Alaska Mental Health Trust reports asset growth, $30 million in FY26 grants and Crisis Now progress

Mary Wilson, chief executive officer of the Alaska Mental Health Trust Authority, told the joint House and Senate State Affairs Committees on April 3 that the trust has grown its investment corpus since its creation and continues to fund grants, crisis response and system-change work for beneficiaries statewide.

The trust, created after a 1984 court ruling and a 1994 settlement that returned lands and cash to support mental health, is self-funded and uses land and investment revenue to underwrite grants and initiatives rather than relying on the state general fund, Wilson said.

The trust matters because it provides grant funding, planning and advocacy for Alaskans with behavioral health conditions and developmental disabilities and seeks to use land and financial assets to support services statewide.

At the hearing, Wilson and agency staff summarized the trust’s history, its governance, and current scale: the trust manages roughly 1,000,000 acres of land, the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation manages the trust’s financial assets, and the APFC-managed portion of the trust corpus now exceeds $730,000,000, Wilson said. Total trust assets, including nonfinancial holdings, were described as about $800,000,000 plus the portfolio of lands and resources.

Wilson said the trust awards more than $20 million annually in grants and that the trust-authority grant program for FY26 totals about $30,000,000 in authority grants. She said the trust has granted roughly $270,000,000 to state agencies since inception and has provided approximately $465,000,000 in grant funding overall since creation.

“The 200,000,000 mentioned earlier that the trust received at our creation … the amount of funds that APFC now manages for the trust exceeds 730,000,000,” Wilson said.

Katie Baldwin Johnson, the trust’s chief operating officer, described how the trust uses stakeholder input, statutory advisory boards and targeted listening sessions to shape grant priorities and to align with the State’s comprehensive integrated mental health program plan. Baldwin Johnson said the trust acts as both a funder and a convener, partnering with tribal entities, providers and other funders.

Wilson highlighted the trust’s Crisis Now initiative, a multi-year effort to transform behavioral-health crisis response across Alaska. She said trustees have committed about $20,000,000 in grant funding to the initiative and that implementation varies by community. As an example of early results, Wilson said the Fairbanks Mobile Crisis Team handled 729 calls in 2024 and that 85% of those calls were resolved in the community, with about 19% requiring law enforcement intervention or hospital resolution.

“We remain committed with funding and advocacy resources to our work to transform behavioral health crisis response in Alaska,” Wilson said.

Baldwin Johnson told lawmakers the map shown in the presentation marked Crisis Now activity, not the trust’s entire grant footprint, and said the trust regularly funds rural and urban partners. She and Wilson acknowledged the ongoing challenge of equitable distribution of services across Alaska’s rural and urban communities and said outreach to tribal and local partners is central to that work.

The trust’s grantmaking includes two main tracks: trust-authority grants awarded directly by the trustees and Alaska Mental Health Trust Authority authorized receipts (MTAR) increments that must be transmitted to the Legislature as part of the state budget. Wilson said trustees authorize the use of trust funds and that MTAR increments to state agencies require legislative receipt authority.

Wilson emphasized that the trust supplements but does not replace general-fund mental-health spending. “The settlement expressly emphasizes that basic mental health funding will continue to come from the general fund,” she said, noting the trust’s role is to support system improvements and targeted initiatives.

The presentation closed with officials offering to provide lawmakers with more detailed grant data, geographic breakdowns of past awards and metrics used to evaluate programs.

Lawmakers asked follow-up questions about rural reach, how grants are prioritized and whether evidence-based local programs are being scaled; trust staff said those topics are addressed through ongoing stakeholder engagement and budget-development processes.