West Virginia Wesleyan College is helping the West Virginia First Foundation review Community Catalyst grant applications through the college’s Center for Addiction & Trauma.
Wesleyan President James Moore spoke at a November 9 press conference at the Robert H. Mollohan Research Center in Fairmont, according to a release from the foundation. The event focused on six academic and research partnerships the foundation uses to guide and measure how it spends opioid settlement money.
The foundation said Wesleyan’s reviewers contribute expertise in addiction, trauma and behavioral health to the grant review process.
The foundation opened applications in June for the three-year program, which My Buckhannon reported in May would offer $9.87 million. The grants are meant to reduce substance use, strengthen public safety responses and improve rehabilitation and prevention, and continued funding depends on recipients meeting yearly performance expectations. The foundation said in June that it expected to make final funding decisions and notify applicants in December.
“We have a responsibility to make every dollar count. That means going beyond simply funding programs to understanding what works, measuring results, and making decisions that will change the course of this crisis for generations to come,” foundation Executive Director Jonathan Board said in the release.
The foundation outlined these roles for its other five partners:
Marshall University’s Center of Excellence for Recovery assists with Community Catalyst grant reviews and is helping develop ways to track results from funded projects.
West Virginia University’s Health Affairs Institute leads the West Virginia Wayfinder assessment, identifying gaps in prevention, treatment and recovery services to help guide funding.
Resources from the Teva opioid settlement support the University of Charleston’s work on overdose prevention and tracking naloxone use and outcomes, building on a School of Pharmacy distribution program.
Johns Hopkins University has advised the foundation on grantmaking, including how it receives applications and measures outcomes.
The University of Notre Dame’s Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities independently evaluates grant applications using research to help the foundation decide which projects to fund.
After the press conference, the University of Charleston held training for attendees, including foundation board members and staff, on recognizing and responding to an opioid overdose with Narcan, or naloxone.
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