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Liz Whynott, director of the harm reduction at Tapestry Health, in the agency’s Northampton office. Tapestry and Craig’s Doors in Amherst have partnered to receive a $150,000 grant to expand and enhance harm reduction initiatives in 14 Hampshire County communities. The grant is being matched by the Easthampton, Northampton and Amherst. -
Liz Whynott, director of the harm reduction at Tapestry Health, in the agency’s Northampton office. Tapestry and Craig’s Doors in Amherst have partnered to receive a $150,000 grant to expand and enhance harm reduction initiatives in 14 Hampshire County communities. The grant is being matched by the Easthampton, Northampton and Amherst.
NORTHAMPTON — After 15 years directing harm reduction at Tapestry, Liz Whynott recently accepted a new post as senior program officer at RIZE Massachusetts Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to funding and collaborating on solutions to end the overdose crisis in Massachusetts.
RIZE announced that Whynott will lead the development and implementation of a new model for the state’s municipal training and technical assistance program, which RIZE assumed control of on July 1 through its Mosaic Opioid Recovery Partnership. The program is funded by opioid settlement dollars.
The transition of oversight of training and assistance to RIZE is designed to streamline services, deepen community connections and align training and technical assistance more closely with the state.
In a statement released by RIZE, president and CEO of the company Julie Burns said that under Whynott’s leadership, communities can expect “thoughtful, personalized support” and help using opioid settlement money to fund tangible change.
“Liz brings deep experience, compassion, and a fierce commitment to the people and communities most deeply impacted by the opioid crisis,” said Burns.
Whynott will oversee the contract across the state to provide training and technical assistance to people and support each community. At Tapestry, which offers sexual and reproductive care, food and nutrition education, and harm reduction services in western Massachusetts, she led efforts to expand harm reduction services across the region.
When she began working in overdose prevention, Whynott said that harm reduction looked very different. According to Whynott, there was also a lot of stigma around drug use, especially within systems that interacted with drug users, such as health care facilities and legal systems. She added that in the early 2000s, there was a common view that Narcan enabled drug use.
“It was just really, really easy to see how much discrimination, societal stigma, existed with this population,” she said. “There still … continues to be a lot of things that need to get better or change in order to just support the well-being and the dignity of people that are continuing to use drugs.”
She aims to combat this stigma by continuing to focus on harm reduction, such as distributing naloxone, or Narcan, to people at the highest risk for overdose.
Her work with RIZE involves settlements with big pharmaceutical companies and money that has been given to states all over the country. About 60% of the money from those lawsuits goes to the state of Massachusetts, and 40% of it goes to individual municipalities, acting like a direct payment to all the cities and towns and correcting harm. This type of funding is also referred to as abatement funding. Whynott’s role is overseeing contractors across the state to help provide training and technical assistance to municipalities.
The hub-and-spoke model involves RIZE, the organization, as the hub, and different spokes for different parts of Massachusetts. The idea is to provide a regional approach to care and approaches that are reflective of what the individual communities need and want, Whynott said.
She plans to have people embedded into different parts of the community to work with municipalities as “spokes” and establish different types of community advisory boards to ensure that they’re connecting with people affected by opioid use. She also wants their community members’ voices to be heard.
Franklin, Hampden and Berkshire counties are the most rural areas in Massachusetts, Whynott said, and some small towns may lack the infrastructure to figure out how to spend the abatement funds. She hopes to support municipalities, look at a regional approach and aid them to help get that money to their communities. While RIZE is based in Boston, Whynott, a Northampton resident, aims to bring her experience working in harm reduction in western Massachusetts to the role.
“I hope to be able to really serve and support western Mass. communities to really get these opioid abatement dollars into the hands of people and into programs … to support people who have been most affected by opioid use and harmed by it,” Whynott said.