The Foundation for Opioid Response Efforts (FORE) in New York City has announced grants totaling $4.8 million in support of 11 projects through its recently launched Innovation Program.

The two-year grants are focused on helping to end the nation’s opioid crisis and will fund projects that combine approaches from diverse fields and engage multi-disciplinary teams to encourage work on some of the most intractable challenges of the crisis. To that end, the grants will target three areas: professional education and training to address stigma, timely and actionable data, and supporting the transition from treatment to recovery. 

Recipients include the Agency for Substance Abuse Prevention (Oxford, Alabama), which was awarded $164,470 in support of faith-based specialist training; the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Foundation (North Dartmouth, Massachusetts), which will receive $591,485 for its novel organizational simulation training to improve graduate’s mastery and attitudes (NO STIGMA) program; and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, North Carolina), which was awarded $599,488 in support of randomized trials and analytic chemistry innovations to optimize drug alerts.

“We are launching our Innovation Program to generate and support new approaches to some of the long-standing barriers to making real progress in addressing the opioid crisis–how to better tackle stigma, generate more timely and actionable data, and help for people transitioning from treatment to long-term recovery,” said FORE president Karen A. Scott. “These projects have great potential to give us exciting new tools and lessons that will help communities around the country respond to the crisis more effectively, inform future policy decisions, and ultimately save lives.”

For a complete list of grantees, see the FORE website.

(Photo Credit: Getty Images/Moussa81)