Social and Behavioral Interventions to Increase Organ Donation | HRSA 16 072

Opportunity Information: Apply for HRSA 16 072

The Social and Behavioral Interventions to Increase Organ Donation opportunity (HRSA-16-072) is a discretionary grant program run by the Division of Transplantation within HRSA (HHS). Its core purpose is to shrink the persistent gap between the number of people who need organ transplants and the limited supply of organs available from deceased donors. HRSA is looking for applied research projects that do more than raise awareness in a general way. The intent is to identify specific strategies that can be proven to work, can be repeated elsewhere, and can be adopted in real-world donation and transplantation settings to increase organ availability across the United States.

The funding announcement centers on four priority objectives, and applicants can choose to target any one of them (or coordinate multiple objectives if the project is designed that way). First, the program seeks interventions that increase deceased organ donor registration among adults over age 50, a group that may have different beliefs, motivations, or barriers than younger registrants. Second, it supports strategies aimed at adolescents, particularly approaches that strengthen family discussion and knowledge about donation and, when possible under state rules and practical constraints, increase actual adolescent registration. Third, it calls for interventions that improve the likelihood of parental consent for donation when a minor child dies, recognizing that these decisions occur under intense emotional stress and are influenced by prior knowledge, conversations, and trust. Fourth, it supports efforts to improve public knowledge of living organ donation, including the opportunities it provides and the risks and benefits involved, with the aim of helping people make informed decisions and potentially increasing living donation where appropriate.

A defining feature of this program is its emphasis on producing "model interventions." In HRSA's framing, a model intervention is not simply a promising idea; it must be demonstrably effective (with measurable outcomes), replicable by others, transferable to other settings or populations, and feasible to carry out in practice. Because of that, the announcement puts heavy weight on rigorous methods and evaluation. Projects are expected to include strong quantitative evaluation components that can credibly determine whether the intervention caused an improvement in the targeted outcome (for example, verified registration changes, measurable increases in knowledge, or improved consent-related outcomes). Qualitative methods are allowed and can be useful, but they are positioned as complementary rather than a substitute for quantitative evidence. Applicants are expected to align their budgets and timelines with the demands of rigorous research design rather than minimal evaluation.

HRSA allows both pilot and extension studies. Pilot projects are for interventions that have not previously been tested in the organ donation field, essentially establishing early evidence of utility and effectiveness. Extension projects build on prior pilot results, refining or expanding an intervention by adding a new dimension or adjusting elements to strengthen results. The FOA also permits multi-component interventions, meaning applicants can propose a coordinated set of strategies that work together. However, if multiple strategies are used, the project must be designed to measure not only the combined effect, but also the independent effect of each strategy and any interactive effects among them. This requirement is meant to ensure that, at the end of the grant, the field can tell what actually drove outcomes and what can be scaled efficiently.

The announcement encourages innovation but ties it to practicality and cost-effectiveness. Applicants are invited to bring forward novel approaches, especially those that can produce results without being prohibitively expensive to implement broadly. HRSA also explicitly encourages borrowing successful strategies from other public health areas and testing whether they translate effectively to organ donation. In addition, the program highlights equity and impact in populations with high need. Because kidney transplant demand is disproportionately high among minority populations and donor-recipient compatibility is often higher within the same racial or ethnic group (including blood type and other matching factors), applications that focus on minority populations are specifically encouraged.

Applicants have broad flexibility in how they structure interventions, including the setting (such as community sites, schools, health systems, DMVs, faith-based venues, or other locations), the geographic area, and the target population, as long as the proposal aligns with one or more of the FOA objectives. Regardless of setting, projects are expected to be grounded in sound conceptual models of behavioral change, meaning the intervention should be based on established theory or evidence about how and why people change beliefs and behaviors. Reviewers will place increased attention on impact and on whether the study design supports replication after the grant ends. Approaches that strengthen generalizability, such as including more than one target population, oversampling a population of interest, or running the intervention in multiple geographic locations, are presented as ways to improve confidence that findings can be transferred and used quickly in other parts of the country.

In terms of eligibility, HRSA notes that public and nonprofit private entities are eligible under section 377A(b) of the Public Health Service Act. Examples include federally designated organ procurement organizations, state and local governments, Indian Tribal Governments, public or nonprofit institutions of higher education, and other nonprofit organizations such as faith-based and community-based organizations, including Tribal organizations. If the applicant is an OPTN member, or is working in a consortium that includes OPTN members, HRSA expects all OPTN members involved to be compliant with the HHS OPTN final rule (42 CFR Part 121). Foreign entities are generally not eligible for HRSA awards, with limited exceptions tied to authorizing legislation or research, and that exception does not apply to research training awards or construction of research facilities.

Administrative details included in the source listing identify it as a grant (not a contract), with CFDA number 93.134. The original closing date listed is January 4, 2016, and the opportunity anticipated around 11 awards. The listing shows an award ceiling of 0, which typically indicates the ceiling was not specified in that summary field rather than that awards have no budget; applicants would normally confirm actual funding limits and expectations in the full FOA. Overall, the program is designed to move beyond general outreach by funding well-evaluated, behaviorally informed interventions that can be scaled, adopted by donation stakeholders, and ultimately increase the number of organs available for transplant, with potential spillover benefits for eye and tissue donation as well.

• The Health Resources and Services Administration in the health sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "Social and Behavioral Interventions to Increase Organ Donation" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 93.134.
• This funding opportunity was created on 2015-09-23.
• Applicants must submit their applications by 2016-01-04. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• The number of recipients for this funding is limited to 11 candidate(s).
• Eligible applicants include: Others.

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