This morning I attended a long Medfield Care About Prevention (MCAP) meeting at Medfield High School at which Dawn Alcott, the director of the Medfield Youth Outreach office, and her team presented their plan to apply for a five year $625,000 ($125,000 a year for five years) federal grant to address substance abuse in Medfield. The goal would be to change the community culture.
The availability of the grant monies was a recent surprise happening, and as a result the team is scrambling to get the grant application submitted within the next three weeks. This morning the team filled the twelve required slots on the coalition mandated by the grant. I was asked to be the representative from a “local … agency with expertise in the field of substance abuse,” based upon my being a Medfield selectman with a twenty year history as a member of the Riverside Community Care board, including five as its president. During my tenure with Riverside Community Care, Riverside grew from about a $36,000 per year vendor to the state using borrow state staff into a $30 m. per year community mental health center. In the fifteen years since I left its board, Riverside has doubled in size.
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