Reporter's Notebook: Governor hopeful Avellone focusing on drug-abuse crisis
He praised the center, which has a substance abuse treatment model, includes inpatient and outpatient services, and handles 22,000 annual client visits. The center has 30 beds in its detox unit for alcohol and opiate treatment, according to its website.
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Medical Datebook
“Grief and Loss in Addiction and Recovery,” 7:30-9 p.m. Tuesday, March 25, will describe theories of grief and grief recovery, losses that the chemically dependent individual and his/her family experience throughout the addiction and recovery processes …
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Casper Calendar for March 7, 2014
7 p.m.,500 S. Wolcott, Ste. 200, Easy Does It, nonsmoking; Glenrock: 615 W. Deer (downstairs). * 8 p.m., 917 N. Beech, closed, nonsmoking; Douglas: 628 S. Richards #5, Loft Group, smoking. * 8 p.m., 328 1/2 E. A St. (upstairs). One Day at a Time group …
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Philip Seymour Hoffman's death brings attention to drug addiction
And addiction is a medical disease, not a choice, writes Dr. Kim Dennis, a psychiatrist who's CEO and medical director of Timberline Knolls, a residential treatment center for girls and women in Chicago. “Saying that a person addicted to drugs can …
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Right Step Launches Groundbreaking 'Positive Recovery University'
Right Step is a network of outpatient and inpatient addiction treatment centers in Texas. Since 1990, Right Step has provided compassionate, comprehensive substance abuse treatment at an exceptional value. In recognition of its high-quality programming …
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Govt urged to focus more on preventing drug abuse
The International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) recommended that the Indonesian government should invest more in preventing drug abuse and establishing a rehabilitation center rather than prosecuting drug addicts. The 2013 annual report published by …
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Maineville residents want planned substance abuse treatment center to be …
MAINEVILLE, Ohio — Downtown is the wrong spot in the small town of Maineville for a substance abuse treatment center that's set to open in April, according to many who live there. A flyer reached the hands of Maineville residents Wednesday, notifying …
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Social Innovation Fellows Class of 2012

Image by ChimpLearnGood
FELLOWS

Jamila Abass – MFarm
As CEO of MFarm, Jamila Abass uses mobile technology to help farmers increase their incomes. MFarm provides farmers in Kenya with real-time market price information and a group selling platform where they can connect with other farmers to jointly market their crops in greater volumes. By giving rural farmers more direct and powerful access to buyers, MFarm is positioned to improve hundreds of thousands – and potentially millions – of lives.
www.mfarm.co.ke/

Lukas Biewald – CrowdFlower
Lukas Biewald is CEO and founder of CrowdFlower, a crowdsourcing internet company that breaks large digital projects into small microtasks and distributes them to workers around the world. CrowdFlower engages a workforce of nearly 3.5 million people to complete more than 2 million tasks every day. In a key example, Biewald helped PopTech Science Fellow Sarah Fortune find new ways to study the bacteria that cause tuberculosis. By sharing the workload, making it fun and insisting on quality results, CrowdFlower provides incomes while speeding the path toward more accurate and scalable results.
crowdflower.com/

Rachel Brown – Sisi ni Amani – Kenya
Rachel Brown founded Sisi ni Amani – Kenya ("We are Peace – Kenya" in Swahili) to pioneer the use of mobile technology to get the right communication capacity into the hands of local peacebuilders, enabling communities to participate in democratic processes and prevent violence. Through civic education, engagement and dialogue, SNA-K leverages SMS text messaging to support the peace efforts of community leaders. As a key partner in the collaborative PeaceTXT project, SNA-K is working to make locally effective tools that can be replicated globally in stopping violence and building peace.
sisiniamani.org/

Bryan Doerries – Outside the Wire
Bryan Doerries is the founder of Theater of War, a project that presents readings of ancient Greek plays to service members, veterans, caregivers and families to help them start talking about the challenges faced by military communities today. He is also the co-founder of Outside the Wire, LLC, a social impact company that uses theater and a variety of other media to address pressing public health issues, such as combat-related psychological injury, end of life care, prison reform, political violence and torture, and the de-stigmatization of the treatment of substance abuse and addiction. A self-described evangelist for classical literature and its relevance to our lives today, Doerries uses age-old approaches to help heal very modern wounds.
www.outsidethewirellc.com/

Toure McCluskey – OkCopay
Toure McCluskey is the founder of OkCopay, a unique search engine for medical procedures that helps Americans with inadequate insurance find affordable local health care. At OkCopay, people can quickly search for the procedure they need, compare local providers, and view actual provider prices and details on the appropriate health clinic. By bringing transparency to healthcare costs, OkCopay is ensuring that those most in need can find effective and reasonable health services.
www.okcopay.com/

Nicholas Merrill – Calyx Institute
Nicholas Merrill created the Calyx Institute to help launch a telecommunications and Internet service provider focused on the right to privacy and freedom of expression. Merrill has personally fought intrusive government demands for private customer information, and he aims to develop, document and publicly release technology to enable private communications that even the service provider cannot decode or eavesdrop upon. Merrill’s goal is to inhibit mass surveillance and to protect the privacy and security of users everywhere.
www.facebook.com/calyxinstitute

Jacobo Quintanilla – Internews
Jacobo Quintanilla joined Internews to bring news and information resources to people in humanitarian crises. As Director of Humanitarian Information Projects, Quintanilla has helped create a two-way dialogue between aid workers and affected communities in countries such as Haiti, Central African Republic and Kenya. Building on Internews’ core mission, Quintanilla’s projects empower local media in crisis situations to give people the news and information they need, the ability to connect, and the means to make their voices heard.
internews.org/

Andreas Raptopoulos – Matternet
Andreas Raptopoulos is the founder and CEO of Matternet, building a network of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to transport medicine and goods in places with poor road infrastructure. Matternet’s "drones for good" use small, electric UAVs to transport packages weighing up to 2 kilos and containing items like vaccines, medicines or blood samples, over distances of 10 kilometers at a time. By creating a new paradigm for transportation that leapfrogs roads, Matternet is helping to revolutionize transportation in the developing world.
matternet.us/

Aishwarya Lakshmi Ratan – Global Financial Inclusion Initiative
As director of the Global Financial Inclusion Initiative at Yale University and Innovations for Poverty Action, Aishwarya Ratan focuses on the design and delivery of effective financial services for the poor. GFII seeks to test, evaluate and replicate interventions to improve products, delivery channels and tools ranging from savings products to mobile money and financial literacy programs. The initiative’s rigorous approach to testing and measuring the impact of such innovations aims to ensure that the financial services available to the poor to manage and grow their money are affordable, efficient, secure and welfare-enhancing.
www.poverty-action.org/financialinclusion

Eric Stowe – A Child’s Right / Splash
Eric Stowe believes that every child has a right to clean water—and he has built an innovative, scalable approach to act on that belief. Since founding A Child’s Right (soon to be Splash) in 2006, Stowe has developed a highly effective model to ensure safe water for urban children living at the intersection of these two streets: “greatest degrees of poverty” and “worst water quality conditions.” Leveraging world-class water purification technology, sustainable monitoring and maintenance, excellent people, and a rigorous commitment to transparency, A Child’s Right will soon announce that every orphanage in China has safe drinking water. Stowe’s team will then demonstrate how they are customizing their approach for 15 more countries in Asia and East Africa, using their "Proving It" platform to share both successes and failures at all of their project sites.
achildsright.org/

Eric Woods – Switchboard
Eric Woods is the CEO and founder of Switchboard, which uses mobile phones to create nationwide networks of health workers in developing countries. Switchboard partners with mobile operators to provide health workers with free nationwide calling, a nationwide registry and access to information via bulk text messaging. Having already linked all doctors in both Ghana and Liberia, Switchboard will next connect health workers at all levels throughout Tanzania, working toward the vision of a collaborative network of health advice, referrals and improved care in places where access is most challenging.
www.switchboard.org/

Daniel Zoughbie – Microclinic International
Daniel Zoughbie created Microclinic International to help leverage the power of social network relationships to spread healthy behaviors throughout under-resourced communities. Working in Jordan, India, Kenya, the West Bank and the United States, Microclinic International has begun to show that working through existing social groups of friends and family can significantly help people improve their outcomes in the fight against such diseases as diabetes and HIV/AIDS. The effectiveness of their approach is attracting attention from governments and other large-scale health providers, opening the door to large-scale replication and the broader use of this "contagious health" approach.
microclinics.org/

Substance abuse: Pilot initiative will help Mercer
That's why we welcome the recent announcement of a new pilot program that will offer community-based substance abuse treatment to people on probation, parole and supervised release in nine southern West Virginia counties, including Mercer. Phase 1 of …
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Veterans court gives troubled vets help in turning things around
Judge Phil Pena, center, speaks to an Alachua County Sheriff's Office inmate, who is also a military veteran, during a recently established veterans court program, which handles veterans that have committed crimes, at the Alachua County Courthouse …
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Navy commander slain in Orange Park was living troubled life, acquaintances …
12 in an Orange Park hotel room he called home had been living a troubled life, according to three acquaintances and court records. Orange Park police … Charles Baxter said he regularly drove Doss and his son to a substance abuse treatment program in …
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MediciNova, Inc. (MNOV) news: MediciNova: Gestation Is Slow And …
This has certainly been the case with MediciNova (MNOV), a small biopharmaceutical company headquartered in La Jolla, California and having only 17 employees. ….. With 23.9 million Americans (9.2% of the total population) using illicit drugs (NIH …
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Mary Walsh Speech Nails What's Wrong With How We View Mental Illness
The structured environment of work and school (he was a college student at the time) helped him recover, but he also relied on therapy and antidepressants to pull him out of a downward spiral. "You can change your brain chemistry enough to think: 'I …
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