., & Nijdam, M. J. (2017). Mental health stigma and barriers to mental health care for first responders: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 94, 218–229. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychires.2017.08.001
Kuehl, K. S., Elliot, D. L., MacKinnon, D. P., O’Rourke, H. P., DeFrancesco, C. A., Miočević, M., Valente, M. J., Sleigh, A., Garg, B., McGinnis, W., & Kuehl, H. (2016). The SHIELD (Safety & Health Improvement: Enhancing Law Enforcement Departments) study: Mixed methods longitudinal findings. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 58(5), 492–498. https://doi.org/10.1097/JOM.0000000000000716