The Community First Responder Program (CFRP) received a grant of $1.3 million from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration that allows them to expand into a regional hub, adding new programs at five institutions in New England.
Anita Jacobson, a clinical professor in the College of Pharmacy and the program director of the Community First Responders Program, and Tolani Olagundoye, clinical assistant professor at URI, said that they are working together to put the grant to good use.
The CFRP received the grant at the end of September and the grant will end in September of 2024.
Jacobson found out about the grant through a request for grant proposals from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) that went out. They had been successful with another grant from SAMHSA back in 2019, and they wanted to apply again.
“It’s a rural opioid Technical Assistance Grant to become a regional center,” Jacobson said. “So since we had been awarded one in 2019, we felt uniquely positioned to go after this one.”
Applying for the grant was a lengthy process that required a lot of different forms such as an extensive project narrative, ten different attachments for the budget and a project timeline. The deadline for this grant was back in April, and the CFRP was notified that they had gotten it in August.
Olagundoye said she wasn’t a part of the submission process, but she was aware of Jacobson submitting this application for the grant and talked about the goal for how Jacobson had submitted and completed grants in previous years dealing with opioid issues.
“She had already submitted and completed a grant in the previous years, focused on opioid overdose issues and this was a grant that expands our partnership to different other universities and we’re able to do that and our goal is just to provide education and provide ScienceBase information about opioid overdose and how to prevent that,” Olagundoye said.
Olagundoye mentioned that she is more of the cooperative extension piece of this partnership and how her role with cooperative extension is sort of the hands and feet of URI in terms of reaching out to various places in Rhode Island.
With this grant, the CFRP is now able to collaborate with five partner universities, according to Jacobson. Three partner institutions are also Cooperative Extension, which are the University of Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire. There are also the two schools of pharmacy which are Husson University and Western New England University in Springfield, Mass.
“The other component is that it’s focused on rural communities,” Jacobson said. “So our job is to outreach and provide education in rural parts of each of those states and cooperative extension. Four h is youth, agriculture, livestock and different traditionally farming sort of community components.”
With this grant money, the CFRP is trying to figure out where to implement certain things in terms of the regional hub expansion. They created a module that they have controlled in Rhode Island since 2019. However, in early 2020 when the pandemic hit, they had to transfer everything online.
Jacobson said they were successful in bringing it online to where people can go online, get trained on how to recognize an overdose and respond to it as well. They can also have naloxone, a medicine that reverses an opioid overdose rapidly, mailed to them. According to Jacobson, they have already mailed about 3,000 naloxone kits through their online module.
“We are creating some for each of these partner institutions that they can house on their website,” Jacobson said. “They can have flyers and when they do outreach events with Cooperative Extension or other things they can give them to people.”
Olagundoye believes that the next generation are in mental health situations and are turning to opioids as a solution for their mental health problems. She wants to be able to target the next generation or hit a multi-generational target and educate them about the dangers of opioid use in terms of self-medicating or to improve their mental health.
“I hope that this generation would be the generation that finally would see a reduction in an increase the issues of pandemic, maybe opioid issues even worse, because we’re not dealing with their mental health in the proper way,” Olagundoye said. “They’re self medicating, and so we want to make sure that we are educating the next generation.”If you want to learn more about opioids and the opioid crisis, you can go to the CFRP website on the URI webpage.