The Interventions and Practice Research Infrastructure Program (IPRISP) funding mechanism was introduced by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to bridge the gap between the worlds of services research and the usual care practice in the community. The goal was to build infrastructure that would provide a platform for research to establish the evidence base for improving mental health care available in diverse communities. This is done by providing support for researchers and community mental health providers to establish working and sustainable partnerships to make evidence-based mental health services available and acceptable for people in need of mental health care. In this article, we (a) present the nature of one IPRISP and its attempt to foster science-to-service and service-to-science interchange; (b) discuss two models of implementation practice for human service agencies, the more common "external specialist purveyor model" and the "embedded generalist purveyor model" that is emerging from our IPRISP experience; and (c) we address our emerging practice approach to two issues that are critical in implementation practice and research: local adaptation of evidence-based interventions, and the use of client outcome data in usual care environments to inform clinical practice decisions. (Contains 3 figures.)