Claire Fiddian-Green is the President & CEO of the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recently released a report showing that new Hepatitis C cases in the U.S. grew by nearly 300 percent between 2010 and 2015. The root cause of this dramatic increase is the opioid epidemic – specifically, the use of needles to inject heroin and prescription painkillers. Unfortunately, Indiana is one of seven states with rates of Hepatitis C infection at least twice the national average. This week, the Indiana State Department of Health released a county-level report detailing the broad and devastating toll of the opioid crisis in Indiana. The picture in […]

Alex Cohen is the Director of Learning and Evaluation for the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation. The opioid epidemic, and related behavioral and mental health issues, is wreaking havoc in the lives of Hoosiers across the state and in Marion County in particular. To help address the crisis, the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation is making strategic grants to expand access to treatment for those struggling with addiction. It’s important to our Foundation and the people these grants are designed to help that we target our grants to areas of greatest need, which we do by tracking several key metrics related to access to treatment. One metric we monitor is the behavioral […]