Organization Also Awarded $812,000 Grant
Rockbridge Recovery, a community-based recovery organization serving Rockbridge County, Buena Vista and Lexington, has been recognized by the Virginia Opioid Abatement Authority (OAA) as a statewide model for how community-based organizations and local government can join forces to confront the opioid epidemic.
At the inaugural Virginia Recovery Conference — held June 15–17 at the historic Hotel Roanoke and hosted by the OAA’s nonprofit foundation — Lori Turner, who serves as the executive director of the Community Foundation for Rockbridge, Bath, and Alleghany, was invited to present “Bridging the Gap: Community-Based Organizations and Local Government,” a session the OAA selected specifically to be shared with localities across the commonwealth as an example of how the work should be done.
The recognition arrives alongside the OAA’s approval of the FY2027 Cooperative Partnership grant supporting Rockbridge Recovery at the full requested amount of $812,458.61 — a vote of confidence in a partnership model that pairs the reach and authority of local government with the lived-experience credibility and low-barrier services of a community recovery organization.
Under the award, the city of Buena Vista serves as the fiscal agent, and the Community Foundation for Rockbridge, Bath, and Alleghany as the sub-recipient and project manager. Turner, who wrote and manages the grant, presented it in Roanoke on the Foundation’s behalf.
Of the four general sessions and 20 breakout sessions featured at the sold-out statewide gathering, Rockbridge Recovery’s was held up as proof that a small, rural community can build something replicable and durable from a finite stream of opioid settlement dollars.
Rockbridge Recovery was launched in 2022 with early organizational support from the Community Foundation for Rockbridge, Bath, and Alleghany, and today operates as an independent organization governed by its own board of directors. The application itself reflected deep community buyin: ahead of any opioid-settlement dollars, Turner secured 54 percent of the project’s required match locally.
“This recognition belongs to an entire community that chose to work together instead of in silos,” said Jeri Schaff, board chair of Rockbridge Recovery. “What began as a local effort to help our neighbors has become a model other Virginia communities can learn from. Our board could not be prouder of the partners who made that possible, or of the people in recovery whose lives are the real measure of this work.”
For decades, the people most at risk in the opioid epidemic have fallen through a gap that no single system was built to close, explained Turner.
Community-based organizations provide the recovery housing, peer support, and human connection that sustain longterm recovery — but they do not run the jails, the courts, or the emergency response that so often mark the first and most dangerous touchpoints of addiction. Local government holds those levers but rarely has the trust, flexibility, or lived experience to meet people where they are, she continued. When those two worlds operate in separate lanes, individuals are handed from one cold referral to the next, and too many are lost in the handoff — most tragically in the deadly window immediately after release from incarceration, when overdose risk spikes, she said.
Rockbridge Recovery’s partnership exists to close that gap. Rather than operating in parallel with local government, the organization has built a single, coordinated continuum of care alongside the city of Buena Vista, the city of Lexington, Rockbridge County, the regional jail, local law enforcement, and the Maury River Recovery Court.
Peer recovery specialists — people with their own lived experience of recovery — are positioned at the precise moments of highest risk: reentry from incarceration, post-overdose follow-up, and court involvement.
What follows is a warm handoff rather than a dropped one, and a recovery-oriented response rather than a criminalizationonly one, Turner said. Each partner contributes what it does best, and shared accountability replaces fragmented effort. “That breadth is the heart of why the model travels: the effort behind it drew 34 community partnerships and 16 letters of support to the OAA — a coalition spanning local government, the courts, law enforcement, health care, and the recovery community, and the kind of broad ownership any locality could set out to build,” said Turner.
That integrated, partneraligned approach is what the OAA chose to elevate to a statewide audience.
The opioid settlement funds flowing to Virginia’s communities are significant but not limitless and will not last forever, Turner said.
The question facing every locality is not simply how to spend the money, but how to build something that outlasts it. Rockbridge Recovery, she said, demonstrates an answer: partnerships, not one-off programs; shared infrastructure, not isolated services; and measurable outcomes that justify continued investment. It is a structure designed to survive changes in grant cycles, leadership, or budgets — because it is jointly owned by the community and its government, not by any single office or personality.
The model carries particular weight for rural Virginia, continued Turner. Communities like Buena Vista, Lexington and Rockbridge County face the opioid crisis with fewer providers, longer distances to treatment, and thinner margins than their urban counterparts.
By pooling resources and aligning systems, the partnership multiplies what limited dollars can accomplish: recovery housing in two VARR-, NARR-, and DBHDS-certified residences; peer support that builds the trust government alone cannot; transportation that removes one of the most stubborn barriers to care in a rural region; and harm-reduction services that keep people alive long enough to find recovery.
“The city of Buena Vista is proud to serve as both a partner and the fiscal agent for this work,” said Wayne Handley, interim city manager for Buena Vista. “When local government and a community organization share the same table and the same accountability, public dollars stretch further and more lives are changed. We are honored that the commonwealth sees what we have built together as a model worth following.”
“Here in Rockbridge, we were honored that the Opioid Abatement Authority asked us to share our story with the entire commonwealth,” said Turner.
