Our History

The Community of Practice Rural Community Opioid Response Program (CoP-RCORP) Master Consortium was formed in 2018 when Ohio University’s Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Service (OU-VS) and the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation (PIRE) were both awarded $200,000 Rural Community Opioid Response Planning (RCORP-Planning) grants from the Health Resources and Service Administration (HRSA) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. With approval from HRSA, OU-VS and PIRE used a formal shared services agreement to braid the funding of these grants, allowing five Counties to be funded: Ashtabula, Fairfield, Sandusky, Seneca, and Washington Counties. Washington County participated as part of the COP-RCORP Consortium until 2020.

In addition to the COP-RCORP Master Consortium that provides cross-community leadership and management oversight for project activities, each community also has a community-specific consortium that localizes grant activities within each of the COP-RCORP Counties.

The work of the COP-RCORP Consortium has been supported by a series of grants from HRSA through the Rural Communities Opioid Response Program.

RCORP-Planning Grants (G25RH32459 and G25RH32461) to both OU-VS and PIRE allowed the five original COP-RCORP communities to create local consortia and to create comprehensive, data-informed plans for addressing the opioid epidemic in their communities.

RCORP-Implementation Grants (GA1RH33529 and GA1RH33532) to both OU-VS and PIRE allowed Ashtabula, Fairfield, Sandusky, and Seneca Counties to work across prevention, treatment and recovery to implement their plans as part of comprehensive community-level approaches to addressing the opioid epidemic.

RCORP-Psychostimulant Grants (H7N42563 and H7N45748) to both OU-VS and PIRE allowed Fairfield, Sandusky, and Seneca Counties to complement their opioid response work by adding in prevention, treatment and recovery activities designed to address growing issues with psychostimulants. These grants were especially helpful in ensuring that efforts to address psychostimulants were integrated with ongoing work to address opioids.

The COP-RCORP Consortia currently are supported by a RCORP-Behavioral Health Supports Grant (G2846290) to OU-VS. This grant has allowed COP-RCORP communities to sustain work on opioids and psychostimulants while broadening efforts to include work to address a wider array of behavioral health issues. As part of this grant, the COP-RCORP Consortia are most proud of work to support maternal mental health and to diffuse the HRSA’s National Maternal Mental Health throughout Ashtabula, Fairfield, Sandusky, and Seneca Counties. This grant also has supported focused work in each community to support workplaces in applying for and receiving Ohio’s Recovery Friendly Workplace designation.