Orange County Opioid Advisory Committee opens grant cycle to support local programs

The Orange County Opioid Advisory Committee opened the grant cycle for opioid settlement funds to support programs focused on the prevention, treatment, recovery and awareness of opioid use disorder. 

The grant funds come from national opioid settlements led by Josh Stein during his term as attorney general. North Carolina will receive $1,420,932,713 total from 2022 through 2038, and Orange County will receive $12,748,445.

Sophie Suberman, co-founder and executive director of community nonprofit Grow Your World, said one in five kids who overdose on opioids overdose on their first use. Grow Your World also received opioid settlement funding, which Suberman said they used to fund projects like opioid overdose reversal training for 57 people who collectively encounter 44,000 youth a month. 

The number one cause of death in people under 50 in the U.S. is unintentional injury, the leading cause of which is unintentional poisoning as from overdose, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Overdose death rates are decreasing in general but increasing in communities of color, North Carolina Formerly Incarcerated Transition Program Director Evan Ashkin said. The program received opioid settlement funding in 2023. 

“If you look at data, like who was referred to drug treatment versus who's incarcerated, there's also a disparity among communities of color,” Ashkin said. “White people are more often put in treatment programs or offered other avenues to deal with charges.”

Suberman said the American Red Cross training highlights how to serve white people by only saying that people who have overdosed turn blue, while people of color often turn purple or gray and ashy. 

Ashkin said 70 percent of people in U.S. prisons identify as having a substance use disorder. He said he encourages local law enforcement to send people who commit low level drug offenses to diversion programs. These programs provide treatment and have shown positive outcomes in multiple studies, he said.

At NC FIT, people who have been recently released from incarceration are provided with primary care and can develop a reentry plan that includes housing, employment and family reunification, Ashkin said.  

Ashkin said NC FIT used their opioid settlement funding to assist people who have substance use disorder. 

“We were able to hire a second community health worker to focus on people in our community who are coming out of the criminal legal system with substance use disorder issues,” Ashkin said.

Suberman said Grow Your World applied for multi-year community programming and received $20,000. She said there was a lot of ambivalence surrounding the process of the funding. 

“We just want more transparency in the organizations that are holding on to the funding,” Shepperson said.

Orange County Opioid Advisory Committee Member Jay Miller said the committee wanted to get some money out right away.

“We really didn't have a formal process, and it was a little confusing, and I think some of the smaller local groups were kind of discouraged,” Miller said. “We definitely hope that they will come back for this round that we're working on right now because we now have a formal process that's been developed, and we have a system for grading the priorities.”

The Orange County Health Department will hold application workshops on Tuesday afternoon in Chapel Hill and Wednesday evening in Hillsborough. Two workshops were held last week.

Applications are due Feb. 21. The Opioid Advisory Committee will make recommendations to the Orange County Board of County Commissioners for final approval in April, and contracts will begin on July 1.

“We definitely want to encourage people to come to the workshops, find out more and see the process, and we hope that it'll go a little smoother this next time around,” Miller said.