AKRON, Ohio — Nearly three years after it first formed, the OneOhio Recovery Foundation announced Wednesday its first grant recipients to utilize Ohio's opioid drug settlement money.
OneOhio has been tasked with handling and distributing much of the money received from lawsuit settlements with opioid manufacturers and distributors.
Grant applications are currently being reviewed across the state, however, some regions of OneOhio, including Summit County, were ready to begin awarding grants to seven entities.
Region 5, which makes up of Summit County, announced the following recipients:
"Some have chosen to really focus on how we can impact kids and families who been impacted by the epidemic," OneOhio Executive Director Alisha Nelson explained. "Others have focused on recovery supports and making sure housing, transportation and some of those needed peer supports are developed."
Nelson added that a major component of targeting funding will also focus on future prevention.
"We want to make sure that this doesn't impact another family," she added. "We're talking to them about targeted evidence based prevention. It's going to be exciting to see how those programs really grow and support our communities."
Nelson emphasized that these are merely the first recipients in this first round. More recipients in Summit County and across Ohio are set to be announced in the near future.
In total, OneOhio expects to distribute $51 million in this round of grants, ideally by the end of the year.
So far, OneOhio has received $223.4 million from the national opioid settlements and the bankruptcy of Mallinckrodt. In total, OneOhio is slated to receive more than $800 million through 2034.
RELATED: How Ohio is handling the billions in opioid manufacturer and distributor settlement money
"We received our first funds last year and as soon as we received those funds, we put a plan into place to really activate the 19 regions across Ohio," Nelson said. "[The regions] really are the decision makers of how these funds will impact their communities."
Among those first recipients is China Darrington and her team at the Summit Recovery Hub, an Akron nonprofit drop-in peer support center, meant to help those dealing with substance use and mental health disorders.
Their $250,000 grant will go toward allow them to expand by adding transportation options as well as growing their physical footprint.
"That’s going to allow us to double our physical size so we can accommodate the larger groups we are now drawing," Darrington said. "Our initial thought was we were going to serve 600 people in our first 12 months. We just did our reporting for our last quarter and we have 1,597 recovery contacts in 90 days."
In addition, projects in Montgomery County and Northwestern Ohio were also approved.
The foundation’s nonprofit status, board members said to News 5, is to avoid what happened when the state settled with big tobacco companies in 1998.
Back then, legislators diverted much of those funds away from tobacco prevention and put them in the state’s general fund.
"We wanted to make sure the funds stayed with the issue," Nelson explained. "It's going to be important that they go to those initiatives that are focused on ending this crisis. But then, also sustaining those programs to make sure that we prevent this from ever happening again."
To learn more about the OneOhio Foundation, click here.
Clay LePard is a special projects reporter at News 5 Cleveland. Follow him on Twitter @ClayLePard or on Facebook Clay LePard News 5.
Download the News 5 Cleveland app now for more stories from us, plus alerts on major news, the latest weather forecast, traffic information and much more. Download now on your Apple device here, and your Android device here.
You can also catch News 5 Cleveland on Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, YouTube TV, DIRECTV NOW, Hulu Live and more. We're also on Amazon Alexa devices. Learn more about our streaming options here.
