Recovery Café Lexington — a $650,000 State Opioid Response Effort award, and programs built to last

Recovery Café Lexington had opened its physical space just weeks before I joined the team as a part-time staff member. The organization was peer-led at every level — all people in recovery from substance use disorder. It held one weekly support group and was open one day a week. The mission, the values, and the framework were all there. The grant I wrote realized the vision.

In 2022, Recovery Café Lexington was awarded $650,000 through the Kentucky Opioid Response Effort (KORE) — Kentucky's iteration of the federal State Opioid Response block grant program, administered through SAMHSA. I wrote the application and saw it through the award.

The proposal was built around four goals: expanding the activity schedule to grow social and community recovery capital; launching programming to strengthen personal recovery capital; establishing a clinical resource connection and community navigation program; and running a peer-led outreach campaign to raise awareness of the center and its services. It committed to serving 150 unique individuals in the first year, with outcomes tracked through GPRA — the federal standardized outcome reporting framework for SAMHSA-funded programs — along with recovery capital scale measures and ongoing data collection.

The application made the case for what set RCLex apart: recovery-oriented governance at every level, an established community of participants, and a program model grounded in the lived experience of the people it served. The award validated that case.

The impact was immediate. The organization grew from a small part-time team to three full-time and three part-time staff. Weekly public hours expanded from fourteen to sixty-six. Participant enrollment grew from fewer than 25 people when I started to hundreds by the time I left.

My role expanded alongside the organization. As Project Coordinator — the primary person overseeing KORE implementation and day-to-day staff operations — I managed a program that was, at that point, functionally the entirety of what RCLex did.

The award funded programs — and it funded the people running them, at a level that reflected the value of their work.

Every staff member, full- and part-time, was compensated at a living wage. All received health coverage stipends and unlimited paid time off. The board and staff aligned on this from the start: equitable compensation and leadership by impacted people weren't goals to work toward. They were the standard we built from.

One of the commitments I wrote into the grant was meaningful investment in staff development. All full-time employees were trained as Kentucky Certified Peer Support Specialists and CCAR Recovery Coaches. One staff member became a certified QPR Suicide Intervention trainer. Three were trained as SMART Recovery meeting facilitators.

The longer-term vision was to build that capacity into a revenue stream. I became a certified CCAR Recovery Coach Academy trainer, and the plan was to develop an in-house training academy — one that community partners could pay RCLex to use for training their own staff. That program was still in development when I left, but the groundwork was laid: the certifications were in place, the trainers were ready, and the infrastructure existed to make it work.

As the primary point of contact with the funder, I oversaw program implementation, supervised staff, managed compliance, and maintained KORE reporting throughout the grant period. We met deliverables consistently.

This work wasn't abstract to me. I brought my own lived experience with substance use disorder and recovery to every decision we made — about how we designed programs, how we compensated staff, and how we treated the people who came through our doors.

Recovery Café Lexington has continued to grow. They now operate seven days a week and have opened two additional locations — a second site in Lexington and a location in Frankfort.

After RCLex, I brought the same approach to Goodwill Industries of Kentucky as Program Manager for the Ignite 2.0 initiative — a case management, job training, and supportive employment program for young adults with criminal justice involvement, contracted through the U.S. Department of Labor and Goodwill Industries International. I supervised a team of three career coaches and one data analyst and managed a four-year program budget of nearly $1,000,000.

Grantwriting, program management, and staff leadership are part of one integrated practice — one I've developed across peer-led recovery organizations, workforce development programs, and the communities they serve.