Philadelphia announces a new round of grants from opioid settlement funds
Grantees were selected with help from three separate groups of community members.
Recovery specialists, grief counseling, and wound care for people addicted to xylazine are among the projects that Philadelphia’s Overdose Prevention and Community Healing Fund will support in its second year dispensing grants to combat the opioid epidemic.
The fund dispensed $1.9 million in grants last year and announced another round of grants totaling $3.1 million on Wednesday, using money from settlements in lawsuits filed against opioid manufacturers, which are widely blamed for sparking an addiction and overdose crisis that has killed hundreds of thousands across the U.S. Grantees were selected with help from three separate groups of community members who weighed grant proposals for Kensington, the neighborhood hit hardest by the opioid epidemic; North Philadelphia, where overdose deaths are spiking; and citywide operations.
Danielle Spencer, one of the community grant committee members, said many participants had deeply personal connections to the work: Some were in recovery themselves. Others had lost loved ones to overdoses. “We weren’t just reviewing proposals. We were helping to shape the future of support for those most affected by the opioid crisis. And know that our decision will empower these amazing nonprofits to continue their vital work,” she said at Wednesday’s event to announce the grants.
Funding for the Overdose Prevention and Community Healing Fund comes from a $200 million payout, dispensed over the next 18 years, from a $26 billion nationwide settlement negotiated in 2022. The city also recently announced that it will receive $110 million from a separate settlement with Walgreens.
Beyond the grants outlined Wednesday, the city has not yet announced plans for the remaining money it will receive this year from the 2022 settlement. Among the grantees funded on Wednesday were:
Mother of Mercy House, a religious nonprofit, will receive $100,000 to fund, in part, overdose reversals and wound care for people with addiction. (People who use xylazine, which has contaminated most of Philadelphia’s illicit opioid supply, risk developing serious wounds that can easily become infected.)
Klean Kensington will receive $20,000 to pay local teenagers to clean streets in the neighborhood and build community gardens and playgrounds.
Broad Street Love, a homeless outreach organization in Center City, will receive $100,000 to expand services for people without housing who use opioids and live around South Broad Street.
Unity Recovery, a Manayunk-based recovery support organization, will receive $100,000 to expand an employment and reentry support program for people in active addiction or with a history of drug use.
North Philly Project, a nonprofit that focuses on wellness initiatives in the neighborhood, will receive $100,000 to launch a “peer support” program that pairs people in active addiction with trained outreach workers who are themselves in recovery. It will also launch an “information blitz” to educate people in the neighborhood about the opioid crisis.
Other grants will fund programs as diverse as grief counseling for children who have lost loved ones to overdoses, arts programs for young people, and legal services for people experiencing homelessness. In departure from last year’s grant process, Philadelphia officials said earlier this year that, unlike in the previous round of grants, opioid settlement funds could no longer pay for the distribution of sterile syringes.
Noelle Foizen, who heads the city’s Opioid Response Unit, said that meant some organizations which asked for funding for sterile syringes had to revise grant requests that had already been submitted. “All the programs were still allowed to be considered for funding. They couldn’t fund [syringes], but it was okay if [syringe services] were part of their program,” she said.
Those who served on the groups that granted the funds said they were grateful for the opportunity.
“Everyone has a different opinion of what works best. But the beauty of having the community granting group together was that everyone could chime in with their own kind of input,” said Tamas Mizsei, who served on the citywide granting group. (Mizsei also works with South Philly Punks with Lunch, a harm reduction group that received a $100,000 grant. He was not involved in the approval of the Punks with Lunch grant.)
Foizen said she was particularly pleased to see more grant applications from North Philadelphia this year. Just three organizations applied for grants in 2023; for the 2024 round, 21 organizations sent in grant applications. The neighborhood has seen rising rates of overdose deaths in recent years and is second only to Kensington in overdose deaths, city officials say.
Aaron Wells, the executive director of North Philly Project, said his group has learned over the last year that few neighbors in the area were familiar with harm reduction, the concept of keeping people who use drugs as safe as possible so they can decide to enter treatment. Other residents believed that the opioid crisis was more of a problem in Kensington — not their neighborhood.
“People would say, ‘That’s not our problem. Ours is crack,’” Wells said. “But the numbers are saying it’s everyone’s issue.”