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Interact for Health's opioid work featured on cover of Health Affairs

Jan 15, 2020

We were thrilled to learn that our article tracing the evolution of our opioid work was selected as a cover story of the January 2020 edition of Health Affairs, a monthly peer-reviewed journal that explores domestic and international policy issues.

In "Philanthropic Strategy In The Face Of An Opioid Epidemic," Jennifer Chubinski, Vice President, Research and Evaluation, and Evaluation Officer Michelle Lydenberg examine Interact for Health's role in addressing the epidemic, from the earliest signs in 2008 that people were switching to opioids from other drugs, to today's naloxone distribution program and quick response teams. For more than a decade Interact for Health has served as a convener to build a community response to the epidemic while working to reduce the stigma of addiction and championing innovative yet controversial harm reduction strategies such as syringe services programs.

"We were unlucky enough that our region was hit early and hard so we had no choice but to act," Lydenberg said. "Funders in other parts of the country may just now be experiencing the epidemic at the scale to which we have been experiencing it for years."

One reviewer said the article "shows an effective example of how a foundation can truly impact its community around opioids."

The article is just the latest example of Interact for Health sharing what it has learned while promoting innovation.

"I knew this body of work, done over more than a decade by many different people at Interact and in the community, was really cutting edge," Chubinksi said. "We really needed to tell the story of the many important success and failures we had so that others could learn from them and move quickly and effectively in similar work in other parts of the country."

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