Portland's Alano Club expands naloxone access with new Project Red funding

Portland’s Alano Club is dedicated to helping people recover from alcoholism, addiction and mental health disorders. It serves 10,000 people a month with meetings, classes, workshops and other activities and programs. Founded in 1947, it’s the oldest and largest such recovery nonprofit in the country.

Several years ago, a participant in its programs decided to start bringing naloxone from the Alano Club and distribute it to bars and restaurants whenever she could. When the executive director got wind of this effort, he immediately began writing grants and invited her to run a formal program to provide naloxone to communities all over the state. Those initial efforts became Project Red, which now works with organizations in all 36 Oregon counties to get the life-saving medicine to as many people as possible. Like many 501-C3s, it lost a significant portion of federal funding, which nearly ended the program. But recent grants from Boulder Care and Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy Foundation have enabled the expansion of the program and guaranteed its operations through 2027.

Kasey Anderson is the executive director of the Alano Club of Portland. He joins us to tell us more about the nonprofit’s work and how Project Red became integral to distributing naloxone throughout Oregon.

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