Featured Grantee

Mendonoma Health Alliance

The Mendonoma Opioid Response Consortium (MORC) is a group of rural and non-rural partners working to serve the isolated region comprising the southern coastal region of Mendocino County and northern coastal region of Sonoma County. MORC includes over a dozen clinical and non-clinical partners, including a federally qualified health center (FQHC), emergency medical services (EMS) agency, a Level II trauma center, telemedicine, and palliative care. The lead agency for this consortium is Mendonoma Health Alliance. Encompassing a 60-mile service area, the region served by MORC is one of the most rural in California, with only about 6,500 sparsely located residents.

From the center of the service area (Gualala), there is no pharmacy, hospital, social services, public health department, law enforcement, or public transportation for almost two hours in any direction. There is one FQHC available for the entire area, and the clinic has only two part-time medication for opioid use disorder (MOUD) providers. We are federally designated as a “Frontier” community, Medically Underserved Population, and Medical Provider Shortage Area. These challenges have created an environment of resiliency for service providers and has required deep collaboration to better care for our residents.

After conducting a 2019 Opioid Response Need Assessment, we discovered that approximately 12 percent of our community is experiencing addiction to one or more substances. With virtually nowhere to go for help, our consortium realized the importance of working quickly to pull together resources and create a safety net for navigating the complex healthcare system in our bi-county community. As a result, we have successfully identified pathways for treatment options. Additionally, we have built our own peer recovery program and implemented an annual prevention education program in all of the eight local schools using the nation’s first harm reduction-based drug education curriculum, the Drug Policy Alliance’s Safety First curriculum. We have also worked really hard to create data collection systems that strengthen our consortium’s ability to retrieve data demonstrating their work and have used the results of our PIMS reports to tell a bigger story through what we have coined the Community Snapshot.

And finally, our most well-known initiative by the entire service area and beyond is our anti-stigma campaign #overcomingaddiction, which is a compilation of videos, blog posts, and print materials featuring people in recovery from diverse backgrounds, health care providers, EMS providers, and community health workers. A video highlighting our anti-stigma campaign can be found here on YouTube. The campaign is featured at the top of this article. 

The campaign tells inspiring, compassionate, and compelling stories from real people in the community in an effort to help people understand addiction and create pathways for those struggling with addiction to seek help.

Our consortium is planning the launch of a mobile health clinic that will deliver primary care, screenings, and harm reduction services to the most underserved regions of our community. The clinic will use providers, community paramedics, and community health workers to deliver wrap-around services.