Three applicants will present proposals to Johnson County officials in December for grant funding to help with the opioid crisis.
The Johnson County Opioid Remediation Advisory Board met Tuesday to discuss applications for its first grant cycle. The county is estimated to have approximately $5.7 million to distribute through 2038, with an estimated $250,000 available annually to aid proposals focused on opioid prevention, treatment and recovery.
For the first grant cycle, the board received three applications. All applicants will attend a public meeting at 9 a.m. on Dec. 16 to present their proposals to the advisory board. After that meeting, the Board of Commissioners will award the grants at their 10 a.m. meeting the same day.
Infants in BLOOM, which helps infants affected by maternal substance use disorder, sent in an application requesting approximately $55,000 with plans to serve mothers and infants in the Volunteers of America’s Fresh Start Recovery Center in Columbus and Indianapolis, said president and founder Dr. Holly Robinson. The nonprofit will soon see residents from Jefferson and Switzerland counties and wants to add Johnson County to the list as well.
“We will care for the infants who reside in the residential and recovery facilities, follow the infant back to their community and provide services until transition to general pediatric care between their first and second birthdays,” Robinson said in the application letter. “ … We are very hopeful that Johnson County will become a model for other Indiana communities — utilizing the opioid settlement dollars to introduce innovative interventions in battling the opioid epidemic while understanding that only through intensive early treatments of mother and infant can the trajectory of the community truly be changed.”
Recovery Initiatives through Support & Empowerment (RISE) Recovery Coalition is requesting $50,000 to hire a part-time coordinator to increase presence at community events, offer in-person peer recovery support services and harm reduction outreach. The funding will also help the nonprofit host pro-social activities for the recovery community, according to executive director of Upstream Prevention Inc. Kathleen Ratcliff and RISE Recovery Coalition board president Spencer Medcalf.
“The coalition’s purpose is to provide authenticity of voice, hold the recovery community accountable and promote long-term recovery support in the community,” the application says. “ … RISE itself seeks to fill a gap in the existing infrastructure and services in Johnson County by having an in-county based recovery community to pull the various recovery pockets together.”
Ratcliff also sent in another grant application for Upstream Prevention on behalf of Recovery Café JoCo, requesting $50,000 to increase programming offerings at the Recovery Café and better support café members with resource navigation services. The funding would expand the School for Recovery and pro-social events, ensure members have access to a community health worker for resource navigation challenges and make sure location is not a barrier for attendance.
The café launched this past March in a temporary home at Grace United Methodist Church in Franklin. Around 20 recovery cafés have been established around Indiana in places like Indianapolis, Fishers and Greenfield.
“A Recovery Café is a space committed to serving people who have experienced trauma and the results of trauma like homelessness, addiction and other mental health challenges,” the application said.
All municipalities aside from Greenwood put their shares of the opioid remediation funds together to be distributed to organizations fighting the opioid epidemic. Members of the advisory board represent both Johnson County and its municipalities, excluding Greenwood, which has its own plans for funds.
Kevin Walls, Johnson County Commissioner and chairman of the advisory board, previously said he wanted to involve all of the different communities to get a handle on how the epidemic impacts each.
“We have taken a position we want to include the whole county because we don’t know their communities as they know their communities,” he previously said.
Alongside the three grant applicants, Walls said he is trying to get in contact with Riley Children’s Hospital for infants who are born to addicted parents.
The advisory board members want to bring in all three applicants to learn more about the proposals.
“Sometimes it helps for me to see the face with what’s going on because I felt like they all could be quality programs that we would want to assist in some type of format but I think we have more questions. I wrote questions for all three of them,” said Todd Shuck, a Franklin city council member and advisory board member.
Some questions from the board members included how to track what each organization is doing and how to make sure the work is helping people in Johnson County, how the funding will be broken up per organization and the future sustainability of some of the proposals.
To score the proposals, the advisory board will consider Johns Hopkins’s Five Guiding Principles for the Use of Funds from the Opioid Litigation that were adopted by the Indiana Commission to Combat Substance Use Disorder, according to documents for the grant program. The guidelines state that officials should “spend the money to save lives, use evidence to guide spending, invest in youth prevention, focus on racial equity and develop a fair and transparent process for deciding where to spend the funds.”
The overall program or project, its alignment with the abatement strategies and its budget and financial sustainability are the three sections for criteria for grant funding.
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