BUILDING COMMUNITY VOICES INTO PROGRAMMING| 1 

Building Community Voices into Programming

Like many communities across Massachusetts, towns in Franklin County and the North Quabbin 

region have been struggling with a decade-long opioid crisis. Between 2012 and 2022, 198 

people in Franklin County died of opioid-related overdoses.1

 Data from one local hospital 

suggests that between 2015 and 2018, “about one in five (19%) area residents admitted to the 

hospital...had a substance use disorder diagnosis.”2

In 2019, prevention providers with the Franklin County and the North Quabbin Region 

Communities That Care (CTC) Coalition became concerned about the epidemic’s impact on 

young children who lived in families affected by substance use disorder (SUD). They applied for—

and received—a SAMHSA-funded State Opioid Response-Prevention in Early Childhood (SORPEC) grant to support early intervention. 

Four years on, the SOR-PEC grant has helped the Coalition 

achieve some important goals. One has been the selection 

and implementation of Brazelton Touchpoints, a program 

that trains early childhood providers to destigmatize their 

services when working with families affected by SUD and 

trauma. Far from being a top-down decision, the selection 

of Touchpoints was the result of a deliberate and thoughtful 

collaborative process that centered the perspectives of 

people with lived experience in the community. 

Leigh-Ellen Figueroa, the SOR-PEC grant coordinator, puts it 

simply: “Collaboration is a hallmark of everything we do.”

Leigh-Ellen Figueroa speaking at the Communities 

That Care full coalition meeting in the fall of 2022.
 BUILDING COMMUNITY VOICES INTO PROGRAMMING| 2 

TIPS FOR SUCCESS 

Build on Existing Partnerships 

Confronting an issue as complicated as substance misuse takes sustained efforts over time. One 

of the factors working in Franklin County’s favor, says Figueroa, was a long history of 

collaboration among educators, first responders, and other community members on prevention 

activities, sparked by the needs of youth in the late 1990s. 

“Early on, the prevention community formed these core collaborative partnerships with the 

sheriff’s office, the school districts, the early childhood care providers,” she says. The CTC 

Coalition was one; another was the Early Childhood Mental Health Roundtable (ECMHR), which 

brings together a wide range of health and education providers to advocate for evidence-based, 

culturally competent services that support families. 

These partnerships have become critical, trusted players in the region’s efforts to promote 

health and wellness. The ECMHR has representatives from early intervention services, Head Start 

programs, community health centers, and substance misuse task forces. Meanwhile, the CTC 

Coalition has established a number of workgroups that reach deep into the community, including 

a Parent and Family Engagement Workgroup, a Racial Justice Workgroup, and a Regional School 

Health Task Force. Because of these outreach and inclusion efforts, both partnerships have 

become trusted messengers in the community. 

So, when it came time to create a Core Planning Team (CPT) to administer the SOR-PEC grant, it 

was natural to appoint members from these two experienced, well-connected groups. 

“Each group had a slightly different focus, but our goals were 

the same—to improve youth health and wellness and to 

address health equity in Franklin County and in the North 

Quabbin,” says Figueroa.

Acknowledge Critical Gaps 

Figueroa was part of the original four-person CPT that was tasked with identifying potential 

prevention programs. They began the process by conducting focus groups, interviewing 

stakeholders, and examining regional health data to better understand the need. 
 BUILDING COMMUNITY VOICES INTO PROGRAMMING| 3 

It was during this process that Figueroa and other members of the team realized that an 

important voice was missing from the CPT: people with lived experience. Through their 

interviews and other data collection efforts, the CPT learned about the many interrelated 

challenges that families affected by SUD had to confront, including housing insecurity, poverty, 

and unstable childcare arrangements. Yet none of those first-hand experiences were present on 

the CPT. 

“All of us on the core planning team were in similar life positions,” says Figueroa. 

“We were looking at the issue through a myopic lens. We 

needed to have more voices of folks who were actually living 

these struggles right now, in this moment, helping guide our 

work. We needed more parents on this team—more people 

who were utilizing these services to weigh in on what we were 

doing with these funds.”

To identify these people with lived experience, the CPT reached out to CTC’s PEER Ambassador 

Program, which trains parents and caregivers with diverse life experiences to be community 

resources and outreach leaders. She explained that the CPT was trying to better understand and 

address the impact of SUD, and that they wanted to expand the team to be more inclusive. 

Three new people, including two PEER Ambassadors, volunteered 

to join the team. The expanded CPT now featured a much broader 

set of social identities among participants, including people in 

recovery, parents who had experienced poverty, parents of 

children with a disability, grandparents serving as primary 

caregivers, and people who had experienced housing instability. 

Together, this diversity of lived experiences provided the team 

with a broader set of perspectives as they assessed community 

needs, resources, and assets. 

Make Meetings Inclusive 

Being inclusive means welcoming all people and their experiences. 

Figueroa recognizes that people without an advanced degree in 

Students and teachers discussing global 

connectedness and cultural connections in a 

Restorative Practices training at Pioneer 

Valley Regional High School.
 BUILDING COMMUNITY VOICES INTO PROGRAMMING| 4 

public health make valuable contributions to the conversation—and she wants them present and 

vocal in the meetings where community health issues are being discussed. 

Inclusive meetings require that everyone acknowledges that there are different sources of 

knowledge in the room. So Figueroa bristles when she is in a meeting where any public health 

expert corrects the vocabulary of any community member. She believes that action can cause 

shame; it is also a subtle indication that someone does not belong in the conversation. 

Figueroa feels strongly about this because she remembers how difficult it can be to enter spaces 

that are not designed with you in mind. 

“I was a mom who was on WIC and food stamps and fuel assistance. I didn't have an education. I 

went to community college when I was a single parent and had to pull myself up out of that with 

very little help,” she says. “Fifteen years ago, I was that person that we're sitting in meetings 

talking about now.”

One of the ways to be more inclusive is to re-think how meetings are structured. 

“What we—people in the position of power and in the position of agency—tend to value is 

agendas and data and outcomes and charts,” says Figueroa. “But you have to make space for 

people to share their experiences in genuine ways that don't always fit with the agenda. Because 

if you keep pushing your agenda, no one's going to show up. Why would anyone tell you their 

truth?”

Commit to Shared Decision-Making 

Centering the voices of people with lived experience requires listening and learning over time. It 

also means creating the space for participants to have a voice in decision-making. It’s not enough 

to convene a focus group and then make programmatic decisions behind closed doors, an 

approach Figueroa describes as “extractive.” 

“We talk a lot about not being a grasstops organization but being a grassroots organization,” says 

Figueroa. “So, whenever it feels like there's a lot of people who are just decision-makers, and not 

enough people who are from the communities that we’re working with, then we really try to 

make a change.”

To avoid taking an “extractive” approach, CPT members engaged in ongoing conversations about 

the needs of caregivers with the PEER Ambassadors Program and the CTC’s Racial Justice 
 BUILDING COMMUNITY VOICES INTO PROGRAMMING| 5 

Workgroup. These conversations revealed the acute need for a training program for early 

childhood providers that centered on stigma-free and anti-racist approaches. 

Don’t Expect Partners to Always Come to You 

Despite their commitment to creative, inclusive spaces, Figueroa and her colleagues continued 

to hear that participation in CTC Coalition meetings could feel intimidating, as many community 

members lacked a background in public health and were 

unfamiliar with the formal language that prevention specialists 

used to discuss substance misuse. 

To address this challenge, members of the CPT looked to join 

existing conversations in the community rather than inviting 

people to come to them. 

Entering into new spaces to learn, rather 

than asking community members to come 

to their meetings, helped build trust and 

understanding. It also helped broker an honest collaboration 

among all groups where everyone, regardless of their formal 

education, felt that they could contribute. 

REFERENCES 

1 Massachusetts Department of Public Health. (June 2023). Number of Opioid-Related Overdose Deaths, All 

Intents by County, MA Residents: 2012-2022. https://www.mass.gov/doc/opioid-related-overdosedeaths-by-county-june-2023/download 

2 Baystate Health Board of Trustees. (2019). 2019 Community Health Needs Assessment. 

https://www.baystatehealth.org/-/media/files/about-us/community-programs/communitybenefits/2019-community-health-needs-assessments/baystate-franklin-2019-chna-report-final-web.pdf 

SPTAC@edc.org | samhsa.gov/SPTAC

Leigh-Ellen Figueroa and Keyedrya Jacobs 

from CTC, gather with other participants for a 

roundtable discussion at the June OD2A 

conference in Atlanta, GA.