When Hampshire HOPE launched in 2015, supported by a Department of Public Health grant and a charge to respond to the opioid epidemic in Hampshire County, we had one full-time staff member, J. Cherry Sullivan, working out of a tiny basement office. We knew the work ahead was vast. Under the purview of the city’s health director, Merridith O’Leary, this grant sparked the creation of a network of caring community members who teamed up to develop or expand effective approaches to the tragedy of opioid overdose deaths.
Nearly seven years later, we’ve long since cycled through that first grant and gained seven other grants that allowed us to expand the work of Hampshire HOPE, hiring additional staff and bringing together formerly siloed units to create a robust substance use prevention team within the Northampton Health Department.
With Hampshire HOPE as the convener, community members developed and launched initiatives that we believe are reshaping personal and systemic biases toward people dealing with substance use disorders; supported and expanded ongoing efforts of harm reduction; identified and worked to close gaps in services as we unified responses to this epidemic.
This prevention team seemed a logical natural next step because our opioid overdose prevention work reinforced something many in the field have long shouted from the rooftops: To make change that saves lives, we must address all the components along the continuum of addiction — prevention, harm reduction, treatment, which includes medication-assisted treatment and recovery support — with all the tools at our disposal.
Our prevention team represents an expansive vision of health promotion within Northampton’s public health department with an emphasis on developing strong community engagement and partnerships. Health departments in Massachusetts sit at the municipal level, where, often under-resourced, they typically focus on health inspections, infectious disease surveillance, and occasional vaccine clinics. But there are other major public health concerns (and sometimes they are a moving target) that really should be addressed.
We believe this puts us in a position to more effectively respond to emerging public health concerns, chief among them substance use disorders and addiction, with a team of seven full-time staff, most of whom are funded by grant, not city, dollars. In addition to the two of us, two staff are dedicated to the Drug Addiction Response Team programs, better known as DART, in which police, harm reduction counselors and recovery coaches respond to overdoses all over Hampshire County and now in some Hampden County communities, as well as a similar initiative taking root in the Berkshires. Two staff members handle and manage data and the associated technologies needed to turn it into a robust public health database. There are also a part-time grants manager and several people working on specific time-limited projects because they hold a particular expertise.
The newest addition to this team is the Northampton Prevention Coalition, the city’s long-running youth substance use prevention coalition, led by coordinator Kara McLaughlin (who came on board in the summer.) For 10 years, the NPC was based in the school department, funded by a federal Drug Free Communities grant. Bringing youth substance use prevention work into the health department makes sense. To adequately respond to the addiction epidemic plaguing our nation, we need to view prevention broadly and address it much earlier.
Our prevention team is building upon Hampshire HOPE accomplishments, including:
■The tried and true strategies of overdose prevention work: Changing cultural norms around safe storage and proper, timely disposal of medications; promoting harm reduction and working with organizations, like Tapestry, that do it so well; redoubling efforts to distribute Narcan; never missing an opportunity to confront stigma and misunderstanding.
■Being a catalyst for the creation of the now-robust Northampton Recovery Center;
■Working together with local business, municipalities, higher education, and social service agencies to provide Narcan training and distribution;
■Placing NaloxBoxes that provide emergency Narcan in public buildings;
■Serving as convener and connector of community partnerships during the pandemic shutdown to ensure some of the most vulnerable in our community continued to get the support they needed.
From this strong foundation, we aim to take deeper dives into the factors that can lead to risky youth substance use —- and later addiction: trauma, poverty, racism, mental health concerns, generational substance use, and health inequities. We’re close to bringing to fruition a recovery-supported workplace initiative that will help employers and employees understand the rights and responsibilities around employees with substance use disorders, encouraging the creation of recovery supportive workplace culture.
We are working closely with the local communities, Belchertown and Ware, that are part of the national HEALing Communities study, coordinating the data collection for this federally-funded program. Meanwhile, because addiction doesn’t adhere to geographic boundaries, we are rolling out the full regionalization of a database that collects and allows the sharing of data within the four western counties. Our goal is to share what we’ve learned with partners throughout the region by joining forces to engage in community outreach as we respond to changes in this epidemic. Among those changes is working with local police departments to adapt DART programs to meet changing community needs.
As a prevention coalition, Hampshire HOPE evolved because we built community responses in collaboration with partners. As we forge ahead, we are always in search of new ways to bring a message of compassion to areas of our community we haven’t yet reached. The power of connection is a game-changer.
Merridith O’Leary is Northampton’s director of public health; J. Cherry Sullivan, deputy director of prevention for the health department, coordinates the Hampshire HOPE coalition. Members of Hampshire HOPE, the opioid prevention coalition run out of the city of Northampton’s Health Department, contribute to this monthly column about local efforts addressing the opioid epidemic.