In early 2021 amidst the frenzy of distributing the COVID-19 vaccine across the country, my husband (Dr. Kweku Hazel) and I were securing doses for the underserved BIPOC and immigrant communities in our home city of Aurora, Colorado. In this reflection, I’ll discuss the work Kweku and I accomplished through our community outreach group The Gyedi Project, providing resources and support to our community to ensure a more equitable rollout of the vaccine in Aurora. I’ll also detail important lessons we learned that can be replicated for successful community outreach in other cities, especially now with surging cases due to the Delta variant.

At OMNI, when faced with a question, we rely heavily on our core value of Inquiry. Inquiry for us doesn't only mean hitting the books and academic journals but searching for answers and learning from our clients and partners, especially when discussing equity and a community's historical context. We recently developed a resource for the Virginia State Epidemiological Outcomes Workgroup (SEOW) that highlighted the concept of health disparities and how data can be used to recognize, understand, and reduce health disparities in Virginia. As we began our work, what seemed like a straightforward question, how to define and visualize health disparity, turned out to be much more complicated, and so we turned to the SEOW members for guidance. Deriving the appropriate definition for this resource taught us a great deal about both the concept of health disparities itself and a powerful lesson about our roles as evaluators and researchers.

Planning, designing, organizing, scheduling -- in our work, preparation sets a project up for success. So, when OMNI began working with Adams County, Colorado in January 2020 to design and administer their 2020 CSBG data collection in March, we had all the components set, including plans for in-person surveys and focus groups across multiple community-based settings. However, when COVID-19 made in-person data collection impossible, we leaned heavily on our core values to reimagine the work in a way that would still deliver great results to our client and keep community participants and OMNI staff safe.

In September and October of 2020, OMNI was contracted by the North West Prevention Technology and Transfer Center (NWPTTC), covering Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, to provide a two-part training series on health equity as it relates to the public health and substance use disorder field. The NW PTTC is funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration federal agency and serves as a primary training and technical assistance (TTA) resource to the states listed above by leveraging the knowledge of prevention science with the application of community capacity-building, workforce development, and expertise in knowledge transfer mechanisms.

In 2018, NPX Advisors (NPX) reimagined funding in the nonprofit sector by introducing the Impact Security, a private pay-for-success model. The pay-for-success model has most commonly been used with government funding; investors provide money up front to a nonprofit, and if the nonprofit meets the targeted impact, the government pays the investors back with interest. With the Impact Security, if the impact is proven, a collection of donors pays the investors; if the impact is not proven, however, the donors instead redeploy their money into a new pledge. This model blends together traditional forms of investment in the nonprofit and for-profit sectors and provides a more flexible vehicle of investing in the nonprofit sector.

In 2010, the Colorado Division of Criminal Justice (DCJ) began an in-depth effort to evaluate the Statewide Juvenile Diversion Program. The Program provides funding to multiple community-based programs and District Attorneys’ Office-based programs across the state that are focused on preventing further justice system involvement for youth with first-time, low level offenses. Youth who participate in juvenile diversion receive a range of services targeted at risk and protective factors with the aim of increasing accountability and reducing likelihood of future delinquency.

The Northeast Colorado Health Department (NCHD) partnered with OMNI to conduct an opioid and substance use regional assessment of Health Statistics Region 1 (HSR1), the catchment area which NCHD serves. HSR1 is located in the northeast corner of Colorado and consists of Logan, Morgan, Phillips, Sedgwick, Washington, and Yuma Counties. The goal of this regional assessment was to comprehensively assess opioid and substance misuse within HSR1's six counties to provide data for NCHD to use in deciding in how best to strengthen community collaboration and strategic planning to address these challenges.

When COVID-19 proliferated across the United States in March, the Commonwealth of Virginia enacted a stay-at-home order and all in-person substance use prevention efforts were halted. As a part of our longstanding evaluation efforts of Virginia’s prevention programs, OMNI, in partnership with the Virginia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services (DBHDS) Office of Behavioral Health Wellness (OBHW) quickly developed a survey to better understand how the pandemic, the stay-at-home order, and the shift to virtual work were impacting the provision of prevention services across the Commonwealth.

With the support of State Opioid Response grant funding, Universities across Virginia are working to change this dynamic with Collegiate Recovery Programs (CRP), which are on-campus communities specialized for students in recovery. CRPs provide services and supportive spaces that address the entire range of student needs.

The Colorado Coalition for the Homeless recently released the 2020 Point-in-Time (PIT) results, showing that 840 individuals were experiencing homelessness on the night of the count in the Balance of the State region- covering 54 non-metro and rural counties of Colorado. This includes all counties outside of metro Denver (Adams, Arapahoe, Boulder, Broomfield, Denver, Douglas, and Jefferson County), Colorado Springs (El Paso County), and Northern Colorado (Larimer and Weld County).

September is National Recovery Month. In this blog we dive into the world of peer recovery specialists. Peer recovery specialists, often referred to as "peers," are individuals with lived experience of substance use, mental health, or co-occurring disorders who provide support to those who are coping with similar diagnoses. Relationships between peer supporters and the individuals who receive peer services are based on mutuality, agency, and empowerment.

Facilitated by OMNI, The Virginia State Epidemiological Outcomes Workgroup (SEOW) is developing a set of data spotlights to feature behavioral health-related data sources across the state. The goal of the data spotlights is to support Virginia's substance use prevention, treatment, and recovery efforts.

Last October, OMNI's Quantitative Best Practice Team launched an initiative to use the programming language and statistical software R for analysis, reporting, and visualization. As we discussed in a previous blog, we were excited about R's wide-ranging capabilities and the possibility of streamlining our processes by combining the functionality of several other software programs. Over the last year, we used R in many projects across our work. Here are highlights of how R has informed our work and impacted our clients.

The COVID-19 pandemic has and will continue to have far-reaching impacts beyond the immediate concern of virus contraction and related deaths. Current research has shown that vulnerable populations not only face a higher risk of COVID-19 contraction, but also repercussions related to economic stature, housing stability, food security, educational equity, and much more.1-4 These repercussions not only have devastating implications for widening existing disparities, but they also increase the risk for negative behavioral health outcomes, including both substance abuse and mental health challenges.5

In response to this inequity, Impact Charitable established the Left Behind Workers Fund (LBWF) to provide direct cash grants of $1,000 to those who have lost employment due to COVID-19 but remain ineligible for state and federal aid. The LBWF designed a model to partner with local nonprofits across the state to disperse payments directly to undocumented Colorado families in need.

In this blog we spotlight the agility of one of our clients, the Women’s Foundation of Colorado, in their response to the unforeseen challenges COVID-19 has presented to their grant recipients and community. By taking a systemic and intersectional approach that looks at race, gender, and class, WFCO centers equity in its strategic grant-making and serves as a model for how philanthropy can advance equity.

Black lives matter.

Police brutality is systemic and unjustifiable.

All people deserve basic human rights and must be treated with dignity and humanity.

To promote cross-collaboration and help break down data silos, OMNI schedules data presentations at each of the quarterly SEOW meeting. One SEOW member presents to the group on the information they collect, including data collection methods, context, overarching trends, benefits and limitations of the data, and use and external access. OMNI then takes information from these presentations to develop a one-page data spotlight which outlines:

As the Director of Learning and Development at OMNI, part of my work includes helping our staff and clients facilitate effective, engaging meetings. Virtual meetings are the new normal and facilitation is just as important to online environments as they are to in-persons meetings. Below are some of our top tips to support a successful remote/virtual facilitation.

As social science researchers, we often need to glean information from the communities we serve, and one of the best tools for this is survey collection and in-person interviews. COVID-19 put an abrupt stop to our in-person survey collection efforts and has required us to adapt quickly to meet project and client needs while keeping our staff and community members safe.