ATTC Messenger July 2023 Featured Article

Without organizations in the ecosystem of recovery engaging in peer recovery work, treating substance use disorder is unattainable at the population level. But those organizations—mostly non-profits—need funding to retain staff, increase programming, and simply pay rent for their community spaces; the money must come from somewhere. Even though the Biden administration has provided an unprecedented amount of funding to tackle substance use disorder (the President’s 2022 State of the Union speech highlighted this), many organizations do not feel the impact of this policy change.  

Our recently released report, titled “Barriers to Acquiring Funding for Organizations in the Ecosystem of Recovery,” summarizes Quality Improvement (QI) work that we undertook in 2022 to identify the largest perceived barriers in these efforts and convey policy recommendations largely directed at federal and state government agencies. The leaders of over 200 organizations across the US participated in a survey and 85 leaders participated in one of 16 focus groups. To our knowledge, no prior substance use disorder work has engaged such a large number of organizations in the ecosystem of recovery. In the process, we generated a sample list of over 500 organizations in the ecosystem of recovery, which was an important task itself because no single comprehensive list exists. This QI study was motivated by a prior needs assessment of how to build and strengthen the capacity of the peer recovery community and is the first comprehensive empirical examination of the thought processes and struggles that lead organizations in the ecosystem of recovery to pursue funding or not. 

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