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.

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.

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.

Welcome to the final part of our series in which we share findings from year one of Virginia’s State Opioid Response (SOR) Grant. This week, we continue our series with a look at progress related to Virginia's recovery efforts. We also share reflections on how recovery services agencies and Peer Recovery Specialists have responded to the emerging COVID-19 crisis, and how their work has quickly adapted to avoid disruptions in recovery services.

As our daily lives are rapidly changing, leaders are being stretched to new lengths in their effectiveness, approach, and decision making. To be an effective leader, one must be agile during times of crisis and rely on their emotional intelligence to meet the needs of their followers.

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are facing unprecedented times characterized by social distancing-- business and school closures, panic shopping, and entire cities on lockdown-- the collective of which has virtually upended every facet of our lives. The enormous cognitive load involved in processing what is happening around us is causing a form of shared trauma that our society hasn’t felt for generations.

Welcome to part two in a four-part series in which we share findings from year one of Virginia’s State Opioid Response (SOR) Grant. This week, we continue our series with a look at progress related to Virginia's prevention efforts. We also share reflections on how prevention practitioners have responded to the emerging COVID-19 crisis, and how their work has quickly adapted to continue to deliver high quality prevention services in the midst of a rapidly changing environment.

Epidemiology curves, outbreak maps, and line graphs of the volatile stock market are flashing across the news and my social media feeds at a breakneck pace these days. The constant updates on the COVID-19 pandemic have made me think a lot about the role data and data visualizations are playing in this public health emergency. As an evaluator working in public and behavioral health, I look at data