Atheist alcoholics seek recovery from addiction without 'God talk'
Six men who admit they are "powerless over alcohol" recited these words from Step 2 of a Canadian-created, secular Twelve Step program at the beginning of a recent meeting in Vancouver. Alcohol has devastated their lives; the impact extending to their …
Read more on Regina Leader-Post

Kool Living Recovery Opens Its Doors to Help Individuals Battle Addiction
We have done our best to provide a calm and tranquil environment where one can rejuvenate, recover, and re-build from the ground-up. Our specialized treatment program can help put an end to addiction struggles and enjoy life again to the fullest.
Read more on PR Web (press release)

Film to talk alcohol, drug recovery, addiction
Susie Mullens is an advocate for this film, works for First Choice Services Inc. in Charleston, W.Va. ,and is the program director for Appalachian Technology Assisted Recovery Innovations. In West Virginia, there is a need for a Recovery Community …
Read more on Daily Athenaeum

Proposed substance abuse treatment center would be a first in West Virginia
CHARLESTON, W.Va. – More West Virginians died as a result of substance abuse in 2013 than auto accidents. That doesn't come as a surprise to Jim Wilkerson. He's the development director of the T Center. Once it's built, it will be the first of its kind …
Read more on West Virginia MetroNews

Telepsychiatry for Effective, Discrete Substance Abuse Treatment
"We see CloudVisit as a perfect fit for substance abuse treatment facilities, community service boards, and private healthcare professionals. The unique inpatient and outpatient needs of providers and patients, whether financial or personal, can be …
Read more on Marketwired (press release)

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 …
Read more on Bluefield Daily Telegraph

Home-based exercise program improves recovery following rehabilitation for hip …
Among patients who had completed standard rehabilitation after hip fracture, the use of a home exercise program that included exercises such as standing from a chair or climbing a step resulted in improved physical function, according to a study in the …
Read more on Medical Xpress

Pilot to help boost rehab programs
CHARLESTON — West Virginia is preparing to launch a program that will offer community-based substance abuse treatment to people on probation, parole and supervised release. It's slated to begin with nine counties, including Cabell, and arises from the …
Read more on Huntington Herald Dispatch

Foundation expands rehabilitation program for women prisoners
Foundation expands rehabilitation program for women prisoners. Last updated: Monday, February 17, 2014 12:23 AM. Abdullah Al-Qahtani Okaz/Saudi Gazette. ABHA – The Prince Mohammad Bin Fahd Foundation for Humanitarian Development (PMFHD) …
Read more on Saudi Gazette

So Much of What We 'Know' About Addiction Treatment Is Wrong
Showing addicts how to inject drugs safely preserves addicts' health and saves lives — while alcoholics follow brief advice to drink less. Can this be true? Here is some information that might make … inner workings of harm reduction for injecting …
Read more on Huffington Post

Jets QB opens up about his ongoing battle with drug addiction and mental illness
The Washington U. study was commissioned by ESPN, with additional funding by the National Institute on Drug Abuse., and published in the international medical journal, Drug and Alcohol Dependence.Tags: NFL, OTL, Outside The Lines, Painkillers, John …
Read more on ESPN (blog)

West Virginia Poison Center offers holiday safety advice
CHARLESTON — The Fourth of July is a holiday often filled with family, friends, fireworks, food, and fun, but the West Virginia Poison Center wants to remind residents of ways to stay poison safe during their holiday festivities. According to … Keep …
Read more on Exponent-telegram

Forced marijuana treatment: an economic boon for the addiction industry?
A new advocacy group called SAM (Smarter Approach to Marijuana), co-founded by Patrick J. Kennedy, a former congressman and self-admitted alcohol and oxycodone addict, proposes treating marijuana use in the following manner: “Possession or use of a …
Read more on San Francisco Chronicle (blog)

Treatment for heroin addiction is available, for a price
An addict might go through detox and treatment, but upon release, the person's depression — the most common mental illness connected with substance abuse — isn't treated. As a result, the addict often ends up relapsing in an attempt to self-medicate.
Read more on phillyBurbs.com

Avinza Addiction Treatment and Avinza Drug Rehab Center Announced
At the core of their philosophy is the belief that Avinza addiction is a treatable illness. Their addiction treatment experience has shown that anyone is capable of achieving lasting recovery and physical, mental and spiritual freedom from the disease …
Read more on PR Web (press release)

Addicts in West Virginia not getting the help they need
While an estimated 22 per 100,000 West Virginia residents die from drug overdoses (compared to 18 per 100,000 nationwide), the Mountain State does not have enough treatment and rehabilitation services for addicts who want to stay clean, according to …
Read more on The Logan Banner