Coalition Building for Prevention Funding
A Training-First, Sustainability-Driven Model for Building Rural Coalitions into Federal Grant Awardees
The Arkansas Opioid Recovery Partnership invested $325,000 in opioid settlement funds across 13 local coalitions, each receiving $25,000, paired with intensive training, national coalition exposure through CADCA, and grant writers. To create the Arkansas Opioid Academy, separate funding of $211,607 was invested by ARORP with CADCA. The program positioned rural and small Arkansas coalitions to compete for the federal Drug-Free Communities grant, and 7 of the 13 won awards totaling roughly $4.3 million. Cumulative follow-on awards may bring approximately $13.1 million of federal prevention funding back into Arkansas communities.
The Challenge They Were Addressing
Arkansas structured its opioid settlement differently from most states. One third of the roughly $350 million sixteen-year payout goes to the state attorney general. The other two-thirds was pooled by the state's cities and counties, which created the Arkansas Opioid Recovery Partnership to administer those funds locally and outside of state agency bureaucracy. Leadership came in with years of prior state experience and knew firsthand what had slowed earlier substance use efforts.
Across rural Arkansas, community coalitions existed but were scattered, undertrained, and disconnected from one another. Many had been operating for years without realizing they were functioning as coalitions at all, meeting in churches or community centers with law enforcement, schools, banks, and local businesses at the table, but with no formal structure, no shared language, and no pathway into federal prevention funding. Overdose deaths were climbing. State dollars had been pouring into the same channels for years without moving the numbers.
ARORP's leaders saw a narrow opening. The federal Drug Free Communities (DFC) grant could sustain a coalition for up to ten years, but small and rural Arkansas coalitions had no realistic path to win it on their own. They lacked 501(c)(3) status or the right partnership, lacked grant-writing capacity, and had never been through the kind of structured training that produces a competitive application. A relatively small opioid settlement investment, paired with the right training infrastructure and technical assistance, could change that.
What They Built
The Coalition Partnership Empowerment Project is a two-phase model. Phase one, which happens before coalitions ever see their award dollars, builds a statewide training infrastructure in partnership with CADCA (Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America) using $211,607 of ARORP funds. ARORP uses the federal Drug Free Communities application as the blueprint: every training session, every required sector at the coalition table, every compliance expectation is mapped back to what a winning DFC application demands. Phase two involved the opioid settlement funds that awarded $25,000 to each selected coalition, with almost all funds restricted to travel, lodging, and registration for the training sequence. No salaries are paid from the awards. Coalition members contribute their time for free.
The training sequence itself runs over roughly six months. Coalitions first attend the CADCA Mid-Year Training to orient themselves to what a mature coalition looks like and meet peer coalitions from across the country. They return to Arkansas for three weeks of intensive Arkansas Coalition Academy training, split across three months so participants can absorb and apply the content. They graduate at the CADCA National Forum, which coincides with the DFC application window. By that point, each coalition has a 501(c)(3) in place or a fiscal sponsor, has every required sector represented at its table, understands the Strategic Prevention Framework, and has the core narrative for its application.
ARORP then provides funded grant writers to translate coalition work into a competitive DFC application. After the application is submitted, CADCA steps back, and ARORP-funded technical assistance steps forward. Weekly Friday technical assistance calls, held from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m., remain open to any of the roughly 200+ projects in the ARORP portfolio. Short-term post-award technical assistance helps grantees stay compliant once federal dollars start flowing.
Two design features set the model apart. First, strict evaluation and clawback of unspent funds is written into every notice of award, the application itself, and every milestone document. Coalitions submit every receipt, input data into REDCap, and write ARORP a check for any unspent balance. Second, every funded coalition must agree to mentor another coalition and recommend it for future funding. That mentorship requirement grew the statewide pipeline of coalitions and produced most of Cohort 2’s applicants.
Key Program Components
Who You Need at the Table
What made a willing partner essential vs. optional?
A required partner is one without whom the coalition cannot operate. ARORP's leadership is explicit on this: coalitions cannot do this work without state, local, and federal funding relationships; without law enforcement at the table; without school districts engaged; without CADCA's technical assistance; and without ARORP's training backbone. Mayoral and county judge approval is the application gatekeeper. CADCA's training infrastructure is the spine of the model. Remove any one of these, and the program does not function.
Helpful partners accelerate results without being structurally essential. Previously awarded DFC coalitions, external evaluators, local coroner data, and statewide prevention partners all deepen the program's impact. ARORP deliberately does not fund state agencies or state-funded partners in this program, a decision designed to move settlement dollars into the gaps where other funding does not reach.
Budget Breakdown
What is the minimum viable budget to replicate this?
A rural county could replicate the core of this model with roughly $75,000 to $125,000 in settlement funding: enough to award five coalitions at $15,000 to $20,000 each for training travel, and enough to contract a shared grant writer to support DFC applications. The training sequence itself can be accessed through CADCA without replicating ARORP's Arkansas-specific Coalition Academy. A smaller replicator would focus the first cohort on three to five well-vetted coalitions rather than attempting a statewide rollout, and would lean heavily on CADCA's existing technical assistance and the federal Drug Free Communities application as the training blueprint.
What Worked and Why
Specific decisions or design features that drove success
Reverse-engineering the entire program from the federal Drug Free Communities application was the design choice that organized everything else. ARORP did not assemble a generic coalition curriculum, but hoped it would translate. The team pulled the DFC application apart, identified every required sector, every compliance expectation, and every narrative element a competitive submission would need, and then CADCA built the Arkansas Coalition Academy and the $25,000 award rules backward from that target. Coalitions did not graduate as generally stronger groups; they graduated as specifically DFC-ready applicants with the documents, partners, and language already in place.
Sequencing CADCA Mid-Year Training before the local Arkansas academy gave coalitions a reference point that no Arkansas-only program could provide. Coalitions that had never seen a mature, fully resourced coalition operating at scale walked into Mid-Year, sat in sessions with peer coalitions from across the country, and returned to Arkansas understanding what they were being trained toward. The three weeks of intensive local training that followed went differently because participants could already picture what a finished coalition would look like.
Writing strict evaluation and clawback into the application, the notice of award, and every milestone document changed coalition behavior from the first week. Coalitions submitted every receipt, entered milestone data into REDCap, and returned unspent balances by check. Several coalitions completed their work for less than the $25,000 award and refunded the difference. Telling coalitions on the front end that the money would be clawed back if it were not spent on DFC readiness eliminated the end-of-grant scramble that quietly undermines most capacity-building investments.
Tightening selection criteria between Cohort 1 and Cohort 2 turned a lesson into a design feature. The first cohort was open and broadly inclusive, and a portion of those awards went to coalitions who were not truly prepared for or committed to applying to the DFC grant. ARORP took that directly into the Cohort 2 selection, screening for sincerity of intent, documented local executive support, willingness to be mentored, and a realistic grasp of the DFC requirements. The mentorship requirement built into Cohort 1 awards then produced most of the Cohort 2 applicants, so the second cohort started from a stronger pool.
Early outcomes and data
$325,000 of opioid settlement funding deployed across 13 coalitions in Cohort 1 at $25,000 each.
7 of the 13 Cohort 1 coalitions won federal Drug Free Communities awards, totaling roughly $4.3 million in initial DFC funding.
Cumulative follow-on federal prevention funding of approximately $13.1 million flowing into Arkansas communities through the trained coalitions.
Cohort 2 launched in 2024 with four coalitions, the majority of which came from the mentorship pipeline built into Cohort 1 awards.
Roughly 200+ active projects in the broader ARORP portfolio retain access to the weekly Friday 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. open technical assistance Zoom.
Multiple Cohort 1 coalitions completed work under budget and returned unspent funds to ARORP by check, demonstrating the operational impact of the clawback provision.
Coalitions that used the ARORP-funded grant writer won DFC awards at materially higher rates than coalitions that attempted to self-author the application.
Annual evaluation data, including coalition narratives, photos, and links, are collected through REDCap and rolled up across all 13 Cohort 1 grantees.
Lessons Learned
Be thoughtful about your selection process. The first cohort taught ARORP which screening questions actually matter. Sincerity of intent, documented local executive support, willingness to accept mentorship, and a realistic grasp of DFC requirements predict cohort performance more reliably than organizational age or board size.
Meet rural reality on its own terms. Rural coalitions face a shortage of grant writers, limited staff time, and distance from training venues. A centrally funded grant writer, virtual office hours, and regional cohort meetings reduce the structural penalty rural coalitions pay when competing for federal dollars. The program design must account for those realities rather than assume urban capacity.
Put the money where other money does not go. Settlement funds produce the most impact when they reach coalitions, regions, and service categories that other federal, state, and philanthropic streams miss. Layering settlement dollars on top of well-resourced work yields only a modest marginal gain. Finding the gaps is the core strategic task.
Speed matters. The settlement arrived in 2022. COPE awards were out in 2023. DFC wins came in 2024 and 2025. Each year of delay is a year of lost federal match and a year of continued overdose mortality. Moving money on a tight timeline is a feature of the model, not a bug, provided the training backbone is already in place.
Build for sustainability from day one. Settlement funds will taper. The measure of success is not how much settlement money was spent, but how much federal, foundation, and local funding the coalitions unlocked over the decade that followed. Every design choice should be read against that question.
Create a replicable model. The lessons from COPE informed ARORP's next capacity-building initiative, the Parent Resource and Education Program. A well-designed program is not a one-time output. It is a template that the operating team can apply to adjacent problems with less friction each time.