Organizations working in addiction prevention, treatment and recovery gathered in Louisville for the 2024 Kentucky Opioid Symposium.

Grant recipients.

The groups entrusted to spend Kentucky's opioid abatement settlement money or set up to share their work.

Here's a peek at the work being done to fight Kentucky's opioid epidemic.

This commission is investing blood money, investing blood money and life saving efforts across our commonwealth, not just in the Golden Triangle, truly from the mountains to our river counties.

You are making a difference.

The Commission is making a difference here in our Commonwealth.

We're actually having the Opioid Kentucky Opioid Symposium.

There's going to be grantees who receive awards from the opioid settlement funds.

We're also providing an opportunity for them to connect with each other and to build their skill sets and their knowledge by having experts come in and talk to them about different avenues regarding prevention, treatment, recovery and all aspects of that.

Every family in Kentucky has been impacted in some way by opioid use disorder, and I think it's great that the state is taking this big pile of money and really distributing it to organizations that know what's going to work in their local community.

Because Louisville is very different from Clay County is very different from Paducah, where we're quite a diverse state.

And so it's great that they're trusting the local experts in this.

So the grants that you see with this here in the grantee hall, that's a little over $20 million of what's represented.

Those grants cover the 2023 grant cycle for the Opioid Abatement Commission.

We applied for funding for a peer support specialist, full time position and a family support support specialist to do with our families because we serve families with children and single adult females at our recovery housing program.

Along with that, we got some transportation funds and some little bit of operation cost and our ward was $134,000.

Residents who come to us, they're ready to work on their issues.

They're ready to go through the steps, get connected with counseling, with physical health, mental health services.

And so these are connectors are these positions, connect them, and then they're just there for them when they need to talk about someone who talked to someone about what's going on in their life and how hard this is.

The disease of addiction is is a really hard one to crack, to move beyond.

Volunteers of America Mid States received $1 million for our recovery community centers we operate for.

But this funding was specifically for Lincoln and Pulaski County.

And our recovery community centers are just a place for individuals in recovery or maybe still in active use and their family friends to come and get some of those supports.

So we have expungement clinics, we have peer support meetings, 12 step meetings.

We've had barbecues.

Just really anything that people are going to need to connect to that support, that they need to stay in recovery.

But we really want to make sure that there is a holistic approach to what we do.

Treatment, recovery prevention are all key pieces of this, and we want to make sure that as the Commission looks forward and moves with us, that we support those efforts.

It's a disease.

Your networks have been broken and splintered, whether by choice or the families and friends have said no more.

It takes that built rebuilding those positive, healthy connections for you and having a place to do that.

And that's what we are.

Kentucky has secured nearly $900 million from manufacturers and distributors that fueled the opioid epidemic.

That money is split between local governments and the state to fight addiction in Kentucky.