Crisis To Career

 Addiction Recovery and
Workforce Development

​​Jennifer Hancock, LCSWPresident & CEO
Volunteers of America Mid-States​Christina ComptonFreedom House Graduate and Admissions Manager
Volunteers of America Mid-States​Tim RobinsonCEO & Founder
Addiction Recovery Care

In this second session devoted to developing new sources to meet workforce needs, Jennifer Hancock, President & CEO for Volunteers of America, and Christina Compton, Admissions Manager, described actionable approaches to help people break free of addiction and become reliable contributors to the workforce.

A third session led by Tim Robinson, CEO & Founder of Addiction Recovery Care (ARC), reported findings linking the opioid addiction crisis to the decline in workforce participation. He described the ARC program, which provides access to evidence-based treatment and recovery services. He also presented data demonstrating how effectively the program has helped people recovering from addiction to secure and maintain employment and reenter the workforce.

​Fall 2022 Forum in Review​Introduction​The Formerly Incarcerated –
An Untapped Workforce​Addiction Recovery And Workforce Development​Water Management: Flood & Drought​Trade-Offs And Tensions
In U.S.-China Relations

Breaking the Cycle

Volunteers of America (VOA) provides wrap-around services including housing, education, and work preparedness to help women break free of addiction, develop into reliable caregivers for their families and become contributors to the workforce. Jennifer Hancock, President & CEO of VOA Mid-States, described the Freedom House program, which provides residential treatment for pregnant and parenting women with substance use disorders. The Kentucky-based program, which serv has garnered national recognition and has expanded regionally throughout the state and into Oklahoma, Florida, Louisiana and Ohio.

“Women working to overcome substance use disorders want to access treatment but do not want to be separated from their children,” Ms. Hancock noted; therefore, the VOA program provides treatment for women’s substance use disorder, while providing housing, social interaction, and support services to keep families intact and promote the delivery of healthy, drug-free babies.

​Addiction is a brain disease, not a character disorder. Changing attitudes and the narrative about addiction is critical to designing interventions that work.

VOA participants benefit from a three-year relationship with the program, from treatment to housing and aftercare. “Our goal is for women to exit the program into stable, permanent housing, with employment or educational opportunities secured,” Ms. Hancock said.

Through a close public-private partnership with the Child Welfare System and Family Recovery Court, VOA provides substance use disorder education and helps parents access treatment and navigate through the process of receiving treatment with a dedicated liaison.

Evidence-Based Strategies for a Recovery Ecosystem

“Women working to overcome substance use disorders want to access treatment but do not want to be separated from their children,” Ms. Hancock noted; therefore, the VOA program provides treatment for women’s substance use disorder, while providing housing, social interaction, and support services to keep families intact and promote the delivery of healthy, drug-free babies.

​Babies born to VOA participants spend, on average, 3.2 days in the NICU vs the national average of 18.2 days.

​Recovery Ecosystem

​

An effective system to support people’s recovery from substance use disorder must be integrated and coordinated.

The Human Face of Addiction

Christina Compton is now the Admissions Manager for VOA. The journey she shared to get there was arduous and painful, evoking strong emotional responses from the Forum as Ms. Compton recounted her moving story. When she first encountered the VOA program, she was homeless and jobless, and her children had been taken away from her. “I had nothing and no one,” she recalls. “My entire life revolved around substance use. I was scared to death.”

​“I had nothing and no one. My entire life revolved around substance use. I was scared to death.”

Freedom House provided Ms. Compton with everything she needed to climb out of addiction and build a life where she could care for her children. “VOA provided me with things I didn’t even know I needed, such as friends I could trust, the courage to face my fears, giving me an understanding of brain chemistry and my addiction, and providing resources to overcome it. Ultimately, I learned to respect myself and others.

“There is nothing VOA won’t do to ensure the success of their clients,” she continued. ”They are saving the lives of mothers and their children.”

​Substance use disorder is a deadly disease that has been stigmatized and criminalized. But there is a solution. The disease is treatable.

Addiction Recovery Care

Tim Robinson, CEO & Founder of Addiction Recovery Care (ARC), reported findings linking the increase in opioid prescriptions to declines in labor force participation. Workers cannot successfully pass drug screening tests; or, when hired, they fail to perform.

​Mapping a path to substance use recovery is an issue that transcends partisan politics. It affects everyone.

Risk factors for addiction include rejection and abandonment, homelessness and mental health issues, Mr. Robinson noted. More than 60% of elementary aged children in Appalachian Kentucky are being raised by someone other than their natural parents and face the abandonment issues that can lead to addiction. The ARC program also has seen a sustained increase in clients admitted with a serious mental illness diagnosis since January 2020.

Nationwide, as drug overdose fatalities continue to rise, treatment options remain scarce. In 2019, for example, 21.6 million people needed treatment, but only 2.6 million received such care. Meanwhile, expanded access to treatment has been shown to reduce overdose fatalities and support long-term recovery. Kentucky’s Medicaid expansion significantly enabled better access to treatment. In fact, the number of times enrollees in Kentucky’s Medicaid expansion program received substance use services increased by more than 700% between Q1 2014 and Q2 2016.

​“We need to raise our expectations for people with addictions. If we make the right investments in detoxification, addiction treatment, housing, and job training, people recovering from addictions can help solve the workforce problem.”—Tim Robinson

The ARC program is a comprehensive model that supports participants throughout their journey from crisis to career. ARC provides wrap-around services such as transitional housing near treatment centers, access to evidence-based treatment, and job training.

Collaboration with businesses is a key factor for the program’s success. ARC participates in a Fair Chance Academy, which trains employers on strategies for successfully employing second chance workers. Through relationships with “second chance” businesses, ARC matches participants with jobs and provides support to sustain their work performance.

One success story is with Toyotomi, which manufactures equipment for major companies in the automotive industry. They are a certified “fair chance” employer by the Kentucky Office of Drug Control Policy and Kentucky Chamber Foundation.

In January 2021, a pilot workforce program to create and manage talent pipelines for ARC clients was initiated with Toyotomi. The company now employs more than 20 ARC graduates in full- and part-time positions, with 25 more on the waiting list.

Discussion

​

Moderated by

Tom Finneran

 Sen. Robert Stivers
President of the Senate, Kentucky
Ten years ago my hometown was identified as the “worst place to live.” With the coal mines shutting down, we had a devastating problem with opioids and addiction. We realized we had to set a new direction for the community and we needed to rely on evidence-based strategies that produced quantifiable results. Programs like Freedom House, for example, produce quantifiable results: By reducing NICU stays, we save about $75,000 per child. Now we are allocating $22 million from the Opioid Settlement to test such strategies. Ten of our court systems will test a program to see if people with criminal charges are better served by receiving job skills training rather than just a prison sentence, and if they are still employed after a year. We will review those outcomes after two years.

Tom Finneran (Moderator): How do you intervene in an emergency when families need housing and access to schools for the children as well as substance use treatment?

 Jennifer Hancock, LCSW
President & CEO, Volunteers of America Mid-States

VOA has family emergency shelters or makes use of detox centers. Then people move to transitional housing. However, we need more treatment capacity.

 Tim Robinson
CEO & Founder, Addiction Recovery Care

Prior to Medicaid expansion, people could wait months before receiving substance use treatment. Now they are able to get treatment immediately. The current challenge is to streamline the healthcare system so that there is an addiction-to-care pathway involving primary care providers, emergency rooms, and treatment options. There are 500,000 people in Kentucky who need this kind of care.

​The current challenge is to streamline the healthcare system so that there is an addiction-to-care pathway.

 Sen. Beth Mizell
Senate President Pro Tempore, Louisiana

The Dignity for Women Act was a bipartisan effort and got buy-in from all local stakeholders. How is the Act perceived elsewhere?

​The Women’s Dignity Act (2019) set standards for the care of state incarcerated women, including family visitation rights, treatment of pregnant women, and guidelines for incarcerating women in facilities near their children. It limits the access male correctional officers have when a female inmate may be in a state of undress, and requires education and training of employees of correctional facilities in which female inmates are housed.Text of the bill is available here (pdf): S. 1524

 Ms. Hancock: There was significant pushback even after the Act passed. There is still a lot of stigma. Some corrections officers took the hard line that, even for pregnant women, those who commit a crime deserve punishment and are unworthy of humane treatment.

Sen. Bill Ferguson
President of the Senate, Maryland
How can we differentiate high quality providers when we implement these programs?

Ms. Hancock: The Council on Accreditation is an auditor of quality and assesses programs based on thousands of requirements. Unfortunately, the current healthcare system incentivizes performing an activity, not delivering outcomes. A value-based payment model is more effective. We have six Medicaid Managed Care plans that pay us for value. They pay us more because we can document our outcomes: healthy babies, mothers with housing and jobs, and reduced length of stay in NICUs.

Mr. Robinson: For substance use recovery programs, the length of the program is a good indicator. A short time, like 13 days, is only enough time for detoxification. Participants are left with a big risk of returning to using and overdose. Optimal outcomes require long-term recovery programs that span the continuum of care.

Sen. Dominic Ruggiero
President of the Senate, Rhode Island
What is the process to get someone engaged with Family Recovery Court?

Ms. Hancock: When a person enters the child welfare system due to neglect or abuse, the court decides on a permanency plan for the children: Should they be returned to the mother or housed with another person? VOA provides a case manager who is an advocate, helping mothers navigate through the system. VOA’s regular contact with the participant and the court enables a therapeutic — rather than a punitive — approach. There are three phases: daily contact, weekly meetings, and finally annual reviews before participants “graduate” from Family Recovery Court.

Tom Finneran (Moderator): How do you work in areas where neighborhoods refuse to have transitional housing — a “Not In My Back Yard” attitude?

Mr. Robinson: We need to ensure that transitional housing meets standards. The National Association of Recovery Centers provides monitoring to ensure standards are maintained. Informing people of the standards and reporting the regular monitoring may make transitional housing more acceptable to neighborhoods.

For more information about our guest speakers’ organizations, visit
Volunteers of America Mid-States and Addiction Recovery Care.

Presenter Biographies

Jennifer Hancock, LCSW

President & CEO
Volunteers of America

Jennifer Hancock is the President and CEO of Volunteers of America of Mid-States. Jennifer earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in social work from the University of Kentucky, where she began a career dedicated to social justice and community building.

Jennifer has served in many capacities during her more than 20 years of professional leadership in the nonprofit sector and in her 15 years advancing the mission of VOA. Under her leadership, VOA has become a nationally recognized expert in providing family-focused and results-oriented solutions for the opioid and addiction crisis. Working closely with a wide range of elected officials and community leaders, the organization has earned consistent recognition for providing best practice care in nearly 50 programs.

Jennifer has led VOA through unprecedented growth and now oversees a $50MM budget and a team of more than 650 professionals across 4 states. In addition to addition recovery services, VOA also delivers solutions in the areas of veteran services including suicide prevention, housing and homelessness, public health, comprehensive care for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities and a Restorative Justice program that helps to keep youth out of the criminal justice system. Her love for bringing diverse stakeholders together to solve a complex social problem and seeing the tangible and many positive outcomes of the mission of VOA is what drives her most.

Jennifer is active in the community, serving as Chair of the Leadership Louisville Center and on the boards of the Kentucky Children’s Justice Act Task Force, University of Louisville School of Public Health, Impetus for a Better Louisville, Smart on Crime, National Office of Volunteers of America, AdventHealth Hospital, West End Opportunity Partnership, 1 Clay County, You Decide, Kentucky! and as an Advisory Council Member of Young Professionals Association of Louisville. She was recently honored to receive the 2022 Business First Power 50 award as well as the 2022 Enterprising Women award.

Christina Compton

Freedom House Graduate and Admissions Manager
Volunteers of America

Christina Compton is the Admissions Manager for Freedom House at Volunteers of America Mid-States.

She first learned about VOA from a social worker when she was in jail. She had a history of drug and alcohol abuse, had been incarcerated six months and was facing additional time. She was also pregnant and nearing her due date.

Christina was given a chance to leave prison, if she agreed to treatment. Within a week of arriving at Freedom House, she gave birth to Wyatt. She learned that Freedom House was welcoming, but also required hard work.

“It gives me joy to be able to give the gift that was given to me. VOA believed in me when I didn’t even know if I could believe in myself,” shares Christina.

Christina has a valuable life-changing skill set that helps women traveling the same path she has successfully navigated. After obtaining her Peer Support Specialist certificate, Christina returned to VOA where she has become a respected team member, working with Freedom House moms in Admissions.

More than four years later, Christina is the mother of three children, recently bought her first home and is pursuing a degree in Social Work at Spalding University.

Tim Robinson

CEO & Founder
Addiction Recovery Care

Tim Robinson, Jr. is the founder and CEO of Addiction Recovery Care, LLC, which operates a network of 30 addiction treatment centers in Eastern and Central Kentucky based in Louisa. The organization offers a continuum of care including centers for detox, residential, transitional, IOP, outpatient, MAT, outpatient, vocational rehabilitation, and job training. The treatment centers are holistic with CARF-accredited clinical programs, medical services directed by an addictionologist, and a spirituality emphasis that includes the 12 steps and pastoral care. Robinson is a recovering alcoholic and former prosecutor who celebrated 14 years of sobriety in December of 2020.

Tim graduated from Cumberland College with a BS in Political Science and the University of Kentucky College of Law with a Juris Doctorate. Tim was a partner at Hogan & Robinson, PLLC before founding Addiction Recovery Care. Tim and his wife Lelia, consider it their mission to help those with substance abuse issues while focusing on the alleviation of generational poverty. They have dedicated their lives to offering opportunities for treatment throughout Kentucky. It is their heart and goal to help each and every person who is suffering from addiction.

​