Partner with SPI
This page is for one reader: someone assembling a grant proposal or program budget who has a scope gap SPI could fill. It describes what we can be contracted to do, what it costs, and how to include us.
Get in touch before the budget is set
The useful moment is while a proposal is still being written — roughly four to eight weeks before a submission deadline. Once a budget is approved, adding a line item is a modification nobody wants to file. If you think there may be a fit for a proposal you are planning, an early conversation costs nothing and takes fifteen minutes.
What we can be scoped to do
Evidence synthesis and literature review
A citation-audited review of the social-pain, endogenous-opioid-system, and buprenorphine literature, scoped to your population and research question. Delivered as a written synthesis with a full reference set you can draw on for background sections, specific aims, or clinical protocols.
Fixed price, typically $4,000–12,000 depending on scope. Hourly available at $125.
Clinician education and curriculum
Development of training material on the emerging evidence for low-dose buprenorphine in mental health — what the studies show, what they do not show, and how to think about it in practice. Non-promotional by design. Can be built as slides, a written curriculum, or a facilitated session.
Fixed price, typically $8,000–20,000 for a developed curriculum. Single training sessions $1,200–2,500.
Patient-facing materials
Plain-language guides written for people living with BPD, complex PTSD, and chronic suicidality, and for the clinicians who see them. SPI already maintains work of this kind at bpd.fyi and cptsd.fyi, including a clinician guide on buprenorphine for BPD written for primary care and psychiatry. Existing material can be adapted to your program, or new material developed.
Fixed price, typically $3,000–10,000 depending on length and review burden.
Study materials and digital infrastructure
The participant-facing pieces a study needs and a research team rarely wants to build: recruitment and study sites, screening and intake instruments converted into forms people can actually complete on a screen, registry and mailing-list infrastructure, and accessible plain-language versions of consent and study documents. SPI builds and maintains its own sites and registries, so this comes from practice rather than theory.
Fixed price, typically $2,500–8,000 depending on scope. Hourly available at $100.
Lived-experience research partnership
Substantive involvement in study design, recruitment feasibility, protocol review, materials review, and dissemination — as a partner rather than a consulted subject. This is the role many funders now expect applicants to budget for, and it is the one where SPI’s combination of lived experience and technical literacy is most useful.
$100/hour. Typical engagements run 20–60 hours across a project period.
Why this strengthens an application
Funders increasingly score genuine involvement of people with lived experience, and expect it to appear in the budget rather than as unpaid advisory decoration. PCORI’s Foundational Expectations for Partnerships in Research require study teams to dedicate funds to engagement and partner compensation. SAMHSA asks applicants to involve people with lived experience of mental health and substance use conditions meaningfully across the design and implementation of a project.
The difficulty is usually finding someone who brings both the experience and the technical grounding to be useful in a study meeting. SPI arrives with a published citation library, drafted clinical and patient guides, and working knowledge of the literature — which is what makes the role defensible in a budget narrative rather than decorative.
Contracting
SPI operates under a fiscal sponsor with 501(c)(3) status. Subcontracts, subawards, and consulting agreements flow through the sponsor, so there is no need for a separate vendor relationship or organizational risk assessment. We can provide the sponsor’s documentation, indirect-cost information, and a scope-of-work narrative formatted for your application.
What we will not do
SPI has no financial stake in any medication or manufacturer, and we intend to keep it that way. We do not take promotional work, we do not write material intended to market a product or a clinic, and we will not overstate the strength of the evidence — the research on buprenorphine for social pain is preliminary, and everything we produce says so plainly. If a project requires otherwise, we are the wrong partner.
Start a conversation
Tell us what you are applying for, when the budget is due, and where the gap is. If there is a fit we will send a scope of work and a budget line you can drop into the application; if there is not, we will say so.