Member Resources
Cross-Sector Partnerships for Equitable Non-Punitive Solutions
Local and state partners are working across sectors and within public/private partnerships to build services that will address current crises and help to build a more functional equitable system of care.
2026 Opioid Settlement Roadmap
This brief roadmap emphasizes that jurisdictions should treat opioid settlement decisions as a disciplined, transparent policy process rather than a one-off spending event, foregrounding the importance of clear rules, public engagement, and accountable decision-making to ensure funds actually reduce overdose deaths and strengthen community health over time.
Funding Pathways for Programs Supporting Families Affected by Substance Use Disorders
This memo analyzes how seven FORE-funded, family-focused prevention and treatment initiatives can use Medicaid and CHIP to sustain key activities such as screening, case management, perinatal care, behavioral health treatment, and provider training, concluding that most services map to existing authorities (e.g., EPSDT, preventive services, rehab option, targeted case management, health homes, Medicaid managed care tools, and CHIP Health Services Initiatives) but that grantees must still navigate complex provider enrollment, coding, documentation, and benefit design issues, and will likely need complementary funding (e.g., SAMHSA block grants, Title V, opioid settlement dollars) for non-covered populations, settings, or program components.
How are Massachusetts Community-Based Organizations Responding to the Health Care Sector’s Entry into Social Determinants of Health?
This report synthesizes case studies of health care organization–community-based organization (HCO–CBO) partnerships, describing how value-based payment, attention to social determinants of health, and pressure to improve outcomes have driven health systems to collaborate with CBOs, and it highlights core ingredients of effective partnerships—such as sustainable financing models, clearly defined roles, capacity-building on both sides, shared data and metrics, and trust-based governance—along with practical recommendations and tools (e.g., a partnership self-assessment) to help stakeholders design and scale similar collaborations.
Partnerships for Health: Lessons for Bridging Community-based Organizations and Health Care Organizations
This paper examines Blue Cross Blue Shield–funded initiatives that engage community-based organizations to address social determinants of health, documenting how health plans and community partners structure contracts, share risk and data, and align incentives to tackle issues such as housing, food insecurity, and transportation, and it identifies enabling conditions—like braided funding, flexible payment models, strong relationships, and robust infrastructure—that allow CBOs to participate meaningfully in health system strategies while improving population health and equity.
Multiplying Funder Impact Through Multisector Collaborations: Models for Creating Racial and Health Equity – Grantmakers In Health (gih.org)
This “Views from the Field” article argues that funders can significantly amplify their impact on racial and health equity by investing in community-driven, multisector collaborations that align policy, systems change, and local lived experience. Using examples like the East San Jose PEACE Partnership and multisector asthma work in Imperial County, it shows how flexible, pooled funding and collaborative structures enable partners from health care, public agencies, community-based organizations, and residents to identify priorities (such as domestic violence, air quality, or housing) and act on social determinants of health beyond clinical care. The piece highlights the Healthy Neighborhood Investments policy scan as a practical tool for partnerships to map and leverage policy strategies across domains like housing, transportation, and civic engagement, and it underscores the funder role in centering community voice, supporting backbone infrastructure, and encouraging policy advocacy so collaborations can advance structural racial and health equity at scale.
Relevant Research & Data
Funders often seek cost analyses, effectiveness research, prevalence data and more. While it is clear there is a need for more robust disaggregated data, these resources aim to bring some newer and innovative efforts to the fore.
Insights About the Opioid Crisis (Health Affairs, Vol. 44. No 9, September 2025)
This thematic Health Affairs issue focuses on the opioid crisis, especially the persistent underuse of evidence-based treatment and harm reduction despite high overdose deaths, and examines how health coverage, payment, regulation, and delivery-system design shape access to care. Across its articles, the issue explores barriers to medications for opioid use disorder, geographic and racial inequities in services, policy levers to expand harm reduction and treatment, and implications for Medicaid, private insurance, and broader health system reform.
Access to Treatment for Opioid Use Disorder: Highlights from Recent Grantee Publications – FORE
This FORE data brief synthesizes findings from about five years of grantee research on access to medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD), documenting how administrative rules, payment policies, stigma, and logistical factors constrain access to buprenorphine, methadone, and extended-release naltrexone across settings. It highlights promising strategies—such as pharmacy-based models, integrating MOUD into emergency departments and primary care, telehealth expansions, and reforms in Medicaid and criminal-legal systems—that could broaden timely access to lifesaving treatment if scaled and sustained.
The Limits of Recidivism: Measuring Success After Prison (2022)
This National Academies report argues that relying on “recidivism” alone—typically defined as re-arrest, reconviction, or reincarceration—provides a narrow, often misleading picture of how people fare after prison and of whether reentry policies are succeeding. It calls for a broader, person-centered measurement framework that includes indicators like employment, housing stability, health (including substance use), family relationships, and community engagement, and recommends reforms in data collection, research, and policy to align systems with more holistic definitions of success.
Utilizing SBIRT as a Framework for Transforming How We Think About Prevention and Early Intervention for Youth and Young Adults
This article positions SBIRT (Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment) as a public health framework for reimagining youth and young adult substance use prevention and early intervention, beyond its traditional use as a brief clinical tool. The authors argue that universal screening, motivational brief interventions, and structured referral pathways can be embedded across schools, primary care, and community settings, and they highlight opportunities (including integration with digital tools and recovery management approaches) to address inequities and reach young people earlier in the course of substance use.
Adolescent Screening, Brief Intervention, Referral to Treatment: Defining a Research Agenda
This piece outlines a research agenda for adolescent SBIRT, noting that while many pediatric providers report asking about alcohol and other drug use, systematic use of validated screening tools, structured brief interventions, and consistent referrals to treatment remains limited. It calls for studies that clarify which SBIRT models work best for different youth populations and settings, how to implement them sustainably in real-world practice, and how to leverage family-based approaches and technology to improve detection, engagement, and outcomes.
Effects of a Patient-Centered Intervention to Reduce Alcohol Use Among Youth With Chronic Medical Conditions
This randomized trial tested a self-administered, patient-centered, chronic-illness–framed psychoeducational intervention to reduce alcohol use among adolescents with chronic medical conditions, finding that it significantly improved alcohol-related knowledge and perceived risk, and among female drinkers reduced drinking frequency compared with controls. Overall drinking episodes increased over time in both groups, but the differential effect for girls suggests the tailored approach has promise and warrants further refinement to better reach male adolescents and enhance behavior change for all participants.
Is Your Syringe Services Program Cost-Saving to Society? A Methodological Case Study
This methodological Harm Reduction Journal article develops and demonstrates a way for syringe services programs (SSPs) to estimate the threshold number of HIV infections they must avert to be cost-saving from a societal perspective. Using program cost data and published estimates of the lifetime cost of HIV, the case study shows how SSPs can calculate whether their activities likely yield net savings, thereby strengthening the economic and public health case for harm reduction in policy and funding discussions.
Surgeon General’s Report on Alcohol, Drugs, and Health
In this vision statement tied to the Surgeon General’s report “Facing Addiction in America,” Dr. Vivek Murthy calls for a cultural shift in how the nation understands addiction—from a moral failing to a chronic, treatable illness—and urges a comprehensive public health response. The piece emphasizes reducing stigma, recognizing and intervening early on substance misuse, integrating evidence-based prevention and treatment into health systems, and expanding access to care and recovery supports so far more of the millions with substance use disorders receive timely, effective help.
Access to Addiction Services Differs by Race and Gender
This blog post highlights research showing that access to addiction treatment and related services is shaped by race, gender, and socioeconomic status, with people of color and women often facing greater barriers despite high need. It notes that minorities are less likely to receive medications for opioid use disorder and that women—especially pregnant women and women of color—encounter structural obstacles, stigma, and discrimination that limit treatment access and retention, underscoring the need for more equitable, culturally responsive systems of care.
Workforce
These resources seek to reveal local, state and federal efforts to build and sustain a behavioral health workforce that is culturally and linguistically effective.
Supporting and Building the Peer Recovery Workforce: Lessons from FORE’s 2023 Survey of Peer Recovery Coaches – FORE
This resource summarizes findings from FORE’s multi-state survey of 1,174 certified peer recovery coaches supporting people with opioid use disorder, highlighting peers’ indispensable role in engagement and recovery alongside the challenges they face around low pay, limited career ladders, inconsistent supervision, and burnout. It underscores that peers value training, certification, and opportunities for advancement, and offers recommendations for policymakers, employers, and funders to stabilize and grow the workforce through better compensation, supportive supervision, mental health support for peers themselves, and more intentional integration into care teams.
Understanding and Bolstering the Peer Recovery Workforce – FORE
This companion piece provides a broader framing of the peer recovery workforce, explaining how people with lived experience now work across the substance use continuum—from harm reduction and crisis response to treatment and long-term recovery support—and why strengthening this workforce is key to addressing the opioid crisis. Drawing on FORE-funded projects and emerging research, it describes trends in credentialing and Medicaid reimbursement, common implementation challenges (role clarity, workplace culture, tokenism), and strategic steps funders and systems can take to embed peers in interdisciplinary teams, protect their recovery, and demonstrate impact.
Promotores Tackle Substance Use among San Francisco Latinos/x – California Health Care Foundation
This article profiles the PEDAL (Program for Education in Drugs and Alcohol for Latinx) initiative in San Francisco, which trains promotores—trusted Latino/x community health workers—to recognize risky substance use, talk about addiction, use harm reduction approaches, and connect people to services in culturally and linguistically responsive ways. It describes how 20 promotores completed an intensive Spanish-language training, how organizations like El Sol Neighborhood Educational Center have built large-scale promotor programs, and how PEDAL aims to create pathways to certification and careers while improving early identification and support for substance use disorder in Latino/x communities.
National Council for Mental Wellbeing – Center for Workforce Solutions
The Center for Workforce Solutions is a National Council initiative focused on addressing the behavioral health workforce crisis by developing “whole-ecosystem” strategies that strengthen individual career paths, organizational practices, and system-level policies simultaneously. It offers leadership development, technical assistance, and tools to improve workplace culture, recruitment, retention, and pipeline development across mental health and substance use services, while also advocating for policy and financing changes that better support a sustainable, skilled, and diverse workforce.
Behavioral Health Integration Services Fact Sheet
This Medicare Learning Network fact sheet explains how clinicians can bill for Behavioral Health Integration services, outlining the General BHI and Collaborative Care Model (CoCM) codes (such as CPT 99484 and HCPCS G2214), core service elements, and roles for the billing practitioner, behavioral health care manager, and psychiatric consultant. It emphasizes that beneficiaries with mental health or substance use conditions can receive team-based, measurement-driven care management in primary care and similar settings, and it details required components like initial assessment with validated scales, care planning, systematic follow-up, registry use, and coordination of psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy so providers can be appropriately reimbursed for integrated behavioral health services.
Continuum of Care/System of Care
A continuum, or system, of care includes a coordinated approach to primary prevention, harm reduction, treatment, and recovery services. These resources will share ways to think about creating a full continuum with peer and natural supports woven throughout.
CA Bridge: Harm Reduction Kit
This brief CA Bridge example describes the contents of a harm reduction “safe consumption” kit used at Highland Hospital, illustrating how hospitals can support safer use by providing sterile supplies and information even when patients are not ready for abstinence or treatment. The kit includes items like sterile syringes, alcohol pads, cookers, tourniquets, cotton, fentanyl test strips, and printed information on local syringe access programs and safer drug use, and the document encourages sites to adapt the model to their context and expand harm reduction offerings as part of standard care.
CA Bridge: Caring for Youth with Substance Use Disorders
This CA Bridge clinical tool offers practical guidance for emergency and acute care providers on identifying and caring for adolescents with substance use, emphasizing brief, developmentally appropriate screening, motivational interviewing, engagement of families when appropriate, and low-barrier access to services. It highlights validated youth screening tools (such as S2BI and BSTAD), explains consent and confidentiality rules for minors (including youth consent to substance use treatment and medications for opioid use disorder in California), and outlines steps for counseling, safety planning, and referral that meet young people where they are rather than relying on punitive approaches.
CA Bridge: A Caring Culture in Healthcare
This tool focuses on cultivating a “caring culture” toward people who use drugs in hospital settings, offering practical tips for staff to reduce stigma, use person-first language, and approach patients with curiosity, compassion, and shared decision-making. It reframes substance use disorder as a chronic, treatable health condition, encourages trauma-informed care, and provides messaging suggestions and examples of supportive responses that can build trust, improve engagement in treatment, and align hospital practices with harm reduction principles.
MAT for Opioid Use Disorder: Overcoming Objections
This brief is designed to help clinicians, hospital leaders, and staff address common concerns about initiating medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD) such as buprenorphine and methadone, including misconceptions that these medications “substitute one addiction for another,” encourage drug use, or are too complex to manage in acute care. It summarizes the evidence that MOUD reduces overdose deaths, improves retention in treatment, and is safe when properly managed, and it offers concise, evidence-based talking points and practical advice for integrating MOUD into workflows so more patients can receive timely, lifesaving treatment.
CA Bridge: A Patient-Centered, Rapid Access Approach to Substance Use Disorder
This guide outlines a low-threshold, patient-centered model for providing rapid access to substance use disorder treatment in hospitals and clinics, arguing that long waitlists, complex intake processes, and abstinence-only expectations contribute to ongoing use and overdose. It recommends a “medication-first” approach with same-day starts of MOUD when indicated, streamlined intake, shared goal-setting, flexible follow-up options (including telehealth), and warm handoffs to ongoing care, and emphasizes that any setting—ED, inpatient, specialty treatment, or primary care—can adopt this rapid-access model to improve outcomes.
CA Bridge: Harm Reduction Strategies for the Hospital Setting
This guide provides a roadmap for integrating harm reduction into hospitals, especially emergency departments, explaining why hospital-based harm reduction is essential and detailing a suite of strategies from “easy wins” to more advanced interventions. It walks through steps such as educating patients, offering referrals to community programs, distributing naloxone and fentanyl test strips, providing safer use kits, building internal teams, engaging leadership, ordering supplies, and piloting and scaling efforts, stressing that hospitals can start small and gradually expand harm reduction as part of standard practice.
CA Bridge: Culture of Care
This nursing-focused resource translates CA Bridge’s culture-of-care and harm reduction principles into concrete nursing actions at the bedside, emphasizing nonjudgmental communication, advocacy, and proactive overdose prevention. It encourages nurses to champion naloxone distribution (“naloxone in hand” at discharge), pain and withdrawal management, respect for patient autonomy, and coordination with navigators and peer staff, positioning nurses as key drivers of culture change and improved experiences for patients who use drugs.
Behavioral Health Integration in Medi-Cal: A Blueprint for California
This blueprint lays out a strategy for moving from fragmented systems to integrated behavioral health within health coverage and care delivery, describing how payment, governance, data, and workforce reforms can support whole-person care that includes mental health and substance use services. It outlines goals such as assigning clear accountability for integrated physical and behavioral health, phasing in standardized models of care (e.g., Collaborative Care and primary care behavioral health), aligning incentives, strengthening the behavioral health workforce, and establishing shared quality and outcome measures to monitor progress.
Barriers and Solutions to Implementing Medication for Opioid Use Disorder in Michigan Emergency Departments 2024
This report examines efforts to implement and sustain MOUD in Michigan emergency departments, identifying barriers such as limited clinician knowledge and confidence, workflow and staffing constraints, stigma, regulatory confusion, and challenges in connecting patients to ongoing care. Using interviews and implementation frameworks, it also highlights facilitators—like strong leadership support, ED champions, prior experience with MOUD initiatives, and cross-disciplinary collaboration—and offers concrete implementation strategies (training, protocols, external facilitation, IT supports, linkages to community providers) that can help other EDs adopt and maintain MOUD as a standard of care.
Health Equity and Racial Justice
Substance use systems have a long history of racial inequities. These articles discuss how to begin addressing inequities in order to achieve better outcomes across race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, ability and other intersectional identities.
Mismatched Infographic: PHILANTHROPY’S RESPONSE TO THE CALL FOR RACIAL JUSTICE
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This infographic from the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity (PRE) contrasts traditional grantmaking practices with practices that truly advance racial justice, highlighting how common approaches (short-term, project-only, compliance-driven) undermine equity. It summarizes how power imbalances, narrow definitions of evidence, and rigid funding structures create a mismatch between what racial justice work needs and what philanthropy usually offers. It underscores why shifting toward multi-year, flexible, community-led, and power-sharing funding strategies is essential if funders want to reduce racial disparities in health and social outcomes rather than inadvertently reinforcing them.
What does philanthropy need to know to prioritize racial justice?
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This infographic lays out a concise framework for what it means for a foundation to prioritize racial justice, distinguishing performative commitments from structural changes in vision, strategy, operations, and accountability. It emphasizes moving from diversity-focused, race-neutral, or siloed equity work toward integrating racial justice across goals, portfolios, and decision-making, with explicit attention to power, narrative, and community leadership. It provides SUD funders with a concrete lens to assess whether their overdose, treatment, and prevention portfolios are simply serving “vulnerable populations” or actually helping dismantle the racialized systems that produce disproportionate harm and treatment gaps.
Continuum on Becoming an Anti-Racist Multicultural Organization
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This document presents a staged continuum describing how organizations evolve from monocultural or “colorblind” entities to fully anti-racist multicultural organizations, mapping characteristics, behaviors, and structures at each stage. It helps institutions honestly assess where they are, understand the risks of tokenistic or compliance-driven equity efforts, and identify concrete shifts in culture, policy, and practice needed to move toward anti-racism. Using this continuum can inform internal transformation (board, staff, processes) and sharpen external grantmaking so that health, treatment, and harm reduction investments actively counter structural racism instead of merely operating within it.
As the South Goes: Philanthropy and Social Justice in the US South
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This piece examines how the American South — shaped by a legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and ongoing structural racism — functions as both a political and cultural bellwether for the nation, with Southern policy and narrative choices reverberating nationally. It details how racialized policies in areas like voting, criminal justice, and public spending create conditions that harm communities of color and then spread beyond the region, making the South a critical front in advancing racial and social justice. It illustrates why investing in Southern power-building, policy advocacy, and community-based SUD and harm reduction infrastructure is not only about regional need but also about shaping national conditions that drive overdose, criminalization, and inequitable access to care.
April marks National Minority Health Month. It is a time for us to educate ourselves on the health challenges facing communities of color and other vulnerable populations, and to reflect on the progress we have made towards advancing health equity and what more we must do to ensure everyone has a fair and just opportunity to be as healthy as possible. The origins of this observance date back more than 100 years, but it was officially recognized by Congress 20 years ago. Health funders serve many critical roles for the communities they support. They help give visibility and support to some of the most vulnerable people, serve as a bridge between community and policymakers, bring together myriad stakeholders working to address important issues, and serve as leaders through their voice and the programs they choose to support. Now more than ever, we need health funders to leverage each of these roles to ensure that we do not lose the progress of the past two years, and that we do not revert to a time when racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia were acceptable practice. As Barbara Mikulski said, “Each of us can make a difference. Together we make change.”
Funder Approaches to Youth Behavioral Health Equity – Grantmakers In Health (gih.org)
Even before the pandemic, the mental health and well-being of adolescents and young adults was worrisome and worsening. COVID-19 has exacerbated these trends and heightened existing disparities. GIH surveyed its Funding Partners in October 2021 to better understand how health foundations are addressing youth behavioral health equity. The survey results are summarized in an infographic that provides a useful snapshot of primary funding areas, types of populations supported, and top funding strategies.
Communications
The Action Lab | Changing the Narrative
Changing the Narrative is a network of reporters, researchers, academics, and advocates that helps journalists and opinion leaders cover drug use and addiction with accurate, humane, and scientifically grounded information. The site offers expert sources (including people with lived experience) and up-to-date, fact-checked materials to counter stigmatizing and misleading narratives about drugs, drug use, and people who use drugs. This resource shows SUD funders where to invest and whom to partner with if they want their strategies and grantees to be supported — not undermined — by media narratives that influence public opinion, policy, and community support for harm reduction and treatment.
Reporting on Addiction is a collaborative project that provides journalists, educators, and experts with research-based tools to cover substance use and addiction accurately and empathetically. The site includes reporting guides, databases, classroom curricula, and training, and it elevates experts with lived experience so their voices show up in news coverage. This platform is both a direct partner and a model for grantmaking in narrative change, helping ensure that investments in treatment, prevention, and harm reduction are reinforced by evidence-based, stigma-reducing media rather than the sensational or criminalizing stories that fuel punitive policies.
Change How You See People Who Use Drugs
This Elton John AIDS Foundation page describes their focus on ending stigma for people who use drugs by ensuring they receive care, harm reduction, and legal support rather than shame and punishment. It explains how the Foundation works globally with partners to increase access to harm reduction services, push governments to fund proven interventions, and address overlapping barriers such as racism, criminalization, and LGBTQ+ discrimination. It offers a clear example of integrating anti-stigma work, harm reduction, and policy advocacy within a grantmaking strategy, illustrating how investments that center people who use drugs can simultaneously advance HIV outcomes, reduce overdose risk, and challenge the structural drivers of stigma.
Expanding Naloxone Access to Save Lives
This article describes the “You Have the Power to Save Lives” campaign, a partnership among the Elton John AIDS Foundation, Vital Strategies, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and local groups in seven U.S. cities to expand naloxone access where overdose rates are high. The campaign focuses on establishing naloxone distribution points, reducing stigma around carrying naloxone, and centering Black communities that face inequities in access to overdose reversal medication. It offers SUD funders a concrete example of equity-focused overdose prevention, combining community leadership, public health expertise, and communications, which can inform both place-based grantmaking and cross-issue strategies at the intersection of HIV, racial justice, and substance use.
Supervised Consumption Sites: Opposition Response Guide
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This Health in Justice Action Lab factsheet, “Supervised Consumption Sites: Opposition Response Guide,” explains what SCSs are, why they are grounded in harm reduction, and summarizes global evidence that they prevent fatal overdose, improve injection hygiene, and increase access to SUD treatment. Drawing on a media review of Boston news coverage and public comments, it identifies core community fears (e.g., crime, “honey pot” effect, cost, legality, ethics) and provides research-based responses, including data showing SCSs do not increase crime, can save municipalities money, reduce public injection and syringe litter, and support entry into treatment more effectively than criminalization or involuntary commitment. This factsheet is a practical tool and model of evidence-based, stigma-challenging communications and policy work around supervised consumption, helping grantees anticipate and answer community and political opposition while advancing humane, cost-effective responses to the overdose crisis.
Building Narrative Power for Racial Justice and Health Equity
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This report summarizes a convening of health practitioners, academics, organizers, and narrative strategists focused on how public narratives grounded in structural racism shape health inequities and what it takes to change those narratives. It defines concepts like narrative power and narrative intelligence, critiques dominant stories of individual responsibility and “bootstrapping,” and offers themes, examples, and strategies for advancing narratives that center racial justice, collective well-being, and the social determinants of health. It provides a strategic frame and practical guidance for funding narrative infrastructure — storytellers, organizers, cultural work, and communications — that can shift public understanding of addiction from individual failure to a systemic, racialized health issue, thereby opening political space for the humane, evidence-based SUD policies and investments they seek.
Reframing Adolescent Substance Use and Its Prevention
Advocates want to build widespread support for the protective factors that can prevent adolescent substance use, but members of the public hold pre-existing assumptions about adolescents and substance use that act like roadblocks to that goal. Steering the conversation around these obstacles takes an understanding not only of what to say but also of how to say it. While some communications strategies will speed advocates toward their goal, others will slow them down or even halt progress completely. With support from the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, the FrameWorks Institute has conducted extensive multi-method research to develop and test effective strategies for communicating about these issues with the public.
