Agenda 05-06-25; 6-a - Opioid Advisory Committee Settlement Fund Use Recommendations

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113 D. Organizational Readiness All awards received by the SHAC SSP are fiscally administered by IPRC. IPRC's mission is to build the field of injury and violence prevention through interdisciplinary research and the training of the next generation of researchers and practitioners. IPRC is one of eleven Injury Control Research Centers (ICRC) funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and is one of two ICRCs to be continuously funded since the program's inception in 1987. Since July 2023, IPRC has successfully been awarded and managed over$4 million in external funding. IPRC has excellent resources to administer externally funded projects and administers a multitude of contracts and grants whose projects require sophisticated levels of support. IPRC's administrative support for funded projects consists of such tasks as personnel actions (hiring and payments), purchasing, travel administration, accounting, financial management, and reporting to sponsor agencies. IPRC currently administers SHAC SSP's Orange County Opioid Settlement Fund award. To date, we have successfully met all reporting and compliance requirements outlined in our contract with Orange County. No subcontractors will be involved in the proposed work. All proposed and ongoing SSP work is done by student co-directors, student volunteers, and the program navigator. Grant management is performed by members of IPRC in conjunction with SHAC SSP co-directors and program navigator, as established in the prior funded period. We have demonstrated organizational readiness during our prior grant period of Orange County Opioid Settlement Funding by successfully managing the award in conjunction with IPRC, providing progress reports and compliance requirements as stipulated by Orange County, delivering information to community members in respectful and ever-adapting ways, and promoting health of underserved and vulnerable populations in Orange County that are prioritized for this funding source. Due to the student-led and -staffed nature of SHAC SSP, we are in a unique situation as many similar organizations are run by people with lived and living experience with substance use. While many of our volunteers may have personal or witnessed experience with drug use, we do not assume or necessarily know if our primarily undergraduate and medical student volunteer base has lived experience with drug use unless they share this with us. Therefore, input from people who use drugs is something that we are striving to better incorporate into our program and has been a primary focus as we seek to improve our program. Firstly, we have hired a program navigator who also staffs an additional SSP that is run by people with lived and living experience. She is able to incorporate insights from her work at this program to ensure that we are delivering information and supplies in a way that is both empowering and helpful. As an institutional principle we also believe strongly in compensation for work and are seeking to implement paid participant surveys to evaluate the success of our program and help us fill gaps in the resources we provide. We are also planning to develop a Community Advisory Board (CAB) composed of individuals with lived experience with SUD to inform evaluation and future directions of our program. These individuals will be compensated for their time and input, with structured meetings with SSP leadership and the CAB on a regular basis with additional consulting as needed. A strength of our program from our unique background is the diversity of viewpoints of our members: we have volunteers from all parts of the university, including undergraduates, public health students, nursing and dental students, and medical students. Our volunteers are